“John Steinbeck stole his best friend’s wife — and then wrote her into his novels.”

Before The Grapes of Wrath made him America’s conscience, John Steinbeck was a struggling writer in California — and a scandal magnet. In the early 1940s, he began an affair with Gwyn Conger, the wife of one of his closest friends. He pursued her obsessively, broke up her marriage, and then married her himself. The betrayal rippled through their small circle of artists and friends, many of whom never forgave him.

But Steinbeck didn’t stop there. He turned Gwyn into his muse — and his victim. He poured their fights, her vulnerabilities, and their sex life into his novels, reshaping her into characters the public devoured. Gwyn later said being married to him was like living under surveillance: everything she said could be stolen and twisted into art. When their marriage imploded, she wrote bitterly in her memoir, “He didn’t want a wife. He wanted material.”

The scandal was how cold Steinbeck could be. He won the Pulitzer, the Nobel, the adoration of the world — but his family paid the price. His sons later accused him of neglect, saying he treated them as “distractions” from his work. His third wife, Elaine, once joked that John was only faithful to one thing: his typewriter.

And his feuds? Legendary. He despised critics who dismissed him as “sentimental,” lashing out in furious letters. He feuded with fellow writers who thought he was a sellout. Even his Nobel Prize acceptance speech sounded like an attack — more defiant than grateful.

John Steinbeck’s scandal wasn’t only in his novels being banned or burned. It was in the betrayals behind the words — the lives he cracked open for material, the friends he discarded, the women he consumed and then immortalized on the page without mercy.

He wasn’t just writing America’s pain. He was writing his own — and making sure everyone around him bled for it.

 

 

 The Other Side Of Art: A Homeless Man Creates Art In His Space...

 

 

499, FRIDAY THE 13TH - INTERRUPTING HISTORY

RODRIGO REYES ON 499, FRIDAY THE 13TH - INTERRUPTING HISTORY  

** "You appeared one morning from the East, on the beaches of Veracruz. By a strange coincidence, you arrived almost 500 years after crushing the Aztec Empire - a secret miracle had shipwrecked you into the future. What brought you to our time..."
 

What does Friday the 13th, 500 years commemorating the colonial invasion of a doomed Mexico, and the number 499 have in common.
 

This August, Friday the 13th, marks the 500 year anniversary of Spain's invasion, carnage and destruction of a doomed Mexico - and actually much of the Western hemisphere back then. And those horrors and the aftermath are the subject of the unconventional Mexican film 499. And directed by Rodrigo Reyes, whose interest in is probing the legacy of that fateful encounter on this anniversary - and hopefully enlightening the Mexican masses historically and ideologically.
 

The director is on the line from Mexico City to discuss that Friday the 13th dubious anniversary this month - and his stunning film mixing drama and documentary, and laced with poetic imaginative historical storytelling. With Reyes concluding that 'we can interrupt history, and we can invent it - I hope audiences can feel that when they watch my film.'
 

And as seen through the eyes of the confounded, nameless military invader, played by Eduardo San Juan, finding himself dazed on the beaches of Veracruz, inexplicably washed ashore today as an ironic undocumented immigrant among the masses. And encountering real people, not actors, caught in the resulting historical ramifications of violence, poverty, misery and racism in the present time - and the indigenous 'wandering hungry and barefoot, he does not know how to write on the pages of his soul - all he knows are coal ovens...'
 

RODRIGO REYES 499 INTERVIEW
 

Prairie Miller

 

 

 

 

 

Movies 2020: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

   

With a few outstanding exceptions that you're not likely to hear about at the Oscars, or on most critics organization lists whose members are still predominantly white, male and middle class - and most starkly absent is any working class or left perspective membership - the narratives invariably follows the same old trajectory no matter what the year. Namely, whatever the daring political or historical subject matter, there is the inevitable detour along the way to either retreat into the family as more important than anything else, or the death of the heroic figure along with his cause - the latter ultimately deemed disappointing or corrupted. Not to mention a question I like to pose to filmmakers of suspect ulterior motives when they consistently bash progressive history - who funded your movie.

Best Improbable Holiday Movie: Fatman. This Santa Noir finds Mel Gibson as the portly grouch, sparring with the worst kid/best young actor of the year in a movie - Chance Hurstfield as a filthy rich, kind of mini-Trump who won't take no for an answer when subjected to coal in his stocking for Christmas. And who then proceeds to hire hitman Skinny Man, to assassinate Santa. But he's preoccupied with pressing issues of his own - as orders plummet due to the decline of good kids deserving gifts. So Santa is reluctantly forced to produce military products for the Pentagon instead - no surprise in this declining capitalist economy propped up by the US military industrial complex - to make ends meet. Meanwhile, this darkly comical, strange satire reveals a seemingly penitent Gibson deferring to his perhaps reluctant feminist side, and boasts the best screen couple of the year - counting eminent Afro-British actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste as the frequently scolding spouse who wears the pants around this Santa.
 
The Mauritanian: This devastating docudrama is based on Guantanamo Diary, the prison writings of Mohamedou Ould Salahi, an innocent man incarcerated and subjected to a brutal ordeal of 'enhanced interrogation' torture there for decades. Jodi Foster is his ACLU lawyer battling the corrupt US government and military to finally free him. A viscerally traumatic experience for audiences as well, placing them in those torture chambers right alongside Salahi, played by Algerian French actor Tahar Rahim.

Emperor: Yet another greatest story never told of all too often buried courageous black history. A rebel slave uprising political action thriller, Emperor is based on the life of Shields Green, African royalty kidnapped and enslaved on a Southern plantation - who escaped and fought with John Brown at Harpers Ferry. And though released by chance in this BLM moment, Emperor could not be more timely. Along with bracing Brechtian interludes confronting essential ideological issues.

The 24TH: Yet another exemplary example of persistent filmmakers of conviction stepping in to exhume a suppressed black past - where US history and the dishonest education system fear to tread. And potentially ushering in a commendable Black Renaissance in movies. Based on real events in the long infamous US past, the historical drama takes place during WW I, and a Houston army contingent known back then as the 24th Regiment. But this is not a war movie, while at the same time it is, very much so. Namely, the endless war against African Americans from the inception of this nation, and essentially to this very day. And the repeatedly buried black history of defiant, desperate resistance and rebellion, however bereft of hope. Known as the Camp Logan Mutiny taking place on August  23rd back in 1917, a mass rebellion of those 156 segregated soldiers of the Third Battalion occurred in reaction to the Houston escalating racist assaults and outright massacres all around them.

On Night In Miami: Award winning actress Reina King has crafted an amazing feat with her venture into directing - burrowing into the souls, emotions and politics of prominent black men back then, that night in February 25, 1964 in Miami. This fictionalized account finds boxing ring triumphant Cassius Clay and the soon to be Muhammad Ali (Eli Goree), Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) and  Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge), debating racism, religion, FBI persecution, and the socio-political significance of emerging meaningful music in progress.

Escape From Pretoria: Based on the ordeal of filmmaker, author and actor Tim Jenkin, who happens to be the real life South African political prisoner and revolutionary fugitive on which this political thriller is based - and played by Daniel Radcliffe. His grueling predicament, the unimaginable escape from that maximum security prison, his continued struggle to set up a secret communications system to Mandela still behind bars, and the page to screen book he wrote about it all while playing a role in the movie as well, is extraordinary.

40 Years A Prisoner: Mike Africa Jr. revisits his six year old self during the police assault and murder of his family members at their MOVE home in Philly back then, all around him. Along with scenes from the jail cell where his incarcerated mother gave birth to him alone. Then his long struggle captured in this documentary, to free his parents since - political prisoners for four decades.  And what all of this has to do with Malcolm, Martin Luther King, Mumia, the Panthers, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.   

Best Foreign Film: Wasp Network.
Honoring the courage, bravery and sacrifice of the Cuban Five who posed as US defectors to defeat anti-Castro terrorist groups in Miami in the early 1990s and suffered the consequences, incarcerated here for decades. The docudrama bypasses the usual NGO financed propaganda productions, and pays tribute as well to the woman and wife of one who fought on their behalf, Olga Salanueva portrayed by Penelope Cruz

Movies About Women Saving Themselves: For a change, that is. This year counting: Radium Girls,  The real life dramatic feature detailing the horrific and deplorable radioactive poisoning of Jersey female factory workers. While their struggle to demand that the corporation face responsibility, resulted in strengthening occupational labor laws - and the right of individual workers to sue corporations for damages. And mystery character Etta, played by African American actress Susan Heyward, as a political filmmaker herself and a communist back then who gets it about Hollywood, and who turns up from the Tulsa Massacre.
Along With The Women Of... Judy And Punch, Devil To Pay, All Joking Aside, Intrigo: Dear Agnes.
 
Black Lives Matter Checking In... A continued reinvention of Hollywood crime and horror genres that began with 'Get Out.' And Antebellum, with its BLM influenced moments of Janelle Monae declaring homage to Assata Shakur, when not freeing herself from bondage as she incinerates the cruelty of a Southern slave plantation.

The Last Vermeer: Simultaneously convicted, cursed and celebrated in his lifetime, the notorious Dutch art forger Han van Meegeren symbolizes beyond his situation in this dramatic feature, the questionable US and European powers who today claim moral authority -  and continued assault in that regard against Third World countries they've targeted with genocide and exploitation for centuries. An elephant in the room, candid interrogation of what passes for truth or fabrication and self-proclaimed moral authority in history. And fueled by the deliriously elusive, perverse and mystifying Oscar-worthy performance of Guy Pearce. And, those eyebrows...

The Tobacconist (Der Trafikant) : Freud, fascism and a smokers guide to surviving history. One rural migrant's coming of age during the rise of Nazism in 1930s Vienna and Hitler's subsequent invasion of Austria, the young man's traumatic political transformation, and a chance encounter subsequent friendship with chain smoker Sigmund Freud. While moments of Freud wearily crashing on his own therapy couch out of historical exasperation, are indelible.

Best Movie Title: 'The Big Ugly' - A metaphorical reference to US imperialism in this Malcolm McDowell corporate crime thriller.

Best Film Not Coming Out Anywhere:  Wuhan Wuhan! - A remarkable journey capturing a cross-cultural collaboration with Chinese filmmakers in Wuhan shooting footage in Hazmat suits - as the pandemic was raging there. And, everyday people figuring out how to survive, endure - and how to help each other. Collective concern, not cash for care triumphs over the pandemic in China. And it goes without saying here that documentary directors with conviction step in as truth tellers, where the US media fear - or conspire - to tread. Unfortunately, MTV seems to have staged an intervention, claiming what appears to be the same production sources under a different name, for profit in this country.

Double Dose Of Acting Acclaim: The delightfully irreverent Latino actor and comic John Leguizamo is astonishingly eloquent as the unconventional teacher of an unlikely group of inner city high school students in Critical Thinking, who struggle against a racist education system - all the way to victory in a national chess tournament. And starring as well, as zany Detective Espada in Night Clerk, going eccentrically toe to toe with the autistic moonlighter in question.

And The Bad And Ugly...

Nomadland: Hollywood exploits the homeless crisis as cross-country great adventure by van. A pandemic wet dream escapist antidote in every worst sense of the word, Nomadland and its current breathless avalanche of critic accolades could not be further from its sobering reality. Exploiting pandemic free spirit fantasy rambler euphoria - while somehow making US socio-economic misery great again. No need for statistics on homeless female murders and rapes, and with essentially characters hugging and kissing their poverty. More Kerouac than Grapes Of Wrath.

Worst Film Critc: Dennis Harvey in Variety, mocking star Carey Mulligan, the date rape avenger in Promising Young Woman, as "not hot enough to portray the character." In effect perpetrating the lie that rape is about sex - not to mention emphasizing the need for more women film critics.
 
Prairie Miller

THE 24TH REVIEW: Exhuming Suppressed Buried Black History

 

Based on real events in the long infamous US past, the historical drama The 24th takes place during WW I, and a Houston army contingent known back then as the 24th Regiment. But this is not a war movie, while at the same time it is, very much so. Namely, the endless war against African Americans from the inception of this nation, and essentially to this very day. And the repeatedly buried black history of defiant, desperate resistance and rebellion, however bereft of hope.

Known as the Camp Logan Mutiny taking place on August  23rd back in 1917, a mass rebellion of those 156 segregated soldiers of the Third Battalion occurred in reaction to the Houston escalating racist assaults and outright massacres all around them. While an evident spark igniting the uprising however futile, was in some cases the personally experienced East St. Louis Massacre ending just a month earlier, when up to 250 African Americans were murdered by whites,  and another 6,000 left homeless following the rampage burning down their homes, beginning that May.

And the Army unwilling to do anything to protect the soldiers, or prosecuting those responsible. Leading to the armed attack one night against those brutalizing Houston whites, including the police, responsible for the torture and murders of terrified African Americans civilians of Houston as well. The resulting trial, the largest murder trial in US history, led to the execution of nineteen of those brave and defiant soliders, and the rest sentenced to life imprisonment hard labor.

Helmed by first time director Kevin Willmott (BlacKkKlansman, Da 5 Bloods screenwriter) and co-written and starring Trai Byers, The 24th is yet another exemplary example of persistent filmmakers of conviction stepping in to exhume that invisibilized black past - where US history and the cowardly, abominable suppressed education system fear to tread. 

And while it may be noted that the film is being released during this Black Lives Matter moment - along with Emperor, and the Samuel Jackson narrated Enslaved - potentially ushering in a commendable and urgent Black Renaissance in movies, that convergence which could not be more timely, may be more coincidental than otherwise. And quite possibly a reaction against a very different, loathesome convergence - the long surging racist white backlash against this country's first Black president, than anything else.

Prairie Miller

The Big Ugly: Gangster Thriller, Greed, Oil And A Rural Appalachia Uprising

Move over, The Ugly American, boasting Brando front and center or not. A gangster thriller gone global that may endure for it's provocative title if nothing else, The Big Ugly could not have encapsulated planetary US imperialism thuggery more. Playing out in discovered West Virginia oil-rich land around a local creek known as Big Ugly, this Scott Wiper sophomoric sendup of well worn gangster territory, promises so much more while delivering exceedingly less.

The film follows the unfortunate escapades of London mobsters played by Malcolm McDowell and Vinnie Jones, as they are lured to rural West Virginia to invest in a money laundering oil venture concocted by shady businessman, Ron Perlman. And though by no means saintly operatives themselves, the comparatively gentlemanly Brits get caught up in the deadly bully instincts of those avaricious oil Yanks, with tragic consequences. And while dredging up oil exploitation gangster capitalism via the otherwise tired narrative proceedings, Appalachian rebels as the ripped off rural masses happen to rise up to reclaim their confiscated land - though they should have grabbed a lot more screen time, and been placed decisively front and center in the story. 

Meanwhile, with UK sacrificial racketeers turning up, would that be British Brexit anxiety chiming in - now that Boris has left the country vulnerable and on its own for the anticipated US economic feeding frenzy? Who can say. On the other hand, spending screen time with the likes of that OG - or rather OJ, original Joker  - that Clockwork Orange classic unhinged thug, Malcolm McDowell while pondering his take on gangsters then and now, usually tends to feel like it might have been an otherwise missed opportunity.

Prairie Miller

Dateline: Saigon Review: Fake News, Nothing New

 Though the notion of fake news has a specific connection at this moment in time to the sitting president lashing out at media reports unfavorable to him, that concept has a surprisingly much longer and secretive tarnished US history - with no particular party affiliation in collusion with the media as well. And Dateline: Saigon, the documentary delving into the Vietnam War as covered by fearless journalist back then, simultaneously reveals a huge trove of US state secrets conducting that war covertly as if, say - directing a Hollywood movie.

Written and directed by first time filmmaker Tom Herman and narrated by Sam Waterston, Dateline: Saigon revisits the efforts of Viet Nam war correspondents - Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Malcolm Browne, Peter Arnett, and photojournalist Horst Faas, to record the truth on two war fronts, not just one. In other words, struggling against US government censorship bent on discrediting them, pressuring to report the Viet Nam War their way dishonestly, and as a winning venture.

And revealing not just about what transpired decades ago in that regard, but that nothing has changed - no matter which political party. And by extension, what the past can reveal concerning our present time, both historically and about the media.

While in the case of Peter Arnett,  covering Middle East US invasions and wars, along the US assault on Viet Nam - the JFK/Johnson government, CIA and Hoover's FBI were bent on destroying Arnett by shutting him down professionally, And necessitating personal protection as well for reporting the truth.

Dateline: Saigon - A rigorous and scathing chronicle of devastating defeat: The US War on Viet Nam, and on the US media.

Prairie Miller

ARTS EXPRESS TOP TEN BEST LIST 2019

ARTS EXPRESS RED EYE MOVIE REVIEWS - Red Hot And Saucy Top Ten 

Served Up Here

Cold Brook: 'Are you ready to be different?' - Part ghost tale, part Bartleby while at the same time a captivating slavery reparations fable, the film flirts with the supernatural even with its heart planted firmly in sobering class and race issues historically and now.

Dolemite Is My Name: With class, race and cultural divides up for satirical scrutiny, the entire explosive socio-political era that fed blaxploitation gets raw enlightenment on rewind. And with the ignited rebel instinct, lucid moment of the marginalized defining that subversive time.

Gloria Bell *Best Musical: Julianne Moore in a take no prisoners transformative middle age makeover moment of clarity from emotionally passive 'other woman' outcast to patriarchal payback uprising. And with lots of self-celebratory, breathlessly expressive emancipation in this somewhat feminist musical too.

In The Aisles: A metaphorical, muted lyrical elegy of unrelieved despair in the Kafkaesque corporate workplace catacombs of global capitalism, somewhere in the former GDR following German reunification - and the concurrent disappearance of a collective trucker brotherhood under socialism.

Joker: Fear of the masses - in a movie. Unlike say, Parasite's combo derisive mockery and apprehensive undercurrent of potential workingclass rebellion. Along with an erroneous official fear-mongering advisory that the portrayal of that anarchistic comic book villain would precipitate violence in America. But the Golden Lion top prize winner at the Venice Film Festival as more manifestation of a violence already grounded in US culture, and a reflection of simmering low wage police state millennial generation misery.

Official Secrets *Best Female Action Hero: "My motive was to stop a war and save lives - Yes, I'd do it again." Yet another instance of filmmakers of courage and conviction stepping up where unfortunately and unlike Keira Knightley's anti-Iraq War real life rebel - politicians and the press (including critics) fear to tread. Which is the reason you likely never heard of this best female action hero of the year. 

Pause: A vivid, near soliloquy, men distorting women and bypassing the hungering housewife soul. And relief for aging suppressed passions and frustrations do eventually break free for moments, but with only elusive windows of dramatic conjecture provided - as perhaps it should be.

Richard Jewell: 'Don't become an asshole, a little power can turn a person into a monster.' A real life unlikely designated hero in this emerging police state/corporate press collusion cautionary tale.

The Operative: Essential filmmaking of conviction indeed, a dramatic denunciation of the Mossad against Iran, penned by a former Israeli intelligence officer. And a brave movie stepping in to confront the challenges of current political censure and censorship offscreen - where timid and cowardly or complicit governments and corporate media fear to tread.

The Public: A mix of eloquence and satire, in this homeless mass uprising takeover of one of the last remaining US public service and social program sanctuaries for bookworms and the homeless alike, the public library.

** Note: 7 out of 10 were mysteriously 'disappeared' for their socio-political content. The others are inexplicably Hollywood.

AND...Worst Movie Of The Year: Parasite: 'On est tous le parasite de quelqu'un' [We are all the parasites of someone] Though billed as a kind of South Korean anti-capitalism satire - this eat the rich outing when not eating its own at the bottom of the economic food chain, comes off more as an empty plate...A condescending, pessimistic portrayal of human nature, bereft of class consciousness or ideology.
 ~ Prairie Miller