Where's My Roy Cohn?

First Hit: Cohn was a despicable arrogant man, and I can see why he and Trump were good friends.

When Donald Trump asked out loud, “where’s my Roy Cohn,” he was fondly thinking about his past relationship and mentor Roy Cohn. Cohn was a former federal prosecutor who prosecuted the Rosenbergs’ in 1951 and then became assistant to Joseph McCarthy during the McCarthy communist hearings of 1954.

Regarding the Rosenberg trial, in one of the clips in this movie, he’s shown saying he would have liked to flip the switch to kill them both. His hooded eye look, when he talked, gave many people the sense and feeling that Roy was the devil, shady, to say the least.

In the McCarthy hearings, Joseph McCarthy and Cohn made names for themselves. Cohn and McCarthy were pathological in their intent that they alone were the defenders of our democracy. In doing so, they believed they needed to call-out and root out anyone suspected of being a communist sympathizer. They were focused on fear-based thought that the Soviets (Russia and the Soviet Union at the time) were going to destroy our government and our way of life. During these sets of hearings, they destroyed the lives of many people.

What we see as audience members are that both McCarthy and Cohn used the tactic of deflection of the truth with an alternative story to push attention on to something other than what needs to be focused on.

Although I was unaware of it earlier, the film also points out the McCarthy was a closet gay man. With Cohn also being a closeted gay man, the hearings also helped to deflect attention away from their own personal stories and struggles. Those stories also provided fodder for their downfall.

Reading the above, do you note how Trump uses the same pattern of deflection to steer attention away from his own wrongdoing? Yes, this is what DJT does, when he is caught up in something that is a detriment to himself, he deflects and pushes the subject towards something else. Additionally, throughout the film, Cohn is quoted and is shown saying he never apologizes or admits he is wrong about anything. Note the similarity to DJT?

When did DJT learn more about the effects of openly lying and deflecting away from the real story? Donald Trump and his father Fred met Cohn in 1973 when DJT and his father were being sued by the US Government for violating the Fair Housing Act. Cohn came to the rescue. Continuing the pattern of lying and deflection, the case was not prosecuted to the full extent of the law. It was at this time, Donald and Roy became close friends, and for years Cohn worked with Trump to excoriate opponents of the DJT companies. Roy became Donald’s mentor.

The film spends time talking about his upbringing and his lifestyle. It showed him high from the full range of drugs he’d consume, but it was also always about creating a more prominent story somewhere else so that the attention to his own issues or behavior was not being scrutinized.

Cohn denied he was AIDS-stricken and until the end he publicly stated he wasn’t gay and that he didn’t have AIDS, although his friend Nancy and Ronald Reagan got him into specialized AIDS treatment programs.

I cannot imagine that he died with internal peace.

The only redeeming value brought up in the film about Cohn was that he was loyal to his friends. It was interesting to note that when he was finally disbarred from practicing law for his many illegal practices, his friends, including Trump, failed to show him support.

The documentary uses photos, news stories, and film/video clips of interviews with Cohn to document Cohn’s career.

Matt Tyrnauer directed this film chronologically and highlighted the salient points of Cohn’s life.

Overall: It’s no wonder Trump said, “where’s my Roy Cohn” when he admonished his Attorney General Jeff Sessions for not lying, covering up, or protecting him like Cohn. Cohn was a liar and thief, and as wrong as Sessions was, he wouldn’t go that far.

Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool

First Hit: Brings to life some of the mystery surrounding a deeply complex man who expressed himself best through the music he created.

Miles Davis created a unique, inventive, and improvisational form of jazz. In doing so he emotionally moved people in ways they never knew before. As Miles’ pushed his soul to create his live music, the audience was discovering new feelings in their soul while listening to him play.

This movie is narrated by Carl Lumbly, whose raspy voice was equivalent to Davis’ voice post-surgery. This throat surgery did not affect his playing, only his voice.

We are presented with a quick overview of Davis’ upbringing and I was surprised to learn that his family, specifically his father, was a self-made wealthy man, the film states. He was one of the wealthiest black men in all of the United States. His father was a dentist but also ran an income producing farm outside St. Louis. The film also points out that being a child of a wealthy man didn’t stop him from racial injustice both as young boy and as a grown man.

One nugget from his youth is that his mother wanted him to play the violin but Miles wanted to play the trumpet and as with most things in life, he got his way.

In his late teens, he signed himself up to Julliard to learn about music and music theory while also spending his nights sitting in on the jazz bands lining each side of 52nd Street. Sitting in with some of the greats, he quickly found his stride and was able to contribute to the band’s sound.

Starting his own band, he quickly became an audience draw through his extemporaneous innovations and arrangements. He loved experimenting and learning more about music and his soul through the music he created.

I was drawn to the section in the film when he made his first trip to Paris. He was shocked to be in a culture that lacked the kind of racism he found in his own country. For the first time he felt free of his color. Coming back to the United States was such a racial shock that he started to spiral down. All this lead to the part of the story where he ended up on heroin.

His life became all about finding the next score. Broke and nearly living on the streets, his father came to New York and dragged him back to St. Louis where he got clean. The film also chronicles his later issues with cocaine and alcohol.

The film documents the development of his sound through the 60’s and 70’s with the various bands he fronted, the albums he made, and how he made them. He wanted the musicians he gathered to play deeper from their soul than each of the band members ever played before and he pushed each one to stand out to make their sound. He wanted collaboration.

There is a fair amount of homemade film footage of Miles as well as photos and the montage of putting this all together worked really well. Additionally, Director Stanley Nelson used interviews with fellow musicians that ended up being enlightening about Miles and heartwarming to the film watcher. We see old film footage of these musicians as young men, then on the screen being interviewed, older, wiser, and still in awe of what happened when they played with Miles.

The film also chronicles his various marriages and girlfriends while including interviews with three of his former wives.

The film does an excellent job of letting some of the various types of music Miles created to flow in and out of the scenes. Some of the music we hear live, as they were creating it in the studio or on stage, and other times, the music is from what he recorded.

Miles comes across as a troubled man who was steeped in finding ways to express himself in the only medium in which he felt safe, music. And in this realm, he was a genius.

Nelson did a great job of putting this story together. Lumbly did a wonderful job of speaking for Davis

Overall: Although I’m not a jazz aficionado, in a quiet dark room, hearing Davis’ music takes me to places I’ve never been before.

Becoming Nobody

First Hit: Moments of delight with Ram Dass are mixed with Jamie Catto’s own agenda.

Instead of producer and director Jamie Catto eliciting information about Ram Dass and his life, we get him doing this and also spending time sharing his own spiritual journey and points of view. It isn’t that this is wrong; however, I had looked forward to seeing a film about Ram Dass, a man who has influenced so many of us baby boomers and others with his willingness to expand our understanding of life as it is.

Ram Dass (born Richard Alpert) found a yearning from within to better understand life as he and others were experiencing it. He had questions about why life, the way it was unfolding for him, was unsatisfactory. With these questions, he began a quest to better understand it all.

Meeting with Dr. Timothy Leary, he started taking various types of drugs, psilocybin and then LSD to expand his consciousness. But it wasn’t until he met Neem Karoli Baba, a Hindu spiritual teacher in India that he called Maharaj-ji, did he find his guru and path. In Maharaj-ji he found loving acceptance and limitless love for who he was.

The film intersperses current time interview segments with Catto along with previously recorded film and video segments of Ram Dass teaching groups of people. These clips cover a broad spectrum of his life and help to make this story interesting.

TMoments, for example when Catto shares his understanding of Dass’s teachings and when he looks for approval and pats on the back from Dass, got tiring. At one point Jamie outright told Ram that he thought of Dass as his father figure and it came across, to me, as needy and approval seeking.

The film did not spend as much time on Ram’s hospice work, for which he’s very well known and respected. But Dass did talk a little about it by telling a couple of stories, in video clips, of patients he worked with. He also spoke about the importance of embracing both the concept and actuality of death as it arrives at each of us.

It was in these segments along with a couple of other discussions that I fell into enjoying this film wholeheartedly. I’ve come to understand many of the same things that Dass has learned through my own meditation practices and readings, and by reading his books “Being Here” and “Still Here.”

Because I had expected to see a film about Ram Dass, I felt that the film spent too much time on Catto’s teachings and what he’d learn from Dass or on his own.

Overall: Not quite the film it could have been, but there are genuinely laugh out-loud and enjoyable moments.

Aquarela

First Hit: One of the most cinematographically influential films I’ve ever seen.

This exquisitely shot film is about water, water in various forms of power and beauty.

The beginning is both puzzling and amusing at times. We watch as men walk around on frozen water, stooping down, and pressing their head against the ice. They are looking for something.

What could they be looking for? Sealife? A human body? No, they are looking for cars or trucks. We watch as they painstakingly find one, create a big hole in the ice, and using the primitive, yet ever practical, pulley and lever system of moving heavy objects, bring the vehicle up from underneath the ice.

I never really figured out if this was a wide river, part of a bay in the ocean, or a lake, but in the end, it didn’t matter. These inhabitants of a far northern unnamed country drive across the ice for many months of the year, and now that there is global warming, the ice is giving way three weeks earlier than usual, and vehicles are breaking through the ice and sinking into the water. The camera shows this happening several times and it both astonishing and amusing to watch.

At one point we watch this happen, and the camera catches one of the bloodied escaping survivors climbing on to the ice surface and then panicked, we see him trying to find his passenger. Everyone is looking for him, and when they see his body through the ice and they start chipping away to save him.

The film transitions to seeing glaciers, then glaciers calving into the ocean. Later, calving underwater resulting in icebergs rising to the top of the water and spinning in the water as they find the balance point. The noise of the calving glaciers is eerily breaking the silence of the film and sets an ominous tone. The shots of these calving events are extraordinary. I felt right there.

Then we’re on a sailing craft heading through rough seas, and then really rough and vast seas. The two sailors are alone in the dark battling rolling waves that are easily 30 – 40 feet. The boat slamming into the crevasse and then the rise of each wave creates spray off the bow that covers the entire ship. I would not want to be on that boat.

Then ocean waves in a dark arctic storm rolling across the ocean. They are easily 50 – 60 feet. This sequence uses loud heavy metal as background music, and for me, just too much and too loud, and I understood why it was used. These scenes are some of the darkest most potent visions of water on this planet.

We then segue to hurricane shots in Florida, then water overrunning Oroville Dam in California, and end up at Angel Falls in Venezuela, the highest waterfall in the world.

In between all this, there are other shots of water that are equally powerful and at times elegant in their serene beauty.

I cannot imagine the patience and fortitude it took to capture all this water, in this way, on film. These were some of the most amazingly sublime shots I’ve ever seen – in any movie.

Viktor Kossakovsky wrote and directed this, and all I can say is, “wow, what vision.”

Overall: Outside of some of the music choices, this film stands heads above most documentary films about the nature of our planet.

Maiden

First Hit: An extraordinary and heartrending film about women banding together to prove how amazingly powerful they are.

I grew up near boats. My dad and his best friend Frank Schultz built a 32’ cabin cruiser in our driveway so that they could dive for abalone together. My first memories as a month’s old baby are the warm sun, rocking waves, and the sound and vibration of the motor as I lay on the dark green engine cover.

My dad then bought a Mercury class day sailor, and it is here that I learned to sail. It was always exciting to head the boat as close to the wind as possible eking speed wherever possible, and having the boat heal over with water spilling over the rails both scared and excited me.

This film is about two things; sailing the most incredible boat race on earth —The Whitbread, and the first all-women crew to ever sail The Whitbread.

Tracy Edwards was always independent and driven, which is what she learned from her parents. When her dad suddenly died when she was 10, her mother, a new abusive stepdad, and she moved from Pangbourne England to Wales.

Rebelling in high school and eventually dropping out, at age 16 she became a stewardess on a yacht. This became her first introduction to sailing. Loving the independent life of being on boats, she began to learn the different positions by crewing on different ships. Wanting to be a part of the Whitbread race, the most dangerous and prestigious in the world, she sought out a crew position on one of the racing boats. However, the only spot any skipper would let her have was the cook.

Taking the job, she learned three things about this male-dominated sport and race, women were thought of as inferior, she hated how she was treated by the male crew, and she wanted to sail Whitbread again, but this time as an integral crew member.

Realizing this wasn’t going to happen on a boat skippered by a man, she brought together a team of women who would crew a ship that she would captain. Because she couldn’t find a sponsor, she mortgaged her home to purchase a used boat and did a second mortgage to fix it up.

She and her team re-built the boat by hand and got it ready to sail. Finding a sponsor to support the expensive logistics of racing in the Whitbread, she called her old friend King Hussein of Jordan. He said yes, and financed the remaining part of this excursion.

The press and all the other male crewed boats in the race predicted that this all-female crew would give up and turnaround before the end of the first leg of the event was completed. However, they finished the leg in third place, and because this wasn’t enough for Tracy and her crew, they pushed on and won the second and third legs of the Whitbread. Their results gained the respect of all sailors and the press, they were a crew to be contended with. It also created a wave of enthusiastic public support. And as they entered each port, crowds of people were cheering on this women’s team.

That was the real power of this team. The team’s ability to stay together, work hard, and succeed as a top-notch sailing team. The scene when the Maiden pulled into Southampton, England after completing the race brought tears to my eyes and the eyes of Edwards, who, despite her own acknowledged failings, let go and allowed herself the deep joy of doing a fantastic job.

The film used current time interviews with the crew as they recalled the power from completing the race as a team. There were also archive interviews of the Tracy and her team. Along with those clips, there was terrific footage of the race, the crew on the boat, and the power of the ocean.

Alex Holmes did an excellent job of splicing together the archival footage and giving the audience enough historical context of both the race and Tracy to make this story compelling. Tracy and team members Jeni Mundy and Mikaela Von Koskull were the main interviewees of current footage, and it was beautiful to get a sense of their view on the accomplishment.

Overall: Witnessing this sublime slice of sailing history helped to solidify the importance of the women’s movement worldwide.