Alternate pop-culture worlds. The Derbs' weekly Netflix rentals this month included two not-bad movies — better than our recent average.
Once Upon a Time In Hollywood, reviewed by our Steve Sailer at TakiMag was the better of the two.
I didn't enjoy it as much as Steve did; but then, I don't know anything like as much as Steve does about 1960s California, Hollywood, and movies. I agree with the numerous reviewers who complained about the movie being too long, and I naturally frowned at the disrespect shown to Bruce Lee.
The movie kept my attention, though. I stayed awake all through, which is by no means — by no means — always the case with me and movies. The acting is at a high professional standard, and the plot line was clever.
That plot line left me reflecting that two of the three 2019 movies I have seen had alternate-history plots; and the history being altered in both cases was pop-culture history. The other of the two was Yesterday, which I reported on in my April Diary. Is there a trend forming?
Alternate-history stories are of course nothing new. As I noted in April, I've been reading them for almost as long as I've been reading. For the most part, though, their worlds are ones in which some large historical event turned out differently. The allies losing WW2 has been the most thoroughly worked-over alternate world: The Sound of his Horn by "Sarban," Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, Robert Harris' Fatherland, … How many have there been?
Other writers have been more adventurous. Robert Silverberg wrote a rather good novel in which the Ottoman Empire took over all of Europe in the 14th century — Shakespeare's plays were written in Turkish — and held it until the 1900s. Kingsley Amis gave us Russian Hide & Seek, in which the USSR has occupied the British Isles. (Inspiring me to a similar but much shorter effort.)
A favorite of mine, although only at short-story length, was Poul Anderson's "Eutopia," which flips through several alternate worlds, although nothing like as many as David Gerrold's novel The Man Who Folded Himself. And then of course there is Harry Turtledove … Yeah, I know, I've read way too much sci-fi.
Placing the historical switch in the realm of pop culture — of pop music in the case of Yesterday, Hollywood in Once Upon a Time — is new to me, although I may just be out of date here. I've been striving to think of similar plot lines.
- The young Fred Astaire successfully resisted his mother's efforts to train him as a dancer. His physical genius instead found an outlet in martial arts, of which he became a world-famous popularizer. At the climax of the movie an elderly but still-agile Fred (b. 1899) takes on Bruce Lee (b. 1940) … OK, maybe I'm just getting back at Tarantino for the Bruce Lee caricature.
- Mario Puzo can't get any movie producers interested in making The Godfather as written, so he starts over, pitching it now as a musical …
No, I'm not really getting anywhere with this, am I? If any readers have suggestions, I'll put them in my next email round-up. If any suggestion ends up as a movie, though, I want a cut of the movie rights.
Mister Jones. I mentioned having seen two not-bad movies this month. Number Two was Mr. Jones, based on Welsh journalist Gareth Jones' 1933 foray into Stalin's USSR.
Jones' mother, around 1900, had lived in Ukraine as tutor to the grandchildren of Welsh industrial entrepreneur John Hughes, who had founded the iron-working city of Donetsk — actually named Hughesovka until the Revolution. That connection inspired Jones, against all the rules, to go take a look at how Ukraine was faring in 1933. It was, of course, in the throes of a dreadful famine.
It's a story worth telling, and the movie's not badly done. Main negatives: if you don't know the outlines of the story in advance, it's not clear who's who (Mrs Derb didn't, so I had to keep pausing the thing to explain); the scenes of Jones trekking through deserted snow-bound villages could have been cut by half; and the producers were a bit heavy-handed with atmosphere, which, like so many things in life, is best attained if not striven too hard for.
There were some good character sketches, though. Peter Sarsgaard was a fine repulsive Walter Duranty, the New York Times reporter who shilled for Stalin and got a Pulitzer Prize for it (never revoked). It was nice to see a screen portrayal of George Orwell, too, although the mustache doesn't look quite right.
We also get a glimpse of Malcolm Muggeridge, the only movie portrayal of the old gadfly that I know of. It's the merest glimpse, the bittiest of bit parts: no speaking lines, just a background figure in a crowded-party scene, the left one of the two people face-on here. (The other I think is Ralph Barnes.)
