April 10, 2019
Page 11
‘Amazing Grace,’
a Fitting Tribute
C ontinued froM p age 7
work that is so singularly and un-
apologetically focused on African
American experience, particularly
at a time when that subject matter
was considered absolutely unwor-
thy of literary notice. In addition
to archival footage of Morrison
herself, the film also carefully cu-
rates visual art from other African
Americans in a way that lifts up
Morrison’s thematic significance.
Morrison inspires as someone who
managed, by the sheer force of her
intellect and personality, to bring
an astounding amount of light into
the American literary landscape.
Watch for the film’s theatrical re-
lease sometime this year.
The career of journalist Mike
Wallace, best known for his
hard-hitting interviews on “60
Minutes,” is the subject of “Mike
Wallace is Here.” For decades,
Wallace was everywhere, the
quintessential dogged interview-
er; indeed, the film opens with an
exchange between him and Bill
O’Reilly in which the latter claims
to have been inspired by Wallace
and, indeed, to have beaten him
at his own game. (Wallace, in his
90s by that time, appears entirely
unimpressed.) Although director
Avi Belkin grew up in Israel and is
too young to have consumed “60
Minutes” at its height in the 70s
and 80s, he nevertheless correct-
ly discerned that Wallace’s career
is a fascinating vantage point for
reflecting on the ways that televi-
sion journalism has changed in the
decades since its advent. Working
from more than 1700 hours of foot-
age, Belkin assembles a compelling
case that this hard-driving, prickly
personality may well have been
driven by insecurities and an out-
sized ego and may not have been a
favorite of his colleagues, but also
worked with a kind of integrity
that is increasingly hard to find, in-
spired by an actual desire to know
the answers to the hard questions
he posed. The interviews sampled
here are riveting--with notoriously
difficult world leaders like Ayatol-
lah Khomeini and Vladimir Putin
and outsized personalities like Leo-
na Helmsley, Oprah Winfrey, Shir-
ley MacLaine, and a young Donald
Trump--and occurred in a context
in which media companies appear
to have been more prepared to de-
fend independent efforts to get past
pat answers to more difficult truth
(in contrast to now, when so much
of the media is corporately con-
nected to its subjects). Although
definitely not a contemplative fig-
ure, Wallace emerges as someone
who used his questions of others to
interrogate his own views. The film
will be released theatrically in July.
Ninety-year-old
Dr.
Ruth
Westheimer was present for the
screening of “Ask Dr. Ruth,” the
immensely entertaining film about
her life--and that is hardly surpris-
ing once you get a sense of how ab-
solutely irrepressible she is. People
less than half her age can scarcely
keep up with her, and this inves-
tigation into her life story both
reveals her buoyant persona and
grounds it in a history that is quite
full of loss and suffering. The only
daughter of very loving Orthodox
Jewish parents, Westheimer was
sent away to a Swiss orpahnage at
the age of 10 to save her from the
threat of deportation by the Nazis
and, after two years of correspon-
dence with them, never saw her
parents again and later learned they
had been murdered, likely at Aus-
chwitz. The film employs quite ef-
fective animated sequences to de-
pict her early seminal experiences
at the Swiss orphanage, where the
Jewish children were treated as a
servant class and Jewish girls were
not allowed to attend high school.
We meet her first boyfriend and
learn about her own emerging con-
sciousness, while also exploring
her surprising leap to fame in the
relatively prudish 1980s as a sex
therapist who was both controver-
sial and quite beloved for her easy
frankness. Still quite active as a
photo Courtesy p erfeCt d ay f ilMs
The new documentary ‘Toni
Morrison: The Pieces I Am,’
focuses on the Nobel Prize-
winning author, the black
experience and the publishing
world.
writer, speaker, and public person-
ality, Westheimer appears to have
no time for fear or regret, only en-
thusiasm. The film will be released
theatrically on May 3 and will ap-
pear on Hulu in June.
“Jim Allison: Breakthrough”
celebrates an iconoclastic immu-
nologist who pioneered an ap-
proach to cancer treatment which
now offers real hope to patients
who have not been able to find it.
His story, well told in this engaging
and suspenseful tribute, provides
an instructive example of the bar-
riers that hinder real innovation
inside any system which, like the
worlds of medical and pharma-
ceutical research, is too big to fail.
All or most of the incentives rein-
force and reward the usual ways
of thinking, and block and even
punish visionary approaches. The
film tracks Allison’s relentless and
personally costly efforts to per-
suade a pharmaceutical company
to invest the staggering resources
needed to test his ambitious thesis
for how to activate an effective im-
mune response to certain cancers,
and notes that both Allison and one
of his best allies experienced sig-
nificant early losses to cancer in
their own families; the film makes
the case that those losses (in addi-
tion to Allison’s innate iconoclastic
streak) motivated the two to push
for ideas that seemed to others too
risky to invest in. In this story, Al-
lison’s lifelong passion for playing
the harmonica also feels somehow
critical to teaching him to trust his
own creativity. It’s an inspiring and
hopeful story, and will have its the-
atrical release this summer.
“Scared of Revolution” isn’t
quite as easy to pin down and, for
me, wasn’t as successful as the
other biographies. It profiles Umar
Bin Hassan of the Last Poets, an
African-American group of per-
formance poets and musicians that
was a major influence on the emer-
gence of hip-hop. I suspect that,
for those already familiar with the
Last Poets, this film might be much
more intrinsically fascinating; it
focuses less on presenting the Last
Poets in their heyday in the 1960s
and more on Hassan looking back
with some sadness on his life. Still,
his life and struggle for meaning
and voice in a context of genera-
tional poverty, violence, and ad-
diction is worthy of attention even
without all the context I would
have wanted for understanding his
legacy. You can follow the film at
http://www.thelastpoetsfilm.com/
I saw a number of films that ex-
plored manifestations of systemic
racism. One of the best was “De-
cade of Fire” is an investigation
into the destruction of the South
Bronx in the 1970s. The story
is personal to co-director Vivian
Vasquez (working with Gretchen
Hildebran); Vasquez, the daughter
of Puerto Rican immigrants, grew
up in the South Bronx in the 60s,
a time when it was a thriving and
very diverse community in which
African Americans, Puerto Ricans,
Irish, and Jewish folks lived in rela-
tive harmony. But by the 70s, most
whites had moved out of the com-
munity, blacks and Latinos forced
out of other parts of the city due to
redevelopment moved in by larger
numbers, and the predominantly
older housing in the South Bronx
disintegrated. For the decade of the
70s, an extraordinarily high num-
ber of buildings were destroyed by
fire--just at a time when it appeared
the government policy was to just
“let them burn.”
The public narrative was that
the black and brown people living
in the South Bronx were essential-
ly uncivilized and didn’t have any
respect for property. Vasquez and
others reflect on how that narra-
tive got into their heads--and how
some residents eventually came to
resist it. James Baldwin, Stokely
Carmichael, and others began to
challenge that the destruction was
really a matter of government poli-
cy--and the film sets out to address
how redlining, policies that made
it impossible for people of color to
obtain home loans, the construc-
tion of highways that primarily
served white suburbs, speculator
absentee landlords with no inten-
tion of maintaining buildings to
minimum habitability standards,
and other aspects of segregation
and racism were the real cause of
the South Bronx’s “decade of fire,”
and describes how residents even-
tually found ways to take matters
into their own hands. The direc-
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