The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Year 13, Day 226 - 8/14/21 - Movie #3,912

BEFORE: Oprah Winfrey carries over from "Tina" - I did tell you to keep an eye on her, right?  I think after today she's going to be tied with Martin Luther King and Ronald Reagan for most appearances this year. MLK and Reagan both really benefitted from my recent chain of documentaries, they both tend to appear again and again in archive footage, even if they're not the subject of the docs themselves.  There's still 88 films to go of course, any of them could appear one or two more times in films that wants to reference the 1960's or the 1980's, but I'm sure Oprah's got at least one more scheduled appearance - still we'll have to wait until the close of business for 2021 to find out who's going to come out on top.  Samuel L. Jackson and Donald Trump both seem to be out of the running now, but Barack Obama's still holding on to second place, behind the current three-way tie for first. 

THE PLOT: An African-American woman becomes an unwitting pioneer for medical breakthroughs when her cells are used to create the first immortal human cell line in the early 1950's. 

AFTER: I really should pay more attention to dates - I'm off by a few days, and I usually just look at celebrity birthdays, but still, sometimes historic dates line up accidentally.  It was just over 70 years ago (August 8, 1951) that Henrietta Lacks was admitted to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Maryland (the only hospital in the area that would treat black patients) with abdominal pain.  She remained hospitalized there until her death in October, but that's just the start of the story.  Before that date, she'd been treated at the same hospital for cervical cancer, and treated with radium tube inserts.  I'm not an expert on cancer treatments, either then or now, this seems like a questionable practice, but perhaps at the time using radium was an early form of radiation therapy?  Lacks was mis-diagnosed with epidermoid carcinoma, but actually had adenocarcinoma, and again, I'm not an expert on this subject, and that's a bit of a problem when it comes to understanding what went wrong with her treatment.  Aside from, you know, the fact that she had cancer and it was 1951. 

This is where I sort of have to question presenting this film as a narrative with actors, rather than as a documentary - for those of us in the audience who are NOT cancer doctors or cancer patients or even medical students, it can be tough to parse out exactly what was wrong with Henrietta Lacks, what the mis-diagnosis meant, or what might have gone wrong with her treatment.  The bulk of the story takes place decades later, through the eyes of a medical reporter and the descendants and family members of Henrietta Lacks.  Why wasn't the story set back in 1951, when Ms. Lacks went through the events in question?  We see only a few flashbacks that are set in that era, and rather questionably, we don't see the main character going to the doctor, getting treatment, or dealing with the implications, just revealing her cancer diagnosis to two family members while on top of a ferris wheel.  It's an odd choice, that's what I'm saying.  

BUT, on the other hand, this plays out like a medical mystery of sorts, so the subject is kept as something of a mystery herself - her own daughter was so young that even as an adult, she didn't know much about her mother, what her favorite color was, whether she was a good dancer, and so on.  However, all of that is rather beside the point, given the nature of the medical experiments that came later.  There may be thousands of people who died from cancer or other diseases who left small children behind - but the reporter is only interested in Henrietta because her cells lived on much longer than she did, and were instrumental in many medical breakthroughs.  Again, here is where a documentary might have been able to explain WHY her cells were special, I don't think enough was done here to dumb it down for the characters involved, and therefore the audience at home.  

Her cells were observed reproducing at a very high rate - at the time, human cells cultured for laboratory studies would only live for a few days, but Lack's cells could be divided several times without dying, which is why they were considered "immortal".  They became known as HeLa cells, using the first two letters of her first and last names, however to protect themselves, the official word from the labs was that they came from a patient named Helen Lane, and the true identity of the donor of the immortal cells wasn't correctly known for decades.  Traditionally, donors of harvested organic materials weren't compensated or credited in any way, but when you look at the medical breakthroughs that came from her donation - treatments for polio, AIDS, cancer research, gene mapping, and testing human sensitivity to many products - it calls into question how much money was made from her cells over the years, while Lacks' family struggled to survive.  

Of course, there are privacy issues involved - Lacks' family wasn't told about the use of her cells - and there are ethical issues as well.  If her family were to be compensated, then other people might expect payment for organ donation, and a whole Pandora's box of problems might ensue that would rock the medical research industry.  But that doesn't mean what happened was fair or right.  While this doesn't seem like outright abuse, not on the level of, say, the Tuskegee syphillis experiments, it still seems very hinky in not giving proper credit where it's due.  And as for privacy, Lacks' family members were contacted many times by other labs offering them money for blood samples, on the off chance that their cells would carry the same characteristics.  So they always suspected something was up, they just didn't quite know what it was.  

Fast forward a few years, and now we're wondering why some people are hesitant to get the life-saving COVID-19 vaccine - well, maybe this is part of the reason.  A case where the medical community, in a quest to do research that would benefit a large number of people, didn't take into the effects that research would have on an individual, or a small number of people.  Is it any wonder people are questioning the process?  I saw a bunch of research studies taking place last summer, offering money to people willing to take early versions of the COVID vaccine, and I tried to get involved, but no studies were taking place around me.  Would I put my life on the line for the benefit of mankind?  Sure, I was considering it, as I was only working part-time - but I can see how most people would be hesitant if all of the potential side-effects weren't exactly known.  (But, now they are, so come on, all you vaccine hesitant people, what's the hold-up?  By now, if the vaccines were dangerous, there would have been more people with bad reactions, and it only happens to a very, very small percentage of people, we know this.)

After the fact, Henrietta Lacks is now regarded as an unwilling participant, whose anonymous contribution was made for the greater good.  The author of the book about her used the proceeds to start a foundation that has provided college tuition and medical care for Henrietta's family, which is great.  Lacks has received posthumous recognition, a statue, and an honorary doctorate in public service, and was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame - all of which is rather useless to her, but helps us all feel a little better about ourselves, I guess. 

But I'm still questioning the narrative approach here - the acting is SO over the top, and Oprah portrays Deborah Lacks as if she's bi-polar or something, one minute she's working with the reporter, being nostalgic about her late mother, and the next moment, she's tearing up the medical documents and calling that same reporter a profiteering vulture.  Did it really go down like that, or have events been heightened for dramatic effect?  Rose Byrne couldn't really rein it in either, as reporter/author Rebecca Skloot, who seems prone to breakdowns and accusatory outbreaks herself.  All of the other family members are given quirks or interesting backstories too, from the ex-convict to the preacher laying hands on Deborah to calm her down.  It's all very unnecessary when we should be learning more about Henrietta, that's why we all showed up, isn't it?  

The worst digression comes when researching the fate of Henrietta's other daughter, Elsie, who disappeared from the family at some point, and was institutionalized.  It's a side-quest to find out what exactly happened to her, and as you might imagine, the fate of a teen black woman taken away to an institution in the 1950's, well, it didn't end well.  Did we really need to drive home the point that the medical community wasn't kind to certain segments of society?  It's just muddying the waters more at this point - so, is medical science a positive thing or not?  Doctors good or doctors bad?  Looked at so closely, the fate of one individual is never going to be good, long-term, so maybe should we focus on the bigger picture?  No, I guess that's not going to happen. 

Look, I'm willing to compromise with "hey, it's complicated" and move on with my life, but the film just doesn't want me to do that.  The book this is based on is described as a graceful and moving look at the racial politics involved in medical research, but I'm just not getting that from the film, which is a bit of a mess carrying out something akin to a vendetta. And making Lacks' family members into a bunch of crazy people doesn't exactly help prove its case.  Case in point, why does being covered in light from Lacks' cells make them so deliriously happy?  Really, was that all they ever wanted?  That seems a bit odd.

Also starring Rose Byrne (last seen in "Like a Boss"), Renée Elise Goldsberry (last seen in "The House with a Clock in Its Walls"), Courtney B. Vance (last seen in "Project Power"), Kyanna Simone Simpson (ditto), Reg E. Cathey (last seen in "Arbitrage"), Ruben Santiago-Hudson (last seen in "Selma"), Leslie Uggams (last seen in "Deadpool 2"), Reed Birney (last seen in "Morning Glory"), John Douglas Thompson (last seen in "21 Bridges"), Adriane Lenox (ditto), Roger Robinson (last seen in "The Lonely Guy"), Rocky Carroll (last seen in "The Great White Hype"), Sylvia Grace Crim, Karen Wheeling Reynolds Jaedon Godley, Jane Rumbaua (last seen in "Fantastic Four" (2015)), Byron Jennings (last seen in "The Greatest Showman"), Jaylon Gordon, Leon Lamar (last seen in "American Made"), John Beasley (last seen in "I'll See You in My Dreams"), Andrea Frye (last seen in "Baby Driver"), Jazzy Ellis, Tinashe Kajese, Patrick R. Walker, L. Warren Young (last seen in "The Blind Side"), John Benjamin Hickey (last seen in "Tallulah"), Ellen Barkin (last seen in "Hands of Stone"), Michael Gaston (last seen in "Spenser Confidential"), Kate Bond, Peter Gerety (last seen in "A Most Violent Year"), Tyvonna Jones, Tian Richards, Kermit Burns III (last seen in "Green Book"), Ninja N. Devoe (ditto), Lisa Arrindell, Linden Harris, Gabriel Ebert (last seen in "The Family Fang'), Sean Freeland, Jock McKissic (last seen in "Tag"). 

RATING: 3 out of 10 cassette tapes

Tina

Year 13, Day 224 - 8/12/21 - Movie #3,911

BEFORE: It's time to wrap up the Big Summer Music Concert series, with one last documentary about a music star.  I'd say this year's been very female-oriented, with the Go-Go's and Joan Jett and Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt, but I also worked Pavarotti in there, Frank Zappa and the Bee Gees, so I'd say it was pretty balanced in the end. 

Oprah Winfrey carries over from "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project". And I'm just four steps away from posting my "Black Widow" review, FINALLY.  Counting today's film, there are just 90 films left to watch in 2021, so I'm glad that I have a path to Christmas, because once summer's over, the fall's going to go by very quickly.  90 films, that's just about three months' worth, but I have a little over four and a half months (141 days) to watch them.  No worries, I've got this.  

THE PLOT: Exclusive access to the Grammy Award-winning artist to celebrate her career. 

AFTER: Tina Turner's done with show biz, she wants everybody to know that...umm, right after this documentary.  And right after her Broadway musical, which had the bad fortune to open in November 2019, just a couple months before everything shut down.  But I think they're planning to bring that show back this fall.  One more reason for any holdouts to get themselves vaccinated, because starting in September, non-vaxxed people aren't going to be let into Broadways shows, or even movie theaters in NYC.  Just get the damn shot, people, I think there's even like a C-note in it for you now.  Jeez, I got vaccinated for COVID in February and I got nothing except immunity from a deadly virus, what a dope I was. 

Let me get this straight, Tina Turner spoke about the years of domestic abuse she suffered at the hands of Ike Turner in a People magazine article in 1981. This is a complex issue, I understand - victims of domestic abuse are often reluctant to talk about it, and they may even blame themselves, or needlessly excuse their abusers.  But then, years later, after finding commercial success on her own with a hit record, Tina was constantly asked by reporters about her relationship with Ike, and her feelings about the issue, and the resulting trauma.  This documentary holds those reporters responsible for re-traumatizing Tina, again and again.  While I agree that most reporters are either too dumb, too insensitive or too enterprising to care about what they were doing, there was a simple solution. As a celebrity and a known quantity, all Tina and/or her manager had to do was simply say, "There will be NO questions during this interview about Ike Turner.  If the reporter even mentions his name, this interview will be OVER and Miss Turner will leave the studio, and get in a cab to go have an interview with a rival network."  The end, that's all.  Most interviews these days have established, pre-formed questions, anyway, and quite often both parties agree on what will and won't be covered.  Why on Earth wasn't this done for Tina Turner's interviews in the 1980's?  

Plus, somebody then went on to write her biography called "I, Tina", and didn't THAT book discuss the years of abuse?  If she didn't want to talk about it any more, maybe writing a book about her life isn't such a great idea - nor is making a movie adaptation of her life story, followed by a definitive-ish documentary years later.  She sure talks about it a lot for somebody who doesn't want to talk about it any more - or has something changed?  I read an interview with the directors of this film who decided NOT to interview other music legends like Mick Jagger and Bruce Springsteen to discuss how Tina Turner's career changed the music industry.  Well, why the hell NOT?  Isn't that stuff important, too?  

The film also focuses on two turning points in Tina Turner's life - one is that decision to give that interview to People magazine, and the other was making the decision to leave Ike.  The second one seems way more important to me than the first, but then again, what do I know?  If sharing her story can help other women who are being abused or in danger of being abused, maybe the interview was just as important in the long run.  But there's also a bit of a disconnect when the opening of the film holds Tina's parents responsible for leaving her at an early age, and then she sort of does the same thing, leaving her sons behind.  Of course, she HAD to leave, and out of those four sons, only two were hers, the others were from Ike's previous relationship.  But still - even when we see her later, working hard on her solo career, all that touring meant spending time away from her children, didn't it?  

There are some other things that don't really add up - like Tina claims in interviews that she never received any musical training, but then we learn that she sang in a church choir.  Don't they usually teach people the songs in church, why doesn't that count as a form of training?  I sang in church choirs and school choruses, and it was always work for everyone to learn the songs and the notes.  That's called training.  Don't give me B.S. about how it's all natural, like you were born with that ability to sing, because nobody is, it's just that some people learn to sing better than others. 

Then when we get to the point where Tina leaves Ike, it's implied that she gave up EVERYTHING in order to retain her stage name, Tina Turner (which is not the name she was born with, Anna Mae Bullock - or was it Martha Nell Bullock, this is a bit unclear) but that really isn't true.  Yes, Ike retained all publishing rights to their songs, but she got songwriter royalties - also two Jaguar cars, plus fur and jewelry and custody of two children.  That's not really giving up everything, just saying.  Why lie about this, just for dramatic effect? 

The musical performances here also represent some odd choices - they include Tina's cover of the Beatles' song "Help", which apparently was included on the international releases of "Private Dancer", and OK, maybe that song says something about where she was in her life in 1984, I get that - but still, it's not a Tina Turner song, it's just a cover.  Didn't she have a whole bunch of songs that were more iconic, like "Proud Mary" (no, wait, that's a cover, too) and "Let's Stay Together" (whoops, no, that's a cover, also) and "Gimme Some Lovin'" (jeez, ANOTHER cover song?).  OK, what about "Better Be Good to Me", and "We Don't Need Another Hero" and her duets with Bowie, Clapton and Bryan Adams?  Why do I have to listen to "I Can't Stand the Rain" instead of "Private Dancer", a song that everybody knows?  

NITPICK POINT: They used footage from Tina appearing on "Late Night with David Letterman" (or perhaps it was "Late Show"), but they failed to use my favorite clip of all, when Letterman had Tina Turner on his NBC show and presented her with a RonCo product, the tuna turner.  It was a bit like a salad spinner, but to get the oil or water out of your tuna fish.  As a comedy gag, it was just priceless.

Also starring Tina Turner (last seen in "20 Feet from Stardom"), Angela Bassett (last seen in "Otherhood"), Carl Arrington, Erwin Bach, Ann Behringer, Terry Britten, Roger Davies, Rhonda Graam, Katori Hall, Kurt Loder (last seen in "Atomic Blonde"), Lejeune Fletcher Richardson, Craig Turner, 

with archive footage of Lucille Ball (last seen in "Follow the Fleet"), Christine Baranski, (last seen in "The Bounty Hunter") David Bowie (last seen in "I Am Divine"), Grace Jones (ditto), Zelma Bullock, Johnny Carson (also carrying over from "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project"), O.J. Simpson (ditto), John Carter, Cher (last seen in "Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President"), Dolly Parton (ditto), Diana Ross (ditto), Doris Day, Mel Gibson (last seen in "Fathers' Day"), Whoopi Goldberg (last seen in "Bad Reputation"), Ron Howard, Tom Jones (last seen in Muscle Shoals"), Rod Stewart (ditto), B.B. King (last seen in "ZZ Top: That Little Ol' Band from Texas"), Kris Kristofferson (last seen in "Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice), Paul McCartney (ditto), Toni Tennille (ditto), Cyndi Lauper (last seen in "Quincy"), David Letterman (last seen in "Zappa"), Peter Marshall (last seen in "Ensign Pulver"), Irish McCalla, Olivia Newton-John, Bernadette Peters (last seen in "Alice"), Julianne Phillips, Dinah Shore (last seen in "Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond"), Phil Spector (last seen in "John & Yoko: Above Us Only Sky"), Bruce Springsteen (last seen in "Pavarotti"), Stevie Wonder (ditto), Barbra Streisand (last seen in "The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart"), The Temptations, Ike Turner (also last seen in "20 Feet from Stardom"), Adrienne Warren, Mary Wells (last seen in "Hitsville: The Making of Motown"), Loretta Young, 

RATING: 4 out of 10 European tours

Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project

Year 13, Day 223 - 8/11/21 - Movie #3,910

BEFORE: This documentary ran on PBS a while back, on a program called "Independent Lens", apparently it got a theatrical release before that, but only made about $50,000 - sure, there's not a big market for docs out there, I get that.  But the subject matter intrigues me, because for over 15 years, part of my job was to record TV, to do market research on commercials that used animation.  The task required me to record a lot of TV that I didn't even want to watch - kiddie cartoons, sports I didn't care about, Lifetime movies, I had to cover it all so that I could SEE it all, and oddly, paying more attention to the ad breaks, the spaces in-between.  What does that DO to a person?  So I'm in a unique spot, I want to learn about this Marion Stokes because I might be able to gain or give some insight.  We'll see, I guess. 

Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy AND Ronald Reagan carry over from "MLK/FBI". I already know, this film has so many archive footage appearances of politicians, newscasters and celebrities, that it could go almost ANYWHERE in the chain.  This is the proverbial "Time-hole that leads EVERYWHERE", as per "Time Bandits".  There's a very specific reason I'm putting it here, and it's not thematic - tomorrow's documentary has VERY few credits on the IMDB, and I suspect that whoever entered that data missed a LOT, but I know for sure there's at least one person in this documentary's footage who appears in that film, so out of necessity, this one has to go here.  I'd love to save it because it could get me out of another linking jam in the future, but I also need it to get me out of THIS linking jam, between today and tomorrow.

THE PLOT: For over 30 years, Marion Stokes obsessively and privately recorded American TV news, 24 hours a day, filling 70,000 VHS tapes, capturing wars, talk shows and commercials that show us how television shaped the world of today. 

AFTER: There is a fascinating story here, but it's a bit hard to hear the signal over all the noise - most of this film is assembled from archive news clips, and even then, it's a bit unclear whether those clips are from the tapes recorded by Marion Stokes, or if somebody used clips from another source, a professional news archive, in order to simulate what's on her tapes.  Sure, news is news, and random news clips from one source will probably look like random news clips from another source, but since this film is ABOUT Marion Stokes' obsessive taping of TV, I had hopes that I'd get to see a bit of what she accomplished (if that is the correct word...) and now I just don't know.  

Here's what we do know - like MLK, Marion Butler (later Stokes) was tracked by the F.B.I., because she and her first partner (husband? boyfriend?) were active in Socialist organizations.  That's a bit odd for a black couple, honestly, because you tend to associate the African-American cause with liberalism, but in more of a Black Panther kind of way rather than a Red Scare kind of way.  One methodology wanted to tear down the system and replace it with anarchy, the other with a very rigid structure that was often a disguise for totalitarianism.  Socialism tended to need SOMEBODY in charge to redistribute the wealth properly, and that person in charge would eventually get corrupt from all that power, so it's very easy for a dictator to run a socialist country, we've seen it happen time and time again, and have we ever seen true Socialism NOT go down that road?  Stokes and her husband travelled to Mexico with their young son, hoping to get paperwork to emigrate to Cuba, but the paperwork never arrived.  She returned to Philadelphia with their son, and he didn't.

Gradually she drifted toward public access TV, and an involvement with an ecumenical center called Wellspring, which sponsored the TV show "Input" in order to present a number of different political viewpoints and spark discussions between people of different racial backgrounds and faiths.  This seemed to be on the up-and-up, but who can say?  A relationship formed between her and her white co-star on the program, John Stokes, though he was married at the time.  This relationship may have also been on the up-and-up, but again, who can say?  It was still the 1970's, and inter-racial relationships were still a bit uncommon and perhaps misunderstood, but then again, perhaps the two people who were calling for inter-racial peace and harmony were just practicing what they were preaching.  

It was during the Iran hostage crisis in the Carter administration that Marion began recording the TV news, she felt that she could document HOW the news was presented in different ways, and that this was somehow important.  This coincided with the advent of VHS/Betamax technology, and also with "Nightline", a late-night news program hosted by Ted Koppel that focused on the Iran hostages for its first broadcast year.  The rise of CNN and the 24-hour news cycle came a long a couple years later, and by then Marion was taping around the clock, 4 or 8 channels at a time, in order to document ALL the viewpoints out there.  Considering how much of a split we have now between, say, FOX News and MSNBC, we now know that the same news story can be presented in two (or more) very different ways, so Marion was correct, though she may have been just a few decades early.  

I don't tape TV obsessively any more, because I'm no longer being paid to do that - instead I watch movies obsessively, and find ways to obsessively document that process.  That's what broken people do, people with OCD or otherwise looking for something to fill the void and keep them from focusing on the pain in their lives, I get that.  Marion was also a hoarder, saving piles of newspapers and (obviously) piles and piles of VHS tapes, always falling behind on the labelling process, and as for WATCHING what she recorded?  I can tell you right now, she didn't have time to WATCH TV, because she was way too busy TAPING TV.  I know, that doesn't make any sense, but that's the nature of a collector.  Whether it's TV shows, comic books, autographs, coins, stamps, beer, vintage photos, it doesn't matter.  The true nature of a collector is to be so busy adding to and maintaining that collection that one simply doesn't have time to ENJOY the collection.  Trust me on this, it's a form of sickness.  Marion, for example, enjoyed reading books about hoarders, and how they tended to be smarter than average people - and she had quite a few books on this subject, those books themselves were therefore part of the problem.  

(I wonder sometimes about the TV show "Hoarders", and its spin-off's "Hoarding: Buried Alive" and "Animal Hoarders".  Out in the world, are the people who watch this show also hoarders themselves, and are they watching the show because they're fans of hoarding, or do people tend to watch the show as a cautionary tale, as if to say, "THIS is what could happen to me, unless I change my ways and not slip any further into hoarding?"  The subjects on that show also tend to be broken people, who went through a break-up or the loss of a family member, and then found some solace in having more STUFF, so I wonder if the fans of the show have similar problems with self-awareness.  Plus I figure there's at least a few people out there who tape the show obsessively, and ironically now have a massive storage problem due to their large collection of those VHS tapes or DVDs containing episodes of "Hoarders".  And they're too close to the problem to appreciate that irony.)

As with many hoarders, the storage problem tends to not get solved during that "collector's" lifetime - it then falls to their family members to deal with the items left behind.  I'm going to go through this myself in a few months if my parents manage to transition to some form of assisted living.  I've still got some stuff stored in their house, and I'll have to make a special trip to get that stuff, and then figure out what to do with all THEIR stuff - and they have a lot of stuff in that house, some of which came from two other houses, my grandparents' houses.  It's a massive nightmare headed my way, and I've already researched places one town over that do close-outs, somebody comes with a truck and walks through the house, figuring out what's of value, what can be sold in their store, what can be given away and what needs to be thrown away.  

In the case of Marion Stokes, her family loaded her 70,000 VHS tapes into storage pods and they were all shipped to San Francisco, where the Internet Archive is going to spend a few years digitizing all that content (much of which was, WHOOPSIE, not saved over the years by the major and minor news outlets) and then tagging it so the news stories will be searchable online.  Who knows, maybe some smart people can go through it all and analyze the bias in news stories, and then pinpoint the EXACT moment that our country started going down the tubes.  At least then, we'll have somebody to blame.  

For me personally, I have to keep reminding myself that the medium is NOT the message - it's important while I'm cataloguing my comics and obsessively researching movie cast lists to, you know, take a little time to ENJOY the messages entailed, if possible.  Slow down, savor that comic book.  Go see "The Suicide Squad" because it looks like it's a whole lot of fun.  Remember FUN?  That what things used to be when we were kids, when we weren't busy trying to chase the almighty dollar so we could keep buying a whole bunch of content that we're never going to have time to ingest.  Don't just watch that TV show or movie to "get it off the list", try to appreciate it for what it IS, for what bliss it can bring me now, however intangible.  There will be plenty of time for record-keeping later, remember, all that stuff you own is somebody else's problem, after you die - try to take some comfort in that.  

Bottom line, Marion Stokes' goal was to record all the news in order to teach us all about bias in broadcasting, and protect us from "fake news" - ideally we should view her archive objectively so that we can learn from it, and in that sense she was a visionary, slightly ahead of her time.  But also, she was a nutty hoarder with OCD who somehow had the resources to finance and feed her obsessive ways, from the Iran Hostage crisis to the Sandy Hook shootings.  Maybe both things are somehow true, or the real truth lies somewhere in-between.  Either way, the takeaway is that we've all got a limited amount of time on this planet, and we should be thinking about how we want to spend that time - are we making things better or worse, and are we even able to tell?

Also starring Michael Metelits, Melvin Metelits, Frank Hollman, Anna Lofton, Roger MacDonald, Anthony Massimini, Richard Stevens, Anne Stokes Hochberg, Mizzy Stokes, and the voices of Tom Keenan, Lynn Spigel

with archive footage of Marion Stokes, Christiane Amanpour (last seen in "Shock and Awe"), George W. Bush (ditto), Richard Branson (last seen in "Fyre Fraud"), Tom Brokaw (last seen in "Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President"), Jimmy Carter (ditto), Rosalynn Carter (ditto), Bob Dylan (ditto), Ted Kennedy (ditto), Ayatollah Khomeini (ditto), John Lennon (ditto), Yoko Ono (ditto), Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran (ditto), Johnny Carson (last seen in "Pavarotti"), Phil Donahue (ditto), Peter Jennings (ditto), Fidel Castro (last seen in "The Irishman"), Julia Child, Bill Clinton (last seen in "Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump"), Hillary Clinton (ditto), Barack Obama (ditto), Michelle Obama (ditto), Ray Combs (last seen in "Overboard" (1987)), Kellyanne Conway (last seen in "The Accidental President"), Bill Cosby (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Jesse Jackson (ditto), Magic Johnson (ditto), Rodney King (ditto), Sam Donaldson (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Michael Dukakis (last seen in "Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold"), Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds (last seen in "Whitney"), Madonna (ditto), Nancy Reagan (ditto), Saddam Hussein (ditto), Albert Einstein, Jane Fonda (last seen in "Dolly Parton: Here I Am"), Barbara Walters (ditto), Al Gore (last seen in "Zappa"), Ted Koppel (ditto), Bryant Gumbel (last seen in "John Lewis: Good Trouble"), Steve Jobs (last seen in "Always at the Carlyle"), DeForest Kelley (last seen in "For the Love of Spock"), Nichelle Nichols (ditto), William Shatner (ditto), Leonard Nimoy (last seen in "Sound City"), Carroll O'Connor (last seen in "Cleopatra"), Sinead O'Connor, Jane Pauley (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), Oprah Winfrey (ditto), Phylicia Rashad (last heard in "Soul"), Frank Reynolds, Lionel Richie (last seen in "Hitsville: The Making of Motown"), Pete Rose, Pete Seeger (last seen in "Echo in the Canyon"), Jeff Sessions (last seen in "Vice" 2018)), O.J. Simpson (last seen in "The Towering Inferno"), Will Smith (last heard in "Spies in Disguise"), Ted Turner (last seen in "Jane Fonda in Five Acts"), Kurt Waldheim, and the voice of Dick Clark (last heard in "Echo in the Canyon"). 

RATING: 5 out of 10 climate-controlled storage units

MLK/FBI

Year 13, Day 222 - 8/10/21 - Movie #3,909

BEFORE: Right now, my life is still in a bit of flux.  I was supposed to start training for a new job next week, but there's been a holdup in the company's H.R. department, possibly people are just on vacation.  But you can't start a new job if the paperwork's not done, so I'm kind of on hold, waiting for someone I don't know to come back from holiday, and start processing new employees again, in advance of the coming school year.  So I can't really quit the part-time job I have until I officially have the new one, therefore there's a new target date for the transition, which is now set for the end of the month.  I suppose I can hang in at the movie theater for another two or three weeks, as long as this all is really happening - but I'm eager, I want to update my LinkedIn profile TODAY, only I can't do that.  I don't want to get ahead of myself here. 

This also makes it tough to determine if my movie-watching schedule is good, I've spaced things out mentally so I won't have a week-long gap in late September, but it's impossible to say if I'm headed for where I want to be then.  I'm a week behind the original plan, but I think that's OK, it's just going to erase that big gap from the original plan, so I should be OK, right?  Better try to watch five movies this week instead of four, just to be on the safe side.  Then again, I've got "Black Widow" in my pocket, I can run that review any time, even on a work-day.  

Andrew Young carries over from "Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President".  

THE PLOT: Based on newly declassified files, this resonant film explores the U.S. government's surveillance and harassment of Martin Luther King Jr. 

AFTER: The internal debate was over whether to watch this one now, or save it for next year's Black History Month (which I may personally re-schedule to May or June again, that worked out really well this year...).  I've already covered politics and civil rights pretty well this year, so do I add one more film to that mix?  Sure, why not, especially if that prevents me having to go back and re-number everything just to include that documentary about the 1999 Woodstock Festival.  Let's avoid that at all costs. 

But there's really not much new ground broken here, there's just two key points of information, and I'm wondering why it took an hour and 45 minutes to relay those two things.  Seriously, this could have been knocked out in a half-hour TV special, or even a 10-minute short film.  The first key point is that the FBI was spying on Martin Luther King, and other key civil rights leaders.  Well, duh, the word "Investigation" is right there in their name, that's what they do, they investigate stuff, just try to stop them.  And with everything we know about J. Edgar Hoover, it's not much of a shock to learn that he had an agenda, to gather information about certain people and label them radicals or communists or whatever he could think of to discredit them.  In MLK's case, if he couldn't have him labelled as a communist, then he'd find evidence of extra-marital affairs and use that to expose him as a hypocrite who was unfaithful to his wife.  

And the other key point of information here is that MLK was unfaithful to his wife - being something akin to the "rock star" of the civil rights movement, he also lived a bit like a rock star, in that he had groupies or followers or admirers, or whatever you want to call that, plus he spent a lot of time traveling around for the cause, so naturally he got lonely, and over time he found a way to deal with that.  Maybe not the preferred way, maybe not the way that you or I would choose, but in the end we've seen time and time again ("Pavarotti", "Zappa") that a man tends to be less faithful as opportunity allows other options.  So while we as a nation may not be shocked by this information, we may also allow ourselves to be a little disappointed.  But, we've all been here before, right?  JFK and Bill Clinton and even Franklin Roosevelt.  Wait, what?  Yes, I said FDR - I'm still having PTSD flashbacks thanks to Bill Murray in "Hyde Park on Hudson". 

But Hoover, come on, I'm disappointed in you, too - don't we all know by now that he also had a secret life, and he was most likely a closeted homosexual, had mommy issues and was definitely just wound WAY too tight?  For the sake of argument, let's assume those were three different things, and so he definitely had a LOT going on, plus he was also therefore a giant hypocrite himself.  J. Edgar, it turns out that when you point the finger at someone else, you've got three fingers pointing back at yourself.  Just saying.  

The full FBI file on MLK isn't due to be declassified until 2027, which then leads to the obvious question, why make this documentary NOW, why not just wait another seven years and do it right?  I don't really have an answer here - but the interview subjects all have to reference this, and say things like "It doesn't matter what's in the file, that doesn't change anything..." because they can all compartmentalize, and treat Martin Luther King, the civil rights leader, differently from Martin Luther King, the human being.  But should they?  I don't know.  Right now our society has a big problem with this, and we've decided that we can't keep Andrew Cuomo, the politician, separate from Andrew Cuomo, the (potential) sexual harasser.  Or we can't separate Bill Cosby, the comedian, from Bill Cosby, the rapist.  We're not giving Harvey Weinstein a pass just because he produced a few good movies, do you know what I mean?  

The cause of civil rights is apparently too important to start parsing out the good deeds from the bad, I get that.  You don't negate the overwhelming progress that was accomplished by the few in the name of the many just because they had a few character flaws.  But where, exactly, do you start to draw that fragile line?  Humans will let you down, again and again, on a personal level, and progress is never easy.  And we shouldn't let debate over the methods used cause any backsliding, that's for sure - but there's irony, perhaps, in learning that the methodology of the Civil Rights movement maybe wasn't as "black and white" as we thought it was?

Also starring James Comey (last seen in "The Accidental President"), Beverly Gage, David Garrow, Clarence Jones, Charles Knox, Donna Murch, Marc Perrusquia, 

with archive footage of J. Edgar Hoover (last seen in "The U.S. vs. John Lennon"), Martin Luther King Jr. (last seen in "Woodstock: Three Days that Defined a Generation"), Robert F. Kennedy (ditto), Dan Rather (ditto), H. Rap Brown (last seen in "Mr. Dynamite; The Rise of James Brown"), Arthur Goldberg, Merv Griffin (last seen in "The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart"), Murray Hamilton (last seen in "Houseboat"), Lyndon Johnson (last seen in "John Lewis: Good Trouble"), Kenneth Keating, John F. Kennedy (last seen in "The Rum Diary"), Coretta Scott King (last seen in "All In: The Fight for Democracy"), Stanley Levison, Gay Pauley, James Earl Ray, Ronald Reagan (also carrying over from "Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President"), Bayard Rustin, James Stewart (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), William C. Sullivan, George Wallace (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Roy Wilkins (ditto), Ernest Withers, 

RATING: 3 out of 10 hotel rooms

Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President

Year 13, Day 220 - 8/8/21 - Movie #3,908

BEFORE: I've got to take a slight detour into politics before I can close out the Big Summer Music series - the linking's just not there for me to get to the documentary about Tina Turner, believe me, I've tried.  I suspect, however, that maybe the cast list for that HBO documentary is incomplete on the IMDB, most of the docs I've watched in the last two weeks didn't have complete cast lists, a lot of appearances via archive footage have been omitted.  If the cast lists HAD been complete, I could have re-organized this chain much better, but that doesn't matter now, I've made it almost all the way through, I've got my path to the end of 2021 mapped out, so who cares?  I'm just beefing up the IMDB cast lists as I go, to help out other film fans.  As long as there's one solid unbroken line that gets me through the doc chain, and I'm making progress toward October.  I think my back-to-school programming's going to be a little threadbare this year, but again, who cares as long as it's another "perfect year"?

Jann Wenner carries over from "The Go-Go's". 

THE PLOT: Jimmy Carter's election to the presidency of the United States in 1977 was helped by the links that this pop music fan had with stars.

AFTER: I lived through the Carter years, although I was 8 years old at the time of the 1976 election, and I really wasn't into rock yet - I probably hadn't even discovered the Beatles yet, not even through the gateway drug of the "Yellow Submarine" cartoon.  I knew about Jimmy Carter thanks to MAD magazine and watching a bit of the news over my grandmother's shoulder, Grams was big on the news.  And I remember the July 4 celebration during the bicentennial year, but not much else from that time.  I certainly didn't understand politics, and only had a vague idea who Nixon was and what his presidency had done to the country.  I remember that one of my classmates had an uncle who was one of the Iranian hostages, so some people in my hometown paid close attention to what was going on in the Middle East, but that was later in Carter's presidency, this documentary gets there near the end, it was a key reason that Carter lost the election, and what a coincidence that the hostages were released THE DAY that he left Washington.  Did anyone ever look into the timing of that - it's very suspicious, was Reagan pulling a fast one or was the Ayatollah just twisting the knife on Carter?  

But I'm getting ahead of myself - let's start at the very beginning, I hear it's a very good place to start...  Before getting elected, Jimmy Carter's campaign used rock and roll to show that he was a man of the people, with musical tastes similar to the people in the heartland, and they did this with some fund-raising concerts featuring the Allman Brothers.  The Allmans were very popular then, plus they were an integrated, multi-racial band at the time, which was great for optics.  Carter had also shown familiarity with the songs of Bob Dylan, who I guess was starting to fall back into favor, eventually making up for "going electric" and peaking with his Rolling Thunder tour right about then.  Dylan was from Minnesota and was raised Jewish, and didn't seem to have much in common with a former peanut farmer from Georgia, but they connected on some level, and Carter quoted his favorite Dylan lyrics TO Dylan, while Dylan just wanted to talk about religion.  Dylan was converting to Christianity around that time, but he didn't release his album of Christmas music until 2009.  True story.

When he was running for election against Jerry Brown, it was almost a referendum on Southern rock vs. California Rock - Brown had Ronstadt and the Eagles on his side, but that kind of mellowness just doesn't win elections, I guess.  But Carter liked a wide variety of music, like jazz (God knows why) and gospel, even classical, in addition to rock and pop.  He even had Jimmy Buffett play a few fund-raising concerts in the Pacific Northwest, but that backfired when supporters started demanding their contributions back.  I guess he played "Margaritaville" one too many times... The whole middle part of this film shows all the musical acts that came to perform at the White House during Carter's term, or just to stop in and meet the President, as he was probably one of their fans.  

Of course, the other musical friend that Carter made was Willie Nelson - they both came from the South.  Texas, Georgia, it's all the same, right?  Willie visited the White House several times, and the story can be told now about Willie sharing pot with the President's son - hey, it's close to legal almost everywhere now, it just wasn't then.  And then we're shown a Willie Nelson concert on the White House lawn, but Jimmy Carter wasn't there, because he was at Camp David, trying to broker Mideast peace between Begin and Sadat, representing Israel and Egypt.  Jeez, why not take those guys to the Willie Nelson concert, maybe they'd get a contact high and be more likely to sign some peace accords?  It couldn't hurt to try.  As we all know, Carter eventually DID get the two men to come to terms, but sadly, he was unsuccessful in negotiating a peace treaty between Gregg Allman and Cher.  

Then there was the time that the Chinese ambassador, Chai Zemin, came to Washington, but the place he really wanted to visit was Nashville - who knew that someone from Asia would be a big country music fan?  A quick side-trip was arranged by the Carter administration, and the ambassador got to visit the Grand Ole Opry and meet Johnny Cash and Barbara Mandrell. Though I think he really had his heart set on meeting Dolly Parton, if you catch my drift. 

It's for sure that the country needed to heal after the disastrous term of Nixon, and mild-mannered Gerald Ford just wasn't getting it done.  Music is a healing force, a uniting force, and Carter used it to his advantage, to find common ground, because who doesn't like music?  And rock music had turned the corner, from being a symbol of the counter-culture to being part of culture itself.  Hey, Carter must be a man of the people, because he listens to the same kind of music as we do?  That statement holds especially true if Carter listened to nearly every form of music, though.  I'm not saying Carter was lying, but it does seem awfully convenient that he liked nearly everything, almost like he just wanted to be diplomatic and not hate anything.  

I can't hate on Carter, though, because he's done so much charity work, for Habitat for Humanity and also to help eradicate Third World diseases, he may have accomplished more on a service level AFTER leaving the Presidency, and, apart from Supreme Court Justice Taft, who else can say that?  He didn't just go back to his ranch and paint bad art, or move to a Florida condo just to play golf and ruin people's weddings, he's been giving back consistently for over 40 years.  Let's see you build a house for somebody in need when you're 96 years old!  And Carter took his 1980 election loss with grace and dignity, which is the way it's SUPPOSED to happen, not contesting the election results and spreading wacky theories about Chinese satellites interfering with voting machines or dumping votes in rivers.

As I said before, I've got one more music documentary in the Big Summer Concert series, I can get there by next weekend if I'm lucky.  But this one really sort of ties everything from the last week together - Linda Ronstadt is name-checked here, Dolly Parton and Pavarotti make appearances via archive footage, and everyone from Bob Dylan, John & Yoko and Crosby, Stills & Nash came back for another appearance, all seen visiting the White House.  Those were the days, I guess - the only musical acts to visit our last commander-in-grief were Kanye West, Ted Nugent and Kid Rock.  Collectively, what a damn shame. 

Also starring Jimmy Carter (last seen in "Pavarotti"), Madeleine Albright (last seen in "The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley"), Bono (also last seen in "Pavarotti"), Garth Brooks, Jimmy Buffett (last seen in "The Beach Bum"), Rosanne Cash, Bob Dylan (last seen in "Woodstock: Three Days that Defined a Generation"), Larry Gatlin (last seen in "Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me"), Chuck Leavell, Willie Nelson (last seen in "Lost in London"), Nile Rodgers (last seen in "George Michael: Freedom"), Paul Simon (last seen in "Muscle Shoals"), George Wein, Trisha Yearwood, Andrew Young (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Tom Beard, Chip Carter, Peter Conlon, Michael Curry, John Dalton, Jim Free, Nancy Hunt, Frank Moore, 

with archive footage of Muhammad Ali (also last seen in "Malcolm X"), Gregg Allman (last seen in "Muscle Shoals"), Warren Beatty (last seen in "I Am Divine"), Andy Warhol (ditto), Menachem Begin, George Benson, Dickey Betts, Bonnie Bramlett, Tom Brokaw (last seen in "Shock and Awe"), James Brown (also last seen in "Pavarotti"), Luciano Pavarotti (ditto), Jerry Brown (last seen in "Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice"), Johnny Cash (ditto), David Crosby (ditto), Dolly Parton (ditto), Shirley Caesar, Billy Carter, Lillian Carter, Ron Carter, Rosalynn Carter (last seen in "Steal This Movie"), June Carter Cash, Ray Charles (last seen in "Quincy"), Dizzy Gillespie (ditto), Lionel Hampton (ditto), Cher (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), James Cleveland, Chick Corea, Charlie Daniels, Deng Xiaoping, John Denver (last seen in "Sound City"), Gerald Ford (last seen in "All In: The Fight for Democracy"), Redd Foxx (last seen in "Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic"), Aretha Franklin (last seen in "The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart"), John Lennon (ditto), Diana Ross (ditto), Dexter Gordon (last seen in "Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind"), Herbie Hancock (last seen in "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets"), Vladimir Horowitz, Mahalia Jackson, Ted Kennedy (last seen in "RBG"), Ayatollah Khomeini (last seen in "They'll Love Me When I'm Dead"), Loretta Lynn, Barbara Mandrell, Glenn Miller, Charles Mingus, Walter Mondale (last seen in "Bombshell")

Graham Nash (also last seen in "Woodstock: Three Days that Defined a Generation"), Stephen Stills (ditto), Paul Newman (last seen in "Somebody Up There Likes Me"), Richard Nixon (last seen in "The Rum Diary"), Yoko Ono (last seen in "Zappa"), Ronald Reagan (ditto), Mohammed Reza Pahlavi (the Shah of Iran), Elvis Presley (last seen in "Dolly Parton: Here I Am"), Anwar Sadat, The Staples Singers (last seen in "The Last Waltz"), Hunter S. Thompson, Conway Twitty (last seen in "Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band"), Sarah Vaughan, Phil Walden, John Wayne (last seen in "Keith Richards: Under the Influence")

RATING: 6 out of 10 non-rhyming poems

The Go-Go's

Year 13, Day 219 - 8/7/21 - Movie #3,907

BEFORE: Well, here's symmetry for you, I started the Big Music Summer Concert series with the Runaways (well, almost, except for one film) and I'm wrapping it up with another all-female band, the Go-Go's (well, almost, I've still got one music doc coming up in a few days...)

Sting carries over from "Pavarotti". 

THE PLOT: This documentary chronicles the meteoric rise of a female rock band, born from the L.A. punk scene that not only captured but created a zeitgeist. 

AFTER: The Go-Go's were a popular female band in the 1980's, and as this doc points out, they were the FIRST all-female band...to write their own songs AND play their own instruments AND have a #1 album.  Umm, that's a lot of modifiers for a statement of pride - that means there were all-female bands who did two out of those three things, so really, were the Go-Go's all that groundbreaking?  They might, arguably, be the "most successful" all-female band, but after just a couple albums they broke up over money, songwriting credits, and petty in-fighting.  In other words, they were a typical band. If anything, perhaps they should be known as the first all-female band to do more drugs than the average male band.  

I didn't know they came out of the punk scene, that they were a punk band before they were a pop band, but now that makes sense - because you can get up on stage and play punk music even if you don't know how to tune a guitar or play a regular drum beat.  But then somebody accidentally wrote "We Got the Beat" and somehow it became a hit, and so they had to change their whole approach, their look, and for some reason, their manager.  At some point it didn't matter who got them where they were, and it became about who could get them to the next level.  That goes for the band members who were jettisoned after being labelled as dead weight, also - there are two or three Go-Go's I've never heard of before, who got left by the side of that road. 

Then the band had a hit ALBUM, top of the charts, which is great, but that leads to the inevitable "What comes next?" and "How do we avoid the sophomore slump?" and suddenly it's not so easy to repeat success, catch lightning in a bottle the second time.  Yeah, sure, by all means, crawl into a bottle or do a lot of blow, that'll help you figure things out.  Everything was fine until the second album had only one potential hit song, "Vacation", and that was written for one band member's previous band, they just got lucky that nobody ever bought that record.  

Before long, after that tour of London opening up for Madness, the band was split down the middle when the band members who weren't songwriters found out that the ones who WERE earned more money.  Look, if you're upset that your bandmates are getting publisher royalties for writing songs, and you're not, then the solution is fairly simple - write some songs for the band yourself.  What's that?  You can't do that?  It's hard to write a good song?  OK, then, you've just proven WHY your bandmate makes more money than you, so maybe shut up now.  

But for some reason they couldn't hold band meetings or discuss these situations like adults, they just broke down and stopped communicating with each other, and retreated to their new McMansions bought with the royalties from "Beauty and the Beat".   By the time they got together to record their fourth album, Jane Wiedlin wanted to sing lead vocals on ONE song, and got outvoted, so she quit.  No discussions, no negotiations, it's just over. 

A band can have more than one lead singer - look, Keith Richards usually sings leads on one song each Stones album, on average, and takes over when Mick needs a break in concert, right?  Jeez, the Beatles had three solid lead singers, and even damn Ringo got to sing lead on few songs, what's the big deal?  Look, I have a version of Jane Wiedlin singing "Our Lips Are Sealed", and I prefer it to the version that got released.  I can understand all the lyrics for one thing, plus she just has a better singing voice, there, I said it. #TeamJane

If anything, the Go-Go's proved that a female band could be just, on the whole, as childish and insecure as any male band, which I'm not sure counts as progress.  Why just settle for being as good as men, when you can be BETTER?  Why try to be the first woman on the moon, when you can be the first person on Mars?  Then there's the debate at the end over whether the Go-Go's should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame - when I'm still trying to determine if they even deserved a documentary.  

Tonight's glaring omission is that notorious sex-tape that got made behind the scenes before their SNL performance, or something.  Gee, I can't imagine why that didn't make the cut, maybe because the band members harassed a female fan into servicing a male roadie?  Turns out some women can take part in sexual harassment, too, it isn't just a male thing.  

NITPICK POINT: Why the apostrophe in their name?  It's unnecessary.  Grammatically, it's needed if you're talking about the plural of letters ("the A, B, C's") or years ("the 1970's") but it's not needed if you're talking about the plural of go-go clubs or go-go dancers.  "The Go-Gos" would have been FINE and correct.

Also starring Charlotte Caffey, Belinda Carlisle (last seen in "Swing Shift"), Gina Schock, Kathy Valentine, Jane Wiedlin, Elissa Bello, Paula Jean Brown, Ginger Canzoneri, Chris Connelly (last seen in "Gilbert"), Miles Copeland, Stewart Copeland, Pleasant Gehman, Lynval Golding, Richard Gottehrer, Kathleen Hanna (last seen in "Bad Reputation"), Margot Olaverra, Dave Robinson, Lee Thompson, 

with archive footage of Dan Aykroyd (last seen in "Zappa"), Rodney Bingenheimer (also last seen in "Bad Reputation"), John Lydon (ditto), Sid Vicious (ditto), Katie Couric (last seen in "Richard Jewell"), Terry Hall, Martha Quinn (last seen in "Quiet Riot: Well Now You're Here, There's No Way Back"), Andy Summers, Jann Wenner (last seen in "Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band")

RATING: 4 out of 10 lawsuits