Reviews

We see a beautiful young married woman abandoned by her husband pursuing his own interests in Tokyo and an aging has-been movie star with the sweetest golf swing I've ever seen and an indifferent wife and family in California. Even at age 94 I had no trouble "getting" the message of this slow, relaxing story. But unrealistic sentimentality, at least for me, does not an entertaining movie make. And I do watch an incredible number of movies for entertainment. If I am interested in how other people see the real world, dramatized or analyzed, I read a book. It seems to me that the writer/director did a credible job expressing her purpose, but I'm puzzled why she injected those stupid scenes of the Japanese girl demanding that her stockings be ripped or lipped off and the fast roll in the hay of the man with the singer. And why was the picture given an R rating? These miscues simply ruined an evening of quiet entertainment.

Graham Greene writes so convincingly that tend to forget that he is a novelist. That is, he writes fiction, not history. His fiction here is that that the US involvement in Vietnam was based upon a CIA operation to murder Saigon civilians and lay the blame on the communists. But, historically speaking, US operations in Vietnam were based upon Washington's calculated policy that had its origins in JFK's pre- presidential Catholic Church support of France's crumbling hold on its Indo-China empire. It was a doomed venture that ignored Vietnam's long fear of China. Here was a Buddhist country, ruled by a Catholic-French supported aristocracy, the brightest star of French pre-WWII imperialism, battling a basically nationalistic, Communist dominated revolution that looked fearfully over its shoulders at their traditional enemy, China, and took no solace from the fact that China was now controlled by a Communist dictatorship. The fact that the US had a treaty with Vietnam was a meaningless excuse because that treaty had been reached with a French/Catholic government which everyone knew was doomed by the post-WWII world-wide drive against imperialism. The CIA in Vietnam, as it had become when JFK chickened out on the US planned Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, was simply JFK supporters' whipping boy, an excuse for his errors. The whole misadventure was intended to forestall his defeat in the post Bay of Pigs presidential election. But as the philosopher said, "He who does not understand history is doomed to repeat it."

Roger Ebert, bless his immortal and great talented soul, wrote that Awakenings was "no tear-jerker." For once Roger was wrong, if we must take him literally, for I and most of our readers by their admissions, teared up all over the place, and I'm a hard-bitten retired trial lawyer. I didn't have the pleasure of watching this great film in a theater, because Nadja and I were enjoying ourselves sailing Baja California and the Mexican Pacific Gold Coast, but I watched it on two DVD rentals this year, and wept appropriately both times.

I must say, however, that I was turned off by the ridiculous scene where Robert DeNiro whips his fellow suffers into a frenzy. This instantly reminded me of the scene in the 1977 version of The Island of Dr. Moreau where the animals, surgically and at great pain transformed into human beings, in their misery proclaimed "We are men. We are men." This scene, in my humble opinion, was entirely unnecessary because the actors, by their body language both before and after, quite adequately made the point. I suspect that some Hollywood executive who fancied himself more knowledgeable than the script writers insisted on this scene to give it more action. Whatever, it sure cured my teary mood.

I also wish the DVD had come equipped with subscripts for people with hearing problems, which means probably 60% of viewers over 60. But the acting was so good, I believe I understood what was going on.

As noted my brief comment in the Summary section, this story's beginning and ending with the ward's patients being in and reverting to catatonic trances intrigued me. This device was used in the unexpurgated edition of the satirical psychiatric novel "Paper Doll, The Times and Tribulations of George Selkirk, M.D."

A potentially good who-done-it drama done in by fatally flawed pacing. Why it was classed as a comedy, I cannot imagine, although I spent a lot time laughing and jeering at my TV screen as the DVD ground on to its conclusion. Very early on I was shouting, "You're being set up," which was obvious when a beautiful but mature woman is hanging around dolefully, like a school girl with a crush on a teacher or the high school football star, so that he gets a good nose full of her pheromones, so I holler, "She's got the hook in you, now she's going to set it and reel you in, you fool," and in boring reel after reel she does her thing. What the film needed at this point was for the sex goddess to show up at the old college campus in the front row of his first class, looking her sweet sorrowful self, crossing and uncrossing her great legs while he sweats and stammers his welcome to the students. (I guess this would make it a "fish out of water" movie.) The sad part is it could'a been a passably good drama, even without Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray touch, laying there balefully like Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in Apocalypse Now. "Exterminate the brutes!" was more legible than whatever they excerpted from the Dorian Gray story. Too bad. Oh yes, I actually did enjoy the movie. It wasn't all that bad. At least I didn't go to sleep in the middle of it.

This is a remarkably well done and entertaining movie a comprehensive review of which I will leave to more accomplished writers. However, I was particularly taken by the manner in which the writer used the stag image, which I take was the turning point of his perception of the Queen. When she first sees this magnificent animal, she is transfixed. I fully expected her to immediately call her retainer and communicate her request to all land owners within the stag's natural range to protect "her" stag and to then have a confrontation with her fatuous husband.

By the writer's subsequent treatment of this scene, he condemns the queen to a harsh, uncaring person who cannot possibly be moved by her subsequent viewings of the people's flowers and faces outside the gates of her estate. The writer has thus squarely come down on the side of the Prime Minister's wife.

I flew B-17s with the 8th Air Force in WW-II. On my first pass to London I went to Westminster Abbey where a little old Londoner approached me and took me in tow, proudly showing me all the historic structures, his England, within walking distance although he obviously was a poor as a church mouse. At the end of the day, I offered him a pound note which he insisted on refusing. I thought, My God, the people represented by these building have been screwing my friend and his kind since the memory of man runneth not to the contrary, as the saying goes, and still this is "his" England. Which is the message of The Queen.

Tony Blair was right.

I don't know why our reviewers are so down on novel author Malcolm Lowry, screen writer Guy Gallo and director Walter Houston's gripping story, of a man with much on his conscience, who is put out to pasture as Consul in sleepy Cuernavaca as a grateful Empire's reward for his terrible experience in WW-I when someone on the ship he commands tosses 6 or so German prisoners alive into the coal-burner's fire box, turns to drinks to salve his soul, loses his wife to a torrid affair with his half brother, in his misery gets drunk and contracts syphilis in the Farolito, a rough bar/whorehouse perched on a shelf above a chasm in the shadow of Mexico's renown volcano, Popocatapetl, and, when his wife unexpectedly comes back him and indicates her desire to renew a life of intimacy, has nowhere to go but back to the Faralito and his death under the volcano.

Lowry, of course, had to obscure his seamy plot with reams of reflective language, else he would never have been published. He says as much in opening paragraph where in its second sentence he unnecessarily describes the locale as being south of the Tropic of Cancer.

But John Huston, bless his iconoclastic soul, didn't pull any punches. The clues are there from git go to the very end. Vide Doctor Virgil, the specialist in venereal diseases.

I was also amused that Huston used virtually the same opening as he did in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre: Bogart, the drunk cadging handouts, and Finney, the drunk cadging drinks. Reminded me of the basically identical structures of the Jack and Bobby Kennedy assassinations where the victim is diverted into a killing field and a deadly crossfire.

This is truly a great movie that did total justice to Lowry's celebrated work. And no, I'm not a professor. I saw the movie on DVD, was sufficiently intrigued to read the book. Just once. Read IMDM's comments and couldn't believe the paucity of comment and the plenitude of misunderstanding. So decided to see the movie again before shooting off my mouth.

Great satire of many of our social institutions of the mid-Vietnam era. But not so funny now; too much dirty water over the dam since then. Plainly what passed for Liberals in those days were pilloried, as well as tired old targets--some more deserving than others--such as J Edgar Hoover, FBI, and CIA who apparently had enough muscle in those days to persuade Hollywood to change their initials, although to what end God only knows. I noted that the "right wing extremists" label was used in the movie, which was old hat then and is still the battle cry of Democrat propagandists. The more things change, the more things remain the same, and propaganda slogans become eternal verities. But old Ma Bell, THE telephone company of those days, isn't with us to kick around any more. Our present crop of corporate and financial rulers are nothing like the benign despot portrayed in this picture. Our boys don't pretend to serve; they just brazenly exploit, and laugh all the way to the bank with their "bail out" billions. Anyhow, all and all The President's Analyst is a good evening's entertainment with some nice acting and even a slice of history. But who was the analyst's very obliging sweety working for?

I love this picture for many reasons. I don't know why it isn't available on DVD. It reminds me of my childhood dreams of becoming a military pilot and the joys (and terrors) of flying. As a teen-age in the mid-1930's I saw Ernst Udet drag the Oakland Airport with his swept-wing bi-plane inverted and pick a handkerchief off the runway with his wing tip. And about 8 years earlier, when I was about 6, I lived in Rio Vista on the Sacramento River mid-way between Sacramento and San Francisco, when a mail plane crashed in a grain field just outside of town. I ran out with a crowd of town folks and other kids. By the time we got to the plane it was burning fiercely with the pilot trapped in the cockpit and no way the men in the crowd could have rescued him. Everyone was grim-faced and silent, except for one smart alec who said he wished he'd brought his knife and fork because the burning pilot smelled good. I have often wondered if this gruesome event inspired The Great Waldo Pepper's scene where Waldo's friend crashes and burns. But I expect this was a common occurrence.

This could have been turned into a better than average garden variety thriller with a different ending. In fact, I suspect the original script may have been written that way. Certainly the opening scene which found the new bride hovering between dream and reality -- and perhaps a bid daft -- was an excellent set-up for an ending in which after the terrified woman calls the cops, having made one of the more macabre discoveries of terror spoofs, the knock on the door reveals the police officer, suspensefully followed by the unbloodied "victims" who stagger over from the party next door to console the poor woman, victim of an over-stressed imagination or really off her rocker. Too bad about the ex-marine who only wanted to do what randy marines like to do to available women, but the life of a fighting man is fraught with hazard.

I thought the shovel banging on a wooden box was a real blunder. Whether dead dog or murder victim, no killer would put the body in a box to bury it.

As a member of an 8th Air Force B-17 bomber crew who served under Curtis LeMay and bunked in the same Nissen hut as a lead crew navigator with LeMay in the right seat, I saw young men like myself die in bunches of 100 at a time and survived against all odds with the firm conviction that never again would the political leaders of the world's major nations be so stupid as to take their people into war again. God, how naive and wrong could one possibly be? And so I have watched with dismay and anger the mistakes of the heads of state on all sides have made again and again beginning with Korea.

I also was a student at Cal Berkeley at the same time both Robert McNamara and Dean Rusk were there and I'm not buying this crap that they were just trying to do the best they could to serve the objectives and desires of their Presidents. By all accounts, both JFK and LBJ were in awe of McNamara's intellectual powers, which, in retrospect turned out to be superficially brittle at best. Rusk, on the other hand, was plainly out of his depth and apparently knew it because he protected himself by keeping his mouth shut and going with the flow.

McNamara would have us believe that he just didn't know anything about Vietnam's centuries old struggle with China; Rusk, ever the speechless Buddah, just wasn't talking, although his education and war service in Asia should have given him a clue. So if neither man had any knowledge of Vietnam's history, they were just about the only academics at Berkeley, which then as now, because of its position on the eastern Pacific rim, was focused on the the Orient. And at post-war Berkeley, the phenomenon of Titoism was a matter of daily discussion.

Our Presidents get the glory and the blame for our nation's successes and failures, but, really, they are just figure-heads, political animals who are isolated from the real world by the nature of the institution and must depend heavily on the advice of people like McNamara and Rusk. And if McNamara didn't know this before, he surely knew it by the time this fascinating documentary was filmed. The blood of millions of innocent people is on McNamara's hands, and photographer and director of this film have most eloquently captured his awareness of his guilt. He sure had a lot of chutzpah to try and sell his "I just didn't understand" nonsense to the obviously disbelieving but nonetheless polite Vietnamese survivors of his former arrogance.

I resonated with this picture on so many levels that I found the viewers comments as interesting and revealing as this excellent character study of the Vietnam era. However, I thought the title was poorly chosen and a bit macabre for the subject matter. I was particularly intrigued with the writer of the novel, Scott Spenser and turned to his bio for clues. Born 1945 in Washington, DC was a tip-off for me. Does this account for his awareness of the seamy side of politics and his apparently ruptured idealism? He would have been 17 when JFK was killed and in a couple of years become a prime candidate for service in Vietnam or a fast trip to Canada, as he has his flawed hero admit while explaining his cop-out by joining the Coast Guard. Spenser obviously knows about being conflicted.

I just don't see Fielding Pierce as being idealistic in his political ambitions as so many readers do, at least not until the image of his lost love comes back to drive him to near mental collapse at the climax of a very physically draining political campaign. And such ventures, unless you are blessed by a very wealthy and powerful father, as with JFK and more recently George Bush -- are totally exhausting experiences in which the candidate can feel that he is absolutely alone and that the people around him are just sucking him dry. Fielding is portrayed as a totally passive pretty boy who is picked up by a powerful King Maker and who appears to have not a single political or social thought, whether his own or anyone else's, not even his eminently lovable and totally idealistic lover. So he loved the sex, but what else? And who doesn't? He had a childish dream, which he casually puts forth, of wanting to be President. Which is the sum total of his political and social awareness in so far as the story goes, until the image of his lost love finally reconstructs his insensitive soul.

I was particularly struck by the writer's very short line that no one would have voted for JFK if they had really known him. How did that one get by the Hollywood censors? And did this account for the less than glowing reception this very well acted and directed "sensitive" story actually received? Did Jody Foster or Ed Harris approve that line? Can it be that these presumably politically sensitive Hollywood stars do not sit at the feet of the Democratic Party's latter day Saint Francis? They both must have had something to say about the script before they became attached to this project.

Hmm. I find these clues fascinating. I'll have to watch this one again. And read more about it.

I haven't read all the comments -- just the first page on IMDb.com -- As a wannabe scriptwriter, I find the comments both intriguing and educational. To me the end of this movie was really the start of the story. Plainly the psychiatrist and Lila have met for the first time. So the movie really must be a story ostensibly told from several points of view looking back on the tragic event. But I think there is really only one point of view, that of the psychiatrist, who, like most of his genre, is teetering on the brink. He sees Lila, whom he met for the first time on the bridge and, as her psychiatrist, became involved with sexually - at least in his mind - and whom he saved, which is how the play starts out. Now, like Hamlet to which the writer refers in so many ways, the play becomes the thing. The whole set up, the photography, the imagery, the weird events, like the blind man whose sight miraculously returns in a scene rather like poor Yorick, the dead artist's female psychiatrist who is more than a bit daft and has actually gone over the edge, tells us the story portrayed is the product of a deranged mind. Well told, intriguing, beautifully staged and photographed, and convincingly acted. If you enjoy the sensation of going mad, this movie is your cup of tea. But if you prefer to live in the real world, Join the Howard Beale Memorial Society and celebrate Paddy Cheyefsky's Network.

I can't say I enjoyed this movie; it was far to disturbing, especially at my age when I'm looking into my grave. But I do wonder about the comments other viewers have made, as if the more clear cut scenes portrayed a real life, rather than the flashbacks and flash forwards of the dying brain. Whatever the writer and director intended, it was a very well done and engrossing work. The line between real life and horror is very fine.

Join the Howard Beale Memorial Society. Get Mad. Fight Back. Get Even. Turn the Rascals Out, and the sooner the better! Save America!! A tribute to Paddy Cheyefsky and a wake up call for America.

Lew Warden

Adrien Brody is perfectly cast as the amiable Sad Sack of WW-II fame. And Kris Kristopherson's face, that eye peering out of a chaos of wrinkles as he bumbles through a pale version of Dr. Mengele, is just too much. Poor Kris! He was such a towering figure of a man in his youth. Oh, well, at least he had a few days work.

But weep for poor Jack! Mortally wounded in the Gulf war and then snatched back from death by the mere blink of an eye. Then, mind-blasted, he wanders from crisis to coincidence, not unlike Candy, only Candy had fun. I think -- it was so long ago, all I remember is "Give me your hump!" as she balls a hunchback. Ah, Candy, they don't make pictures like that any more.

Convicted of a murder he didn't commit and can't remember, our Jack is sentenced to a weird lunatic asylum that would put the Cuckoo's Nest house of horrors to shame.

For daring to proclaim his innocence to Kristopherson's dictatorial psychiatrist, he is trussed up in a strait jacket tighter than a Christmas goose and thrust into a morgue drawer, left to reflect on his plight in Stygian darkness. And again and again, every time he crosses Kris. Every turning point, it seems, is a shot of Jack in the Jacket, showing nothing but his pleading doggy eyes. Oh, the horror, the horror! But he does have a few moments of true love. As if that could redeem his suffering.

I don't think I liked this picture, although it did hold my attention.

Join the Howard Beale Memorial Society. Get Mad. Fight Back. Get Even. Turn the Rascals Out, and the sooner the better! Save America!! A tribute to Paddy Cheyefsk and a wake up call for America.

Lew Warden

I don't know why this excellently directed, superbly acted, and for the most part, well photographed docudrama has received so many negative comments. Sure the teen age girls' roles seem unduly exaggerated -- until one recalls the Columbine High School massacre in 1999. Sure the slice of life of the East LA macho culture seems cliché. But welcome to the real world, folks. Except for the opening scenes which seemed to me to be unduly dark, once the players started getting into the wilderness of the teen age mind, my attention was riveted on every scene. All the actors were outstanding in their roles, their pain, their anger, their abandoned adventuresomeness, their loneliness,their lack of understanding and dismay of a real world portrayed and captured by the camera in every shot of their eyes.

I was reminded of a socially conscious and quite lovely California girl I met many years ago. She had signed on for one of JFK's programs to bring light to our city ghettos. Her first venture in establishing understanding between diverse cultures resulted in her being gang banged, not by any implied invitation but in brutal retaliation for having the temerity to enter Chicago's black ghetto culture. When her body healed, she went back to her Peace Corp-like duties and was again gang-banged. This time, after she got out of the hospital, she went home to California.

This is a very interesting and entertaining picture. I, normally sceptical about such ventures, thought much more highly of this one than did the other well-thought out commentators. Claire Forlani's performance, all agree, was superb. But I, having practiced law for many years in the San Francisco Bay Area courts and having had some experience young heroin addicts, including addicted friends of clients, and having seen addicts on the nod in open court and in early withdrawal, was astonished by Forlani's performance.

In one scene I watched closely as she seemingly involuntarily trembled the index finger of one hand while going through her apparently agonizing facial and body contortions. I tried to make my index finger tremble thusly, but no way. How did she "act" so on the edge? At the time I wondered what this actress was like in real life. Were her sly, even crafty yet fearful glances a natural characteristic?

Hell of a performance!! But, without being a spoiler, did you all miss the scene where Forlani first became addicted?

Other commentators tended to put down Lauren Bacall's performance by contrast, but it too was superb. Her seemingly ill-acted more or less stoic performance that drew some criticism in fact was fully in character as was revealed in the closing scenes. She too was playing a game for high stakes, although just how she came to be a player rather than an innocent bystander was obscure to me. I'll have to watch this one again.

True, the flashbacks and flash forwards were disconcerting at first -- such devices usually are -- but these were introduced with a flash of light which happily -- at least to me -- announced their advent.

Good job all around, actors, writers, directors. I could even hear what the actors were saying for a change -- no mumbling or sound track blasting away the dialogue -- although at my age I much prefer subtitles.

Lew Warden

Join The Howard Beale Memorial Society. Celebrate Network. (http://www.networkcentralca.net) And check out Loose Ends at http://www.aventuraproductions.net

Sorry folks, not even my love for Jody Foster could induce me to watch this turkey from beginning to Hollywood ending. I go to the movies to be entertained, not to watch a mother's frantic search for her child. I don't care how many switches, reveals, turning points and all the cute tricks the writer/director contrive to engage our minds, I tuned out on this one about 10 minutes into act two. What a waste of talent and money! I don't know - stupid as I am - if this one made any money at the box office, but it it did, it was only because Jody Foster headed the cast. To anyone who gives a hoot about their kids, this one is quite simply revolting. Join the Howard Beale Memorial Society and protest.

Someone -- director, writer, producer, perhaps all -- are caught with their dialectics down. But where did Sharon Stone fit into this turkey? That black wig was simply awful. The Sharon we love and admire is blonde, blonde, blonde. I got a huge laugh out of the critic who thought those black wigged shots were of different women. I think the wig must have slipped around here and there because she sure looked different from time to time. Sharon may be tired of her Basic Instict fame -- although for the life of me I can't figure out why -- but why on earth did she sign on for this one?

And the propaganda! The kindly Soviet officials, the cold and calloused Brits, and the brutal Americans -- that beefy brute with his leather armpit holstered .45 reminded me of a "settler" the US Attorney in San Francisco used to terrify both lawyer and defendant into copping a plea. The guy looked like King Kong, and roared just about as loudly. My poor client visibly quailed. But I just marveled at his performance and said, "No deal. We're going to trial." So the guy went back into his cage.

Sharon gets rescued from the CIA/FBI's Kong by his good-cop companion who was waiting just outside the room. Which was just about the only action in this boring mishmash of flash backs and forwards, with only the scantiest of love scenes to remind us that Sharon was once America's premier seductress. Alas.

You have to be real old and know a little history to be able to figure out what this one is about but it really isn't worthwhile the struggle. The script was a mishmash, the actors' voices largely unintelligible, the camera work murky, the drama slight, and the entertainment value nil. One can only conclude that someone important in this production was in love with the subject matter.

Well, as they say, love is blind.

I thought this was a very well acted story -- although the groom's rage at the boy's stoic insistence that he was the brides' former and long dead husband was a bit over the top. Cameron Bright, the boy, and Nicole Kidman, whose obsession for her dead husband finally took her over the edge, provided particularly fine performances as two manifestly brainwashed and troubled people. Anne Hecht and the old folks who lived in the same building as Nicole and her lover, were appropriately evil. Which left me with the feeling that the original story may have been somewhat different, that it started life as a shakedown for money or a revenge thriller but someone decided to go all out for fantasy, which gave the plot development a rather cobbled appearance as old clues were left unattended in the finale. I'd sure liked to have been a fly on the wall listening to the three credited writers, and whoever else had a hand in it, arguing about how the story should end. Still, all in all, I thought the story was convincingly done. A worthwhile evening of entertainment. I enjoyed it and only fell asleep once, as I recall. Oh, the blessings of DVD which allow one to have a good snooze and still wake up, scroll back to what one missed, and go to bed satisfied. I might have felt differently had I paid $6 bucks for a ticket and been awakened by the credits. The music was terrific!

The point of this "keep 'em in the dark until the very end" crime mystery is just that, keep the audience in the dark. So we hang in there and try penetrate the flickering shadows of action shot in the dark -- For God's sake! The movies are visual entertainment. We are entitled to see what is going on. So why this passion for pseudo noir? The plot, in a small nutshell, is an undercover team of good guys set a trap to get the goods on a gaggle of bad guys who are smuggling drugs out of an Army base in Panama. But, given the writer's ambition, the weak point of the whole story is in the connection between the dirty Colonel and the hero. Why on earth would the Colonel call in an old friend whom he knows to be a smart investigator to solve the mystery of the killing of several members of a training team under his command and risk having his whole operation exposed? I suppose we might take that tale about a group of renegade Rangers muscling in on the indigenous Panamanian/Columbian drug merchants as an intriguing reveal, but it was so disingenuously introduced as to be a source of immediate suspicion so we really weren't all that surprised when the juvenile "hail the gang's all here" ending comes on. I seem to recall that such a scene has been done before -- many times. I did have a good nap in the middle of the show, however, so all was not wasted, and what I did watch (and could see) was entertaining, to a degree.

Only Sean Penn's hatred for Richard Nixon can explain his interest in this story. For a moment I considered that he might have regarded this as a vehicle to show his range as an actor. Certainly he effectively played a bumbling loser who blames the world for his inability to do anything right, but this story stumbled its dreary way from A to B with not a single endearing bit of character development. From bumbler to thief to madness is hardly a journey I consider interesting. As I watched with growing disinterest, I wondered how on earth the writer, director, and star expected the audience to suspend disbelief to the extent of imagining that Penn's character could possibly have married a neat little winner like his wife or fathered two wonderful children.

Now I can understand the affection the dog felt for him -- but that is why we love dogs -- they are so uncritical.

Personally, I go to the movies to be entertained. Had I paid 6 bucks to see this dog -- I rented this CD from Blockbuster on a monthly card -- I would have demanded my money back. But I expect a lot of Nixon haters got it off just by the title alone. However, I expect they were sorely disappointed when Penn's character had his ultimate failure.

PS. I decided to write this before reading any other comment. I expect the gushes will depress me even more than did this dreary picture.

PPS. I don't know if a negative comment constitutes a spoiler. Probably not, but I didn't want to take a chance. Join the Howard Beal Memorial Society. As Howard said: "First you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a human being, Goddammit. My life has value.'" And so does my time for watching movies.

This movie was passably interesting but I found the readers' comments even more interesting. Obviously both readers, writer, director, et al. are of today's generation of takers who don't have the least idea about what life was life in those terrible days. The central figure, a 12 year old boy who wants to go to the movies, is repeatedly seen trying to cadge a quarter from his dying grandfather.

Out of compassion, a grocer who is overextended giving credit to his impoverished neighbors and forgives their small thefts, gives the kid a nickel for a job the kid never does. A compassionate doctor, who himself is nearly as bad off financially as his patients, gives the kid a dime for a job the kid never does. Finally the kid badgers his mother into giving him her last dime for attending to his grandfather's dying wish. This the kid does, in a really great scene. But he gets to the theater too late for the twenty five cents early admission price. Now the price is fifty cents, a seemingly hopeless sum.

This was an absurd price for a movie ticket in those days. I recall ten or fifteen cents for a kid and two bits for adults. But fifty cents then was a good pay for a day's hard work by a man. As Steinbeck wrote of those days regarding a California farmer's view of fair wages: "A red is any son of a bitch who wants five cents an hour when I'm paying four." I got forty cents per month per customer for getting up at 4:00 am delivering newspapers door to door, and had to pay the company for the papers whether the customer paid me or not.

Back to the movie -- Then the grandfather dies and, miraculously, the kid finds a quarter in the dirt nearby. And off he goes to the theater, splurging the whole fifty cents. Not a penny's worth of character development here, although the opportunity to do so was palpable.

What a message to send the spoiled brats of today who seem to think they have a God-given right to live off of their parents and grandparents until the old folks die. When that happens we're going to have a hell of a depression. Which we need like a hole in the head.

Today homeless people are living in parks and riverside camps and in alleyways behind restaurant dumpsters in the same terrible conditions and nearly the numbers we had during the depression era. The only difference is the modern stainless steel shopping carts they commandeer to move their possessions. But nobody seems to bother counting them, much less doing anything about their plight. We just don't want to see them and so, miraculously, they aren't there.

This play could have been redeemed if the kid had foregone his utterly selfish obsession to go to the movie, and had paid the doctor and the grocer the unearned 15 cents they had given him, and had given his mother back her dime plus the two bits he "inherited" from his grandfather. Or would that have been a politically incorrect message to send to the children of today?

Twelve year is not by any means too young for a child to be aware of the economic burdens parents have today, and certainly wasn't the case back in the thirties. I vividly remember when I was about 12 and spent a summer on my grandfather's ranch -- which he had lost long before to the mortgage holder who let him and grandma live there until he died on the land he and his parents had owned for nearly a century.

He taught me how to play poker, so well in fact that by the time my vacation was over, I had a pretty fair stack of pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters which I kept stacked on the kitchen table with the sugar bowl and salt and pepper shakers.

I really felt bad about taking the money -- although God knows the old man had lost his ranch in large part because of his gambling and hell-raising youth -- and so when my folks picked me up I "forgot" my small hoard of possibly three-four dollars, which was big money to me too. Later I got a letter from my grandmother noting my gesture, but letting me know that my grandfather was deeply hurt because a 12 year old kid had felt sorry for him.

My grandfather taught me to play a pretty good game of poker too, which I put to good use in the Army and later when I had to play "poker" with the insurance companies for much higher stakes. Like the man used to sing, "You've got to know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em."

Anyhow, TWO BITS was a big disappointment to me for these reasons. Obviously, I'm not at all happy with the state of affairs in our society these days. If you want more lectures along these lines, see our website (www.networkcentralca.net) based on the 1976 blockbuster movie NETWORK where Paddy Chayefski -- also a Depression era child -- famously satirized and forecast the sorry state of affairs of our news media and economy. Some day a more vital culture, whether Chinese or Mexican or Muslim, is going to eat us alive, and if you are around then and don't know why, remember TWO BITS.

Lew Warden