Adam Membrey

Giants From Another Land: ‘The Other Dream Team’

July 5, 2015 by Adam Membrey

Anyone who has used Netflix knows this inherent dilemma: having so many choices and yet not knowing what to pick. But another side effect of having such a deluge of choices is that your brain never quite buys competely in to your choice. Unless it’s 100% what you wanted to be watching – which, frankly, only happens when you’re binge-watching your new favorite show and got to see the next episode – the realization that you can simply stop at any time and make a different choice is always there, just standing by the door, ready for your signal to open it and walk right back outside.

All of this to say that I wanted so badly to bail on The Other Dream Team. We made the choice to watch it based on my cousin’s recommendation, who tried to let us know just how good it is without overselling it. But the opening scenes of the film are almost entirely subtitled. I’m used to watching movies with subtitles, but hearing some of the dialogue that matches the words makes it easier to just flow with it. When they’re talking in a different language and I still have to read in English? It feels more like homework. And no one wants to do homework on a Saturday night.

But sometimes there’s a reward for sticking with things. And, boy, does this movie reward you.

The true story, about Lithunaian basketball – their rise, their struggles, their future NBA stars – is as fascinating as it is heartbreaking. Lithuania had the true misfortune of being stuck between two super powers in Russia and Germany during World War II. This resulted in many fleeing the country, as well as stranding many who were unable to escape. It’s a dark history to start a story with, but it informs the joy and ownership the country takes with basketball. It is their true sport, they remind us, and it is the thing that propels them through the darkness.

Even more interesting is learning about their superstar players who nearly missed their chance to dominate in the NBA. I was familiar with Arvydas Sabonis, mainly because I never understood how someone who looks so slow and unwieldy could be so damn good. He frustrated me in every playoffs I saw as a kid, leaving me uneasy whenever he ran into my Malone-and-Stockton-led Utah Jazz, like a slow-moving buzzsaw you couldn’t retreat from. Even more amazing? Sabonis, due to the draconian rules the USSR held over all their future NBA players, didn’t get to play in the NBA until he was 32 years old. So we missed his prime. And, as you’ll see in this film, we missed something even more incredible.

Even more incredible to me is how Sabonis wasn’t even the best Lithuanian player at the time. That honor belonged to Šarūnas Marčiulionis, who, like Sabonis, joined the NBA late in his career. We didn’t get a chance to see his frightful prime, of which the film gives us short glimpses of.

You will learn some incredible things about Lithuania in this film, such as how you had to pay the government for your new car and wait 10 years for it to arrive. The players describing their first trip to America – where they sat amazed at all the food we could eat, and even tried to make a couple bucks by selling our goods in their home country – will give you some nice perspective.

Perhaps the most incredible part of this whole story is just how a band such as the Grateful Dead became involved. Even on your best Mad Lib days, you would never associate a country like Lithuania with a jam band like The Dead. But understanding how the two became intertwined is one of those great discoveries you make as you don’t allow a heavily-subtitled film to deter you. The rewards are great. Give it a chance.

This movie is no longer streaming on Netflix, but can be rented through Amazon Prime for 99 cents. Here’s the link.

Book Review: ‘The Art of Racing in the Rain’ by Garth Stein

July 5, 2015 by Adam Membrey

I will always appreciate this book for it’s opening chapter. I gave it a shot one night, curious if the large print copy I had found at the local Goodwill would help me read faster. I wanted to start and finish a book at some point, I thought, and why not this?

When I read this quote, it struck me for obvious reasons: not just because I love animals (well, most of them) but because I work with students that often have to use some form of gesture to communicate what they don’t have the vocabulary for. I think we’ve come in contact with someone who feels this way:

“Gestures are all that I have; sometimes they must be grand in nature. And while I occasionally step over the line and into the world of the melodramatic, it is what I must do in order to communicate clearly and effectively. In order to make my point understood without question. I have no words I can rely on because, much to my dismay, my tongue was designed long and flat and loose, and therefore, a horribly ineffective tool for pushing food around my mouth while chewing, and an even less effective tool for making clever and complicated polysllabic sounds that can be linked together to form sentences.” (1)

I finished that first chapter full of awe and wonder. The story, told from the perspective of the dog at the center, managed to escape that cutesy twee feeling you get from narrative overreaches. I could hear this dog’s voice – and it was far more interesting than any humans’ I had heard in a while. So I told everyone about this book – on the first chapter alone. I knew I was probably overselling it, but I didn’t care. That first chapter. Damn.

But the story continues beautifully until about halfway through the book – that’s where the elegant tone Stein has so well-crafted is occasionally threatened by some rather cartoonish characters. He etches in the details of the owner, his wife, and his daughter through the particular lens of this incredibly philosophical dog. They are spare, but they leave you room to imagine. When he introduces the grandparents and some minor characters who take up the second part of the story, however, the balance is threatened. They feel like characters from a different, far-less subtle story. They do, however, provide an obstacle that the characters we side with must overcome. If there’s anything that works well about the dramatic characterization, it’s that our immediate hatred towards them makes us pull that much more for the characters we care about.

I also want to give credit to Stein for descriptions of what it’s like to race in the rain. Part of what gives the dog’s owner, a race car driver, an advantage over other drivers is his ability to drive well in the rain, something that many drivers tend to struggle with. The descriptions of racing here are so gracefully detailed, without become too much, that you feel you’re in the car yourself. It’s a great way to take something that could easily be an overwrought metaphor, and commit to it with detail and sincerity. It works beautifully.

In the end, this book isn’t nearly as sappy as I expected. I finished it – which felt like an accomplishment in itself. But your enjoyment with this book will depend on what you demand of your stories. If you want a simple, (melo)dramatic story with some great grace notes thrown in and told from the perspective of a dog, then this is a book for you.

We Are Human: 2014’s ‘Dear White People’

July 5, 2015 by Adam Membrey

When we first meet Sam White (Tessa Thompson), she’s speaking on her college radio show, Dear White People. She’s got opinions about the racial culture of her Ivy League college, and the serve both as a manifesto for the black students who want to be heard and a reminder to everyone else – who think seeing Good Hair means they know everything – that they know nothing.

As we meet the characters that populate this fictional college, it feels as if the radio show never stopped. It continues throughout, with each character’s dialogue feeling like it’s own radio channel. Opinions are given and expressed, and it becomes difficult to understand where the speech ends and the character begins.

But that’s the point. Everyone at this school is a walking facade, trying their best to establish their place in the world by espousing the cultural conversation they think they should push. Sam wants everyone to know the black students won’t be pushed around; the main white character, Kurt Fletcher (Kyle Gallner), wants his little college magazine to mean something. They’re all chasing something, even if they’re not sure exactly what it is. And so it goes – characters getting angry and struggling with the intangible.

The movie continues to build towards an all-out culture war on campus until it hits an almost literal crossroad: just before Sam is about to join a protest that her followers have been clamoring for, a protest she’s not even sure is the right thing to do, she gets a phone call that stops everything. For the first time in the film, she seems human. She has feelings. She has family she cares about. And she retreats. It’s a necessary reprieve from the escalating atmosphere, a way to show us that deep down, these are just kids struggling to find and fight for their place in the world.

The film’s climatic moments, at an incredibly racist college campus party that’s unfortunately ripped from the real world headlines, show just how far we haven’t come. The culture is still bruised and tattered. Misunderstandings are as ever-present as before. The school’s president and vice-president show they’re not as interested in fixing it as they are in getting some cash and attention off it.

But writer/director Justin Simien, understanding that underneath it all we’re built with the same needs and wants, pulls back the focus at the end to show us what motivates Sam. It’s not about the radio show. It’s not about the uprising. It’s about having a place in which you can comfortably hold the hand of someone who looks different from you and no one will care. Of course, the student body walking by notices Sam’s final gesture. It shows how far we haven’t come and still have to go. But Dear White People is an impassioned, entertaining reminder that we’re made far more of the same things than we’re not.

Fare Thee Well: ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’

July 5, 2015 by Adam Membrey

There’s a moment where I thought the film lost me. Driving on a long, empty road, with one-word-mumbling beat poet Johnny Five (Garret Hedlund) steering beside him and jazz musician Roland Turner (John Goodman) in the back seat punctuating his tedious non sequiturs with short naps, our main character Llewyn struggles in and out of his sleep, unsure of just how long this damn trip will be. Each time the film cut to the road, it seemed to grow longer. It felt like no end was in sight, even if we knew the final destination.

No way the Coen Brothers would lose their pacing like this, I thought. Something is up. This must be a magic trick of sorts.

It’s not until we see Llewyn, playing a rather quietly intense version of “The Death of Queen Jane”, only to be told “I don’t see much money in this”, that we realize what they’re after. They’re allowing us to feel the struggle; the frustration of losing the cat people have trusted you with; the constant need for a couch or money or something to keep you going when your dream alone isn’t enough to sustain you. By the end of the film, Davis, growing weary, is ready to give up. And just as he leaves the nightclub, Bob Dylan is about to play. Folk music is about to have some money to it. He just had no way of knowing.

It’s often said about any Coen Brothers movie that even their minor characters suggest an inner life; they arrive on the scene so fully-formed that even when they don’t say a word, they surely make an impression. This film is no different. From Carey Mulligan’s sweet-voiced but quietly agitated Jean to Justin Timberlake’s happily aloof Jim to the aforementioned John Goodman’s Roland and Hedlund’s Johnny Five – all these characters pop on the screen and keep you smiling, even when the story isn’t exactly a bright spot of sunshine.

This film would make an interesting double feature with their 2009 gem A Serious Man: both films feature men who suffer throughout the film and are aghast at the forces that seem to conspire against them. The difference, however, is that A Serious Man’s Larry Gopnik is a good man while Davis is more than kind of an asshole. Gopnik does his best, providing for his family, being kind to others – even listening to angry parents who want their underachieving teenage students to be given a totally undeserved higher grade. He takes it all in, all these maladies he by no means deserves, and does his best to find answers. Davis, on the other hand, is shown time and time again to be oblivious to the concerns of others. He regularly finds new ways to ask for a couch to sleep on, only showing a slight twinge of guilt. He talks down to the people who try to help him, assuring them they just don’t get what this music is and why it’s important.

In the film, Davis runs into a military boy, Troy Nelson, who gets a music contract. He’s perfectly harmless military man. There’s no edge to him. He’s just a good, wholesome man who wants to play good music for others, another service for the people to partake in after his tour of duty. Davis has no patience for him. It’s people like him, he decides, that take folk away from what it can be. But in A Serious Man, Larry Gopnik doesn’t go blaming people. He goes to three different rabbis looking or answers, and when they ultimately prove unsatisfactory responses, he still does not blame anyone. This is the life he’s been given, he decides, and there’s not much more he can do about it.

So is this a film that celebrates sucking it up and making the best of everything? Of not being an asshole to others because your time may be around the corner? As always, the Coen Brothers don’t explain their films. They stitch these beautiful yarns together and then leave them on the floor, ready for viewing but not for sale. They keep the secrets inside, like the dust that gathers underneath.

A Walk Inside the Hive: Neil Berkeley’s ‘Harmontown’

July 5, 2015 by Adam Membrey

Dan Harmon is the reason I watched Community. His show, which I caught in fits and starts through its first season, didn’t grab at me at first. I left it alone until the A.V. Club hosted an epic Season Walkthrough in which Harmon talked about each and every episode they had made. It wasn’t the first time A.V. Club did a walkthrough and it certainly wasn’t the last; but something about the way Harmon talked about his own show and its various machinations grabbed me. His way of giving every character their own Joseph Campbell journey; his incredible ability to mix something really smart, something really crass, and something really heartfelt into an eye-popper of a few sentences.

But the thing that made Community such a great show is also the thing that almost completely derailed it: Harmon himself. He openly admits his faults, his violent bursts of anger and ability to say really hurtful things with little initial remorse. But they were fine at first – all powered by the same passion that made his show so special – until they weren’t fine anymore. Studio heads finally had enough of him. By the end of Community‘s third season, he was fired.

This is where Harmontown begins it’s journey. It’s not exactly a new thing for a fired creator to hit the road and pass through cities of adoring fans – Conan O’Brien had done it with Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop only a few years earlier – but that’s where the comparisons end. Every show is something different; there’s no set list; there’s no overall strategy. The only thing that’s consistent is that each Harmontown podcast involves the main players – Harmon himself, actor/M.C. Jeff B. Davis, and other guests – playing a live game of Dungeons and Dragons with the irreplaceable Dungeon Master himself, Spencer Crittenden. Each podcast feels like some kind of open therapy, like the room is an open wound of which may be picked on, soothed, or amateurishly stitched up.

But for as entertaining as this documentary is, it can’t seem to decide what to focus on. The result is a lot of interesting elements getting their time in the sun, but not nearly enough to give it the impact it desires. Seeing Dungeon Master Spencer simply volunteer himself at a local podcast and then find himself on a national tour, gaining fame for just how incredible a Dungeon Master he is – it’s a rather thrilling little story that gives Harmontown a nice punch of heart and gravitas. If nothing else, it’s a great highlight to see someone plucked from obscurity show such shout-worthy skill that even a guest celebrity like Jason Sudeikis stands there on stage, completely blown away.

Throughout the first half of Harmontown, Berkeley throws in interview snippets with some of the big time people Harmon had worked with coming up through the ranks – Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Sarah Silverman (who fired him from her own show) – all of which gives us a nice little glimpse into not just Harmon but what it’s like to actually work with him. I found it especially fascinating to hear what writer/director Rob Schrab – who was just recently tapped to direct The Lego Movie Sequel – had to say about working with his buddy Harmon, and how him staying sane while Harmon’s more difficult tendencies got in the way led to them having a break from each other.

There’s a lot to love in Harmontown – the candor, the random humor, the interviews with people you know and love. And while it’s not as well-organized as you would hope it to be, it does give you a pretty realistic look at what life with Harmon is like. It gives you a sense of what pushes him, as well as what keeps him from being as successful as he could and should be. He’s a puzzle that Hollywood has yet to really figure out. Thank goodness for the weird ones.

NOTE: Dan Harmon was rehired after Community‘s off-balance 4th season. It’s 5th, Harmon-led season debuted on NBC last year and it’s 6th season is currently streaming on Yahoo Screen.