Gerald DiPego's Blog, page 3

So, where you from?

So, where you from? Immigration seen through two families who came here and joined into one family and brought me into the world so I could write this brief story of one American man’s heritage, because we’re either Native Americans or we came here from somewhere else and we’re still coming, with the same hope and promise.

So, where you from?

My father was born on a cattle ranch in Argentina. His father had come from Italy and found work there and soon fell in love with one of the servant girls who worked in the great house. She had also emigrated from Italy. They lived in barracks on the large rancho, then married and had their first child, my father.

When my father was ten, he and his parents moved back to Italy, to Camigliano in Tuscany, and took over a grocery store that was owned by the extended family: ‘DiPego Alimentary’. After nine years in Italy my father finished high school and, being the oldest, he was the one to travel to America to find work and help some of his siblings join him there.

He was 19 and spoke almost no English when he boarded the ship in Genoa. He travelled alone with only the name and address of a cousin he’d never met who lived in Cicero, Illinois. He made his way there on the train. The cousin took him in and found him a job in a factory.

My mother’s parents also came to America from Italy. Aboard that ship my grandmother was pregnant with her first child, and the child was born during the passage. There was no doctor in steerage. A Spanish woman helped her give birth, and my aunt was born and named Inez, because that was the name of the woman from Spain.

Once settled in Chicago these grandparents had three more children, one of them my mother, named Alfonsina. They lived in an Italian neighborhood on the South side, and my mother spoke no English until she went to school. She never forgot the shame she felt as the kids made fun of her as the girl who couldn’t speak the language, and then as the girl who spoke ‘broken English’, and then, by the fourth grade, she was fluent, but still carried the pain, and later she rejected that beautiful name Alfonsina and called herself Margaret, which became Peggy, an American name.

My father met my mother’s uncle, and they opened a candy store. Because they sold pineapple candy, the two men were given the nicknames, Little Pineapple (my father) and Big Pineapple (my great uncle who was overweight). My father worked hard and sometimes relaxed by shooting pool, sometimes with Al Capone’s brother, but our family bloodlines go back to northern Italy, not southern, and my relatives, like most Italian-Americans, stood apart from all mob business.

Through his partner (my mother’s uncle) my father met my mother, joining the two families by their marriage. My father and mother lived in an apartment with my mother’s parents. My dad was the wage earner, then half owner of a bar. My mother’s mother did not speak English, but I remember her as a warm, loving presence. My mother asked of my dad that he speak English in the home, and so he did. They spoke Italian to my grandparents and to each other when saying what they didn’t want their children to hear. I regret not growing up bilingual, but I understand my mother’s wishes. Though she seemed to turn away from the past and her “old country,” she certainly honored that heritage with her cooking.

My brother Paul was born, then me, and in 1942 my father was drafted into WWII, even though he was 35 then. So many men were needed. He opted for the Navy and was shipped to California, driving officers around the base at Port Hueneme. On leave in Hollywood he was hit by a car and nearly killed. My mother, who had seldom left the neighborhood, had to get on a train and travel across the country to the Long Beach Naval Hospital to be at his side. It was weeks before he knew where he was, and weeks more mending. In time he was discharged and back to running his bar again, but our neighborhood had grown dangerous. So, when I was nine my father sold his interest in the bar and moved us northeast to the country, to small and peaceful Round Lake, Illinois. My mother’s parents stayed in the city, moving in with my aunt, Inez.

Like his father in Italy, my dad now owned a grocery store where my brother and I worked after school and on weekends: Tip Top Food Mart. It was as if a circle had been completed. By the time I traveled to Italy, my grandparents there had died, but I was welcomed with great affection by all my aunts and cousins. I traveled there several times, once coinciding with a trip my parents had taken to see the family, just outside of the town of Lucca. I watched my parents during that visit, saw my father’s joy, and saw my mother embracing her heritage again, another circle completed.

We’re all from somewhere, and we all have a story, whether we are Native Americans or those who came to live here only last week or 400 years ago, Americans every one, entitled to the promise of this country.

COMING SOON!

THE SCREENERS - 6

GOLDEN GLOBE! INDEPENDENT FILM AWARD! SCREEN ACTOR’S GUILD AWARD! CRITIC’S CHOICE AWARD! NEW YORK FILM CRITICS CIRCLE! The trumpets are still blowing for the films that are considered contenders as the Acedemy makes its first vote. As a writer I voted for five best picture awards, five original screenplay awards and five adapted screenplay awards, and it wasn’t easy. There were six to eight films in each category that were vying in my brain.

Out of each member voting within his or her branch the choices are tallied and the nominations made. At the second vote, after the nominations, each Academy member will vote again, this time for the full range of all the branches that make up the world of film.

Our votes are secret, but in these blogs I have let you know some of the films that hit hard or delighted and why, and a few that missed the mark, and in my last-minute viewing before the vote, there were some that wowed me right at the finish line for the 2018 releases, like Roma that offered me acting, directing and cinematography I had never quite seen before. Black and white was the right choice, but it’s not just any black and white. It’s Cuaron’s black and white that somehow shines and creates its own reality. It’s another film, like Capernaum, that makes you feel you are not watching a movie at all, but moving along looking at life where ‘acting’ disappears into being and nothing is false and nothing is predictable.

If you’re liberal minded, On the Basis of Sex will have you cheering from the heart, not only for the movie, but for RBG.

And don’t let small films escape you — like What They Had with Hillary Swank, Michael Shannon, Robert Forster and a luminous Blythe Danner, and At Eternity’s Gate, with Willem Dafoe’s Vincent Van Gogh so heartfelt and riveting, plus the stunning German film Never Look Away, and Kenneth Branagh’s deep and moving All is True, and one more, the sweet, smart and endearing film, Puzzle.

Enjoy.

(While you’re here take a look at A Family of Writers and see what we’re up to. Thank you.)

THE SCREENERS ARE HERE – 5

I think I’ve been overusing the word ‘amazing,’ so I’m all out of descriptors for two of the foreign film screeners I’ve seen recently: Never Look Away, from Germany and Capernaum from Lebanon. Now, I have many more films to watch before I can be a fair voter, but I can tell you how much these films impressed me.

Never Look Away is so rich in its characters and its amazing plotting (I know, I said it again) that you CAN’T look away. It’s a masterwork written and directed by F. H. Von Donnersmark, who also wrote and directed one of my all time favorite films: The Lives of Others. (“All time favorites” takes on some extra weight when you realize that I’m 77 and have been watching movies since I was five when my mom would walk my brother and me to the neighborhood movie house on the south side of Chicago in the 1940s. We’d go there twice a week, whenever the movie changed. It was always during the day, and not just a way for her to have a break and get out of the apartment. It was her time to dream, and she loved the movies and where they took her.)

Never Look Away moves from Nazi Germany all the way up through the sixties, but you never lose the connection between past and present: a little girl who grows to a young woman, a little boy who grows up to meet this girl, each of these characters molded by events that have moved through their lives like magnets, pulling them closer and….

I wouldn’t dare spoil a moment of this with more description. It is so deep and so artfully done.

Capernaum is a film that moves off the screen and reaches out to hold you in its grip and never lets go, and it leaves you changed. It feels as if you’ve been transported to Lebanon, to the areas of poverty and chaos (Capernaum is Lebanese for ‘chaos’) and you’re there, watching as all unfolds in front of you, every moment feeling undeniably real. How did the director (and co-writer) Nadine Labaki, find these actors? The boy of twelve (twelve!) who has not one false second on the screen — he lets you discover the awful parenting and the street life that is damaging and darkening his existence, and he’s aware, aware of all it, smart and deep enough to understand what’s happening to him and still, amid his depression and sometimes wild anger, able to love.

Labaki has said that each of the actors were chosen because sometime in their life they had lived up close with these conditions and these people, the undocumented, always hiding from authorities, the parents whose children are looked on as ways to make money, the users, always ready with a lie, a trap.

The passage of this boy, Zain, is our focus, and his life. It is a map through a kind of hell that exits in many bombed and broken places, for too many people, and yet there is law within the chaos, and the boy decides he will use the law, he will sue his parents – for giving him life, sue them so they will stop having more children to throw away.

I can’t help it. This is an AMAZING film.

(While you’re here take a look at A Family of Writers and see what we’re up to. Thank you.)

THE SCREENERS ARE COMING – 4

I can’t say what my FAVORITE is, but THE FAVOURITE is making a run at best picture, and yes, the pace is great, acting fine, sets amazing, but it does set me up for a dark comedy and then sets me adrift in only the dark and does away with the comedy. This does not ruin the film, and you may be fine with the change of tone, or not. You cannot, though, easily forget the deft turns of plot, the talent of the three women, and especially the monumental performance of Olivia Colman. That’s a triumph.

VICE has the same high level pace and wit, with some bold and clever chance-taking in storytelling. It’s darkly funny, but behind the smile you can’t help but be so wrenched, so angry and so very, very sorry at the damage that was done to this country by Cheney and his group of manipulators -- making a war because they needed one to shift the political climate and serve their purposes, men who are fiddling and congratulating each other as the world burns and hundreds of thousands of people are dying so that they can win their power games. I take exception to the ending but won’t say a spoiling word about it.

Steve Carell, playing Donald Rumsfeld, is -- what’s the right word? Have we noticed that Steve can play ANYTHING, any type, any part of the human spectrum? Will he go all the way and be another Alec Guinness or Daniel Day Lewis? If he wants that there may be no stopping him. Go Steve.

I don’t want to lose sight of GREEN BOOK or PRIVATE LIFE or the pain and truth that shows through A STAR IS BORN. And then there’s IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK with its slowww moving scenes that can afford to be slow because they are so damn deep, and there is so much emotion on the screen whether the actors are speaking or not. I felt I truly lived through that movie, and carried its weight with me. Choosing is not easy this year, but it’ll really get tight after the nominations in January. And there is so much more to see!

THE SCREENERS ARE COMING - 3

I won’t decide who to vote for until I’ve seen all the films, but I have just seen a performance that, to all of us, is a rare gift, and that’s Saoirse Ronan as Mary Queen of Scots. In every part of every scene, she is so true, so deep inside the role that the line blurs between actor and character and then disappears. Ronan hands us a treasure that goes beyond this ‘race’ and this year, and is there for us forever.

Mary and her cousin, Queen Elizabeth the First of England, are each surrounded by male ‘advisors,’ a whole troop of them, pushing and pulling the queens toward the agenda these men have chosen. The queens are also aware of enemies, some hidden and some boldly in their faces. Treachery is always looming in those cold, dark castle corners.

The film is beautifully photographed, and we are held surely in the period. I wish the take on Elizabeth could have contained more of her strengths and less of her weaknesses, but history is open to choices. She is played well by Margot Robbie, but, in a few scenes, partly due to make-up, comes close to caricature.

Could there be a film more different from Mary Queen of Scots than The Sisters Brothers? It’s a frontier story of gold rush days, following two hired gunmen bent on killing two educated men who are interested in the gold that‘s waiting in the streams. I won’t say what happens when they all meet, but I will say that this is a truly engaging film with characters of depth, smart writing, excellent performances and you WILL be surprised -- many times. The actors are amazing, all four: John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal and Riz Ahmed. You do need to be okay with screen violence, with gunfights, but in trade you get more value than you expect.

(While you’re on this site, please click on A Family of Writers and see what we’re up to. Thanks.)

The Screeners Are Coming – 2

More films are coming in my mail, and the trade magazines are getting heavier with all those bucks shoveled into the ‘race’. But there are, in the center of all this, some people putting their hearts and talents into films they hope will touch us – and not just win.

The Front Runner is large in size and very well made, packed with the energy of a race toward the presidency, with mobs of volunteers and reporters and a cast of fine actors that starts with Hugh Jackman, Vera Farmiga and J. K. Simmons and just keeps doling out exciting performances throughout the long list of players, with surprises like Alfred Molina and Kevin Pollak showing up to strengthen the authenticity of it all.

Through the speeches and strategies and the scandal and heartbreak, I kept hoping to be taken more deeply inside Gary Hart, but he’s not that kind of man. He buries his private life and lets no one in, and the filmmakers went with that, but in leaving me outside, they denied me the deepest feelings, left me out of the center of the struggle. All right, that’s their choice, and I applaud the talent, but I don’t carry the film with me after it ends.

Stan and Ollie is a much smaller film, exploring the last bits of an amazing comedy career and an amazing friendship. Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly get Stan and Ollie so very right. They truly bring them back to us, and then allow us to step inside where we have never been, where the most famous comedy team in the world (in 1937) become older and human and flawed and still loving.

I think the people who will love this film the most are the ones who, at some time in their lives, loved Laurel and Hardy, and that was me between the ages of about eleven to fifteen when all of their shorts and movies were played heavily on TV. They had me on the floor, laughing to tears. Sure, I also laughed at Abbot and Costello and Martin and Lewis, but I didn’t love them. And I don’t care to watch those other teams today, but I’ll jump into a Laurel and Hardy routine any time. Right now.

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The Screeners Are Coming

As the Academy screeners pile in, I’m going to record some opinions for whatever they’re worth. Watched Destroyer last night, and there’s a lot that’s strong and smart about this film, but I wish they had trusted Nicole Kidman’s acting instead of making her look so BAD for shock effect. They lose credibility because the living-dead woman they created cannot be believed as a detective lieutenant of police. Yes, make her look more hard-ridden than ever, but let her act the rest. She can do that. Also, come to find out, the time-frame we thought we were in is altered near the end –- so they get a zinger, a surprise, but I felt tricked, as if they had hidden a puzzle piece. The film is well shot, energy is great, acting fine throughout, dialogue smart and, yes, Kidman shows us a character that hasn’t yet been on her resume, but excesses and the plot trick take away.

Recommended so far: Disobedience, Private Life, Green Book, What They Had, and Boy Erased.

Have you noticed how this year of films is so, so dark? You Were Never Really There and Hereditary and Vox Lux and First Reformed will push you deep into the pit, deeper than necessary to tell a hard story. I think this is because we’re living through a dark time -– just a theory.

More to come.

Thanks,

Jerry

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Six Hours In the ER

I went to my doc for my yearly physical with one troubling symptom: nasal drip. Five weeks of some kind of allergy – explosive sneezing and a box of Kleenex a day.

The standard EKG heart test startled her – there was a dip where there should have been a rising. I had zero symptoms for any kind of heart trouble, but it troubled her and she sent me one building over to the Santa Ynez Cottage Hospital Emergency Room. There they gave me another EKG with a similar finding and also a blood test that was inconclusive. I was told to report to the Santa Barbara hospital in the morning for a stress test and another EKG.

Went to the SB ER and waited. Checked in with several units including nuclear medicine and waited and waited, had a new test. The test was inconclusive. They needed me to wait two more hours and take more pictures of my heart at rest. By this time (it was Friday) the ER was filling up. A storm of voices was rising slowly around me, rolling beds clamoring. All rooms were filled, so I was placed on a gurney in a hallway with many other patients.

I’m sitting on the gurney, comfortable, clothing on, blankets if I need them. I’m given a box lunch chicken sandwich with Jello for dessert, and I’m eating and using my small note pad to play a word game to pass the time.

But then, I hear in the gurney behind me, the desperate breathing of a woman who sometimes whimpers aloud, sounding terrified. I can’t turn all the way around and see her, but I hear her, and meanwhile the hallway is becoming more and more crowded with emergency patients. I feel guilty. I’m just waiting there and having my Jello. They are scared and in pain, some of them critical. The staff keeps hurrying by (good, staff, caring people). I’m eating the last of my potato chips and now I’m writing down both my word game and the bits of sentences I hear all around me in the ER.

In the word game I play I try to find the number of words within a word and see if I can win by finding more words than there are letters in the word. Paranormal has ten letters, but I find eleven words there: Pa, Par, ran, a, an, normal, no, nor, or, norm, ma; so count that a win, while moving around me I hear the voices.

“I can’t sign this. I can’t read it! They took my glasses away!” “Are you able to draw blood in 12?” “I fell. At home. I live in an apartment and.... Down I went. It hurts a lot!”

“Pathfinder” has ten letters, but I can find only ten words there, so it’s a tie: pa, pat, a, at, path, fin, in, find, finder, er.

“And we need your urine.” “You’re obviously very upset. You’re hyperventilating. You may black out. Let me give you something to help you relax.”

A teenage girl is sitting in a chair, not a patient, and next to her I can see only the arm of probably her mother who holds her close as the girl weeps loudly, shaken, weeping on and on as the woman holds her. Is the girl weeping in fear for a sick or broken friend, a relative? Is she weeping over a death that is just down the hall?

“Sparking” is a win. Twelve words within a ten letter word: Spa, Spar, Spark, pa, par, park, a, ark, parking, kin, in, king.

The test was given. My heart-at-rest showed that I was not in danger. I was sent home. I had been there half a dozen hours, waiting, lives crashing around me, maybe ending. Ending: en, end, din, in, ding. Not a win.

Cowboys and Indians

(No, not Dallas and Cleveland.  Think back.)

As a boy:

I played with Lincoln Logs, built forts that came with painted lead frontiersman for defense and Indians for attack.  Even at that young age, I wavered a little when it came to whom I wanted to identify with.  The frontiersman with a musket had a Caucasian face.  The Indian was way too red, but he also had bird feathers in his hair and war paint and, let’s face it, a much more interesting color palette. 

Movies:

I watched six of the best John Ford movies on early television in the forties, all of them Westerns, and two men became my early heroes: Henry Fonda from Drums Along the Mohawk and My Darlin’ Clementine, and John Wayne from Stagecoach, and the three Cavalry movies.  These films played again and again on those early channels, and I never tired of them.  In all these movies there are Indians who are fearsome and some who are actually respected, (and yes some who are clownish, too.)  In many of the Ford movies there is this slight dichotomy, even up and through The Searchers, which could be the best of all if only we could do some surgery and remove that ridiculous and badly played love triangle that sinks the middle of the film.  I would gladly pay someone to edit that out.  How many of you would chip in?  What an unmarred classic it would become.

Clothing and names:

Still young, I gathered many books about Indians, both novels and histories and even large picture books, studies of the tribes, and I loved the wardrobe, and how the warriors painted their faces and painted their horses!  Each one an individual masterpiece of magic and mysticism, and the way the women adorned themselves and decorated their hair.  Brilliant.  The names of the tribes conveyed to me adventure and a world so deep and different from mine: Choctaw, Cheyenne, Comanche, Cherokee, Lakota, Navajo, Osage, and that fierce and biting word: Apache.

There had been tribes everywhere in America, even where I grew up in northern Illinois.  We had had the Potowatamy.  Well, okay, no offence, but some of the names didn’t give me that same ticket to wonder.  And too many tribes were named by outsiders.  The Nez Pearce?  French trappers and boatmen saw a tribe that made cuts on their noses as part of their symbolic individualism, and so this proud tribe exists in our history as the cut noses.  Not fair.  Most tribal names translated as ‘The People.’   That was their thinking.  We are the People, others are…the Others.  And sometimes their enemies named them, as in the name Apache, which the Apaches learned to carry with pride and with challenge.

Growing up:

In one of the later John Wayne movies, Hondo, I think, his character has a line about the waning power of the tribes.  “End of a way of life.  Too bad.  Good way.”  Okay, he didn’t write that speech, but at least he said it.

After I had strayed from Wayne and moved to Brando, I read a quote from the Duke that said “I think the Indians were selfish to fight us and not share their land.”  Really?  Duke?  Come on. Let’s imagine this: Caucasians in the 1500s – a rural town in Belgium or Holland or England.  People are farming; there are stores; trades, a system of law.  One day, some of the people on the outskirts of town notice that strangers are moving into the area.  An Indian tribe, for instance, and they’re putting up their own village.  They use the water; they hunt.... Well the town council meets and the talk is angry and full of xxx.
The town burghers or the ‘Watch’ or whatever, walk over to the village and they’re pretty upset.  “No…  No, you can’t come here and do this.  No.  This is where WE live.  You have to go somewhere else!  You can’t stay here!  What were you thinking?”

The Indians stare at these people, at their hats, maybe at their wooden shoes, and some of them laugh, but the older, wiser Indians say, ”We have come to share this territory and live our lives here and we ask that you don’t bother us.  Don’t be so selfish, and why are your shoes made of wood?”

So, of course, the town Watch raise their blunderbusses or draw their swords and, well, there it goes again, but the other way around.  So John Wayne’s statement of selfishness is just silly to me.  Of course the Indians fought to defend their lands and way of life.

Many of the whites called the Indians savages and pointed out how they even killed women and children on their raids.  Well, gosh, guess who the whites killed when they raided Indian villages, even peaceful ones.  We also gave them blankets we knew were full of smallpox.  And when we saw that alcohol was very damaging to them, we made sure they got plenty of that so….  Let’s try to be fair.   Let’s savor these people who shared our history, and, by the way, they’re still here.  No, they didn’t disappear, didn’t die off.  Some are on the reservations that were set aside for them, but many are in the towns and cities and colleges and armed forces and the trades and professions and all the lives all around us, and some of them hold special gatherings once in a while, and out come the drums and rattles and songs and shouts and the pride and that great wonder and magic they gave me, gave us all.