I Am Somebody (1970)

In Charleston SC in the 1960s (and doubtless elsewhere across the South) hundreds of black nurses and hospital workers were paid less than their white co-workers — less even than the legal minimum wage. In 1969 they organized a union and went on strike.

This is a union-made documentary about the strike, and it’s only half an hour, which you’ll wish was longer, but it’s one of those rare moments in history where the good guys won. Don’t miss it.

The film shows a long line of cops wielding what look like machine guns or assault rifles, as they yell orders at middle-age black women carrying picket signs. The only violence is toward the strikers, never by the strikers, but an edict bans night marches, so strikers and supporters gather to pray, instead of marching. For this, they’re beaten and arrested.

The (all-white, all-male, of course) politicians and hospital management are as awful as human often are, lying about the workers and saying the strike has nothing to do with civil rights.

Guys like that are in charge in 2025, and we need a response like what’s shown in this film.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

I, An Actress (1977)

George Kuchar was a maker of low-budget campy or porny movies in San Francisco, with enough chutzpah and talent that he made himself into a local celebrity and well-regarded arteest. He was basically a straight John Waters.

This is a Kuchar short, “introducing Barbara Lapsley” in the title role as an actress who’s given a very bad script, then worse direction by Kuchar, who soon bellows onto the screen himself, showing and telling her how to deliver her lines.

Ms Lapsley is in on the joke, and both she and Kuchar have a splendid time. My time wasn’t quite so splendid, but it’s only eight minutes and it’s a laugh. It remains the only item on Ms Lapsley’s curriculum vitae.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

I Bury the Living (1958)

Richard Boone plays Kraft, the new manager of the town cemetery, where pre-paying for your plot is not a long-term investment. On the wall in Kraft’s office, there’s a framed map of the cemetery, with white pins for pre-purchased burial plots and black pins for ‘occupied’ plots. Kraft soon notices, however, that when he swaps a black pin for any white pin on the map, that pre-paid client is dead by the next morning.

This is silly, and never scary for a moment, but as he’s figuring out the curse of the pins, most of what Grant does is what you’d do too, if you were faced with such a recurring coincidence. He’s smartly skeptical, but less and less willing to mess with the pins on the map.

The film has a quietly inventive score, with writing and a visual style that reminded me of the marvelous 1960s British TV show The Avengers, complete with an all-too tidy ending.

My awareness of the actor Boone is mostly from movies of the 1970s, when he was old and his face looked like vandalized granite. He would’ve been 40 when this was made, and already his face looks like a century-old sidewalk.

Herbert Anderson has a supporting role, and I didn’t know the name but knew his face instantly. He played Dennis the Menace‘s father on the 1959-63 TV show, which I caught in reruns when I was a mild menace myself.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

I, Daniel Blake (2016)

Dan Blake is a gray, nearly bald man who’s been a carpenter and homebuilder all his life, but he’s had a heart attack and can’t work, by doctor’s orders. The story is set in England, a civilized nation with a safety net, so he’ll be OK, right?

Emphatically, no. England’s safety net is very much like America’s unemployment and Medicaid and the like, crammed with obstacles and protocols designed to dehumanize and disqualify the people who need help the most, and staffed with people who’ve long since run out of damns to give.

Blake deals with barbed-wire red tape, long waits for appointments, longer waits for appeals, spring-loaded rules that aren’t explained until he’s told he’s broken them, and that’s not a third of it. The film hits harder than a year of 60 Minutes, and the closing credits thank anonymous workers at the government agencies depicted, who provided anecdotes and inside info about the system’s inner tickings.

Despite the grimness of a typed description, I, Daniel Blake is surprisingly not relentlessly depressing. The lead actor, Dave Johns, gives Blake a likably bemused impatience that approaches comedy, when it’s not approaching tragedy.

Ken Loach made the movie, which means it’s about people who aren’t rich and most likely won’t find happy resolutions to their problems — people like you, and everyone you know.

Like all Loach’s films, this one’s very UK and jammed with cockney accents that gargle the English language. Subtitles were not available, so I missed perhaps 10-20% of the dialogue, but it barely matters. What’s left is 100% human, resilient, infuriating, realistic, and brilliant.

Verdict: BIG YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes (2008)

Jon Ronson, who wrote The Men Who Stare at Goats (the book, not the movie) and co-wrote Bong Joon Ho’s Okja, delivers this most compelling remembrance of his almost-interactions with filmmaker Stanley Kubrick.

They two men never met or even spoke, but in the mid-1990s Kubrick’s assistant phoned Ronson, saying his boss wanted a copy of a radio documentary Ronson had made. Then Kubrick died, but a few years later that same assistant — Tony Frewin — called again. Frewin had worked for Kubrick for decades, stayed on after Kubrick’s death to manage the estate, and invited Ronson to visit.

What Ronson found was a mansion full of boxes. Kubrick, who’d grown more reclusive and obsessive in his latter years, kept everything, it seems, related to all his films after 2001: A Space Odyssey — A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut.

Eventually Ronson was given permission to open the boxes, which had been sealed for decades. Going through them, the film highlights some of what’s inside, and becomes sort of a search for Kubrick’s ‘rosebud’.

Here’s a photographer, hired to take tens of thousands of photos scouting possible shooting locations for a specific scene in Eyes Wide Shut, and then the revelation that the scene in question was eventually shot on a set instead. Here’s a memo asking a staffer to ring up the British weather service, to find the barometric pressure of an afternoon on a specific date a week earlier, and how it compares to the average barometric pressures in the region. Nobody knows why. Kubrick never said.

On and on, but it’s fascinating. It’s all evidence of Kubrick’s genius and nuttiness, and mostly his attention to detail.

Living among all the boxes, Kubrick became frustrated at how difficult it sometimes was to remove the lids. Of course, he designed a better box, with tops that fit snugly but not so snugly that lifting a lid is difficult.

The film doesn’t solve the riddle of Stanley Kubrick, but people’s lives are not really riddles to unravel. Dude wanted his privacy, didn’t write a damned autobiography, never appeared on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. He wanted his movies to speak for themselves, and they do, but anyone who admires the man’s work will enjoy the heck out of opening his boxes.

Verdict: BIG YES.

5/12/2025

Logo illustration by Jeff Meyer. No talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff. 

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