By Bob Hill

I was still living on Magnolia Avenue come November, having moved from the rear apartment I had previously shared with Bobbi Jean to a ground-level unit that wrapped around the side of the building. I’d been out of work for three weeks. Thus, I hd filed for unemployment along with a quarter of the island. Over the past two months, the City of Wildwood’s population had plummeted from a robust 220,000 to an anemic 5,200. All along Atlantic Avenue, the overhead traffic signals rose and fell like blinking buoys. The midtown streets ran wide and empty. The ashen tide had lost its groove.

People were always finding ways to take advantage of the offseason unemployment boom in seasonal towns like Wildwood. One guy I knew managed to collect in Wildwood despite living in Northern Ireland that winter; another enlisted the aid of an accomplice so he could collect while slinging drinks in Central Florida. Across Cape May County, there was an entire subculture devoted to working under-the-table jobs while collecting full benefits. Local officials were well aware that to acknowledge such things would be to take accountability. It was much more practical to turn a blind eye.

***

My relationship with both parents remained severely strained throughout this period – an unfortunate, albeit necessary, reality which is reinforced via this excerpt from a letter written to me by my mother, dated November 10, 1993:

Bob, one thing I want to mention to you on the side is how bad Dad feels about the way you treat him and talk to him. You know, Bob, Dad probably gave you more time and effort throughout your lifetime than he did any of the other children. I know you say you were just running track for Dad’s sake, well … I think if you really stop and think about it, all the time and effort he put into it, if you had just stuck with it, I am sure you would have won a scholarship to some college and would be in your Junior year by now, completing a college education for FREE! Then, in another year or so, you would be coming out of college owing nothing on student loans! I realize you didn’t want to run track anymore, but don’t you think at 20 years old it may be time to stop and reflect on all your Dad did for you and how much it hurts him when you are constantly “put out” and make both him and I feel like we are just butting into your life? None of the other kids make us feel this way. They may not always agree with our suggestions, but at least they listen to us and think about what we say without being so put upon as you seem. After your birthday when we were coming home from the shore, Dad said he couldn’t understand what he’d ever done to make you so hostile toward him. He was so worried about the heating situation in your apartment, and when he asked you about it, your answer was always, “Don’t worry about it.” All I am asking, Bob, is that you treat Dad a little nicer – take time to talk with him and be in the same room with him. He cares so much about you and feels like you just don’t want to be bothered with him at all. It is a very hurting situation. You will never know the way you talk sometimes, how it hurts a person. I’m sure you wouldn’t talk to any of your friends that way, or you wouldn’t have them very long.

Track. Cross country. Student loans. Engineering … The whole thing sounded like one big ball of hooey to me, perhaps even more so given the prepackaged way it was being presented. The more I insisted upon straying from that path, the more my father reinforced the notion I was shattering every dream he ever had for me. And eventually, that shit took its toll, grinding me down to the extent I spent several years believing I was a total failure – a wholly vile and worthless individual, completely undeserving of long-term love or compassion.

All of which might explain why it was I sought solace in the arms of a 16-year old girl who was categorically succeeding in all the places I once failed. Meghan was an honors student, a class treasurer. Meghan was stable and well-rounded and well-liked; a 5’10 forward, attractive, hard-working, a loving daughter, a cherished sister. Meghan was already half a dozen admirable things I could never really see myself becoming. And yet, she seemed so horribly wounded – bleeding in so many places she kept hidden from the world.

Meghan was a child of divorce; a damaging affair that had resulted in Meghan’s older sister Lauri going off to live with their mother. Meghan never forgave her mother or her older sister. Meghan’s mother had given birth to Lauri during a previous marriage, but Meghan’s father had legally adopted the girl when she was a child and he had raised her as his own.

Meghan was the primary reason I had decided to remain in Wildwood that off-season. Well, Meghan and the fact that I had no other place to go. I mean, sure, my parents had extended a conditional offer for me to come back home and live with them. But the fact was I no longer had that in me. The thing about Delaware County – and there really is no easy way of getting around this – is that any worthwhile native who ever aspired to make a name for him- or herself needed to leave that place in order to do so. None of which is to say that Wildwood represented a place where stardust dreams were given to orbit. But it is to say that Wildwood represented one very necessary step in the wrong direction for me … and I needed that in the grand summation of things.

The weekend after I turned 20, Meghan and I attended our first high school mixer together. I spent most of that evening in the cafeteria kitchen, helping chaperones prep and pour RC Cola into Dixie cups. I appeared so out of place that at one point the Wildwood Catholic Vice Principal, Mr. Turco, sidled up alongside me and said, “Do you mind if I ask exactly what it is that you’re doing?”

“Oh, yes … I mean, no,” I said, glancing round to find the other chaperones had disappeared. “Not at all, sir. Y’see, I’m, umm, Meghan’s boyfriend?”

I said this while pointing with my thumb toward the dance floor, where a loose configuration of high school juniors bounced and ricocheted like gas molecules in a compound.

“Meghan Mac?” Mr. Turco said, upper-brow furrowed foul with skepticism.

“Umm, yes, sir,” I said. “Meghan Mac. That’s right, sir. It’s just that, well, umm, y’see, she’s all the way out there dancing with her friends right now, and I, umm, well, the ladies who were back here a minute ago, they all said it’d be OK for me to help, and …”

“No need to explain,” Mr. Turco said, as he scraped a plate of leftovers into the garbage. “It’s just we get a lot of kids from Middle Township trying to sneak into these events. When I swung around the corner there and saw you standing all alone, tinkering with the bevearges … well, let’s just say I wasn’t quite sure what it was that you were doing here. That’s all.”

I am the guy who stays too late at the party because there is no place that I belong.

Day 353

(Moving On is a regular feature on IFB)

©Copyright Bob Hill

“Democracy is not a spectator sport. It is a difficult, hard, challenging, full-contact, competitive, participatory endeavor. And this … this is critical – people who get comfortable of body get fat; people who get comfortable of mind and intellect get dull. People who get comfortable in their spirit, they miss what they were created for. They were created to magnify the glory of the world, not simply reduce in size and fail to reflect that spirit. I’ve come to learn in my life to embrace discomfort because it’s a precondition to service. I’ve come to realize to embrace fear because, if you can move through fear, you find out that fear is a precondition to discovery. I’ve learned in my life to embrace frustration because, when you get really frustrated, that is a precondition to incredible breakthroughs.”

Killing Them Softly drives its point home like a jackhammer to the cranium. And yet, it somehow manages to drag in all the places it should soar, lulling the audience into a collective malaise – one that’s interrupted only briefly by tense episodes of gore. Killing is the type of entertainment that’ll stick in your craw like gum to the loins, making a nasty impression for all the wrong reasons. What’s more (or less)? The majority of this film feels like one long, cliched take on free market Capitalism, only this time served up raw, with a jagged set of molars on the side. All of which would be just dandy, mind you, provided there was just a little more worth savoring than the two or three scenes in which Messieurs Pitt and Gandolfini get their game on toe-to-toe.

(Killing Them Softly opens in theaters nationwide today.)    Continue reading →

(Good Pictures/Bad Camera is a regular feature on IFB.)

There is a tendency among documentary filmmakers these days – perhaps the cumulative effect of Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock – to insert themselves into their work, forcing personal narrative onto a subject that has little or nothing to do with them.

Perhaps the most prominent example is Paul Williams: Still Alive. But there have been countless others over the past few years, including: Finding John Hughes, Winnebago Man, Resurrect Dead, and You’ve Been Trumped. The recurring problem with this approach is that the person directing each film isn’t nearly as interesting as the person or subject he or she has been chronicling.

Herein lies the central issue with Beware of Mr. Baker – a fascinating (albeit mired) documentary about the life and times of legendary drummer Ginger Baker. The film wastes a good 15 minutes or so at the outset dawdling about in unnecessary back story. By the time its first real beat kicks in, Beware has already lost the better part of its audience, having forced viewers to endure a rambling prologue, accompanied by an absolutely frivolous intro courtesy of the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten.

It’s baffling, quite frankly. And it certainly isn’t for want of material.

Beware features extensive on-screen interviews with a who’s who of kick-ass drummers, including (but not limited to): Charlie Watts, Lars Ulrich, Nick Mason, Stewart Copeland, Mickey Hart, Chad Smith … in addition to Baker’s one-time band mates Jack Bruce, Eric Clapton, and Steve Winwood. Combine that with the fact you’ve got full access to the modern-day Baker, as well as five decades worth of archival footage, and the question one inevitably keeps coming back to is, “Why on earth not just play the goddamned story as it lays?”

Unfortunately, that’s one of several questions Jay Bulger’s documentary completely fails to address.

(Beware of Mr. Baker opens for a two-week engagement at the Film Forum in New York City this Wedesday, with possible plans for a limited rollout to follow.)  Continue reading →

“To be an artist, you have to nurture the things that most people discard. You have to keep them alive in order to tap them. It’s been important to me my whole life not to let go of any of the things that most people would throw in the ashcan. I have to be in touch with my fragility, with the man in me, and the woman in me, the child in me, the grandfather in me … all of these things have to be kept alive. I think I photograph what I’m afraid of … things I couldn’t deal with without the camera – my father’s death, madness, when I was young, women I didn’t understand. It gave me a sort of control over those situations that was legitimate because good work was being done. And by photographing what I was afraid of, or what I was interested in, I explored and learned and laid the ghost. It got out of my system and onto the page.”

Alfred Hitchcock was a brilliant, unpredictable man, cold-brimming with signature style and nuance, much like any number of his films. Hitchcock was also a perfectionist, obsessed with endless layers of tedium. It is this latter element of the Hitchcock persona that has proven so enduring over the years. All of which might explain why the director’s work makes so much more sense when presented in the form of a documentary, or a textbook, or even a traveling exhibit, than it does as a major motion picture.

To that end, Sacha Gervasi’s Hitchcock feels wanton hollow on the inside. The film is entertaining, to a degree. And Helen Mirren certainly does do Alma Reville justice. But otherwise, there’s very little worth digging one’s claws into here, above and beyond what amounts to a fairly decent caricature by Anthony Hopkins.

Caricature, as we all know, is the bane of any well-meaning actor.

And it stands to reason that the real Alfred Hitchcock, if not such a slow-moving, corpulent fellow these days, might very well see fit to roll spinning in his grave, should he learn that his genius and legacy had been toyed with in this manner.

(Hitchcock arrives in limited release today with a national rollout to follow.)

Continue reading →

(Good Pictures/Bad Camera is a regular feature on IFB.)