"But [Rob Reiner's] films are predictable from their first moments, and they begin to establish a weird, dumb orthodoxy that if we're good to our kids, everything will be okay."

So writes David Thompson in "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film," read out loud on the New York Times "Daily" podcast today by the NYT critic Wesley Morris.

Morris uses that book to try to get to an honest assessment of the career of the recently murdered film director. I don't know if I'm getting the punctuation right, but from the transcript of the podcast, Thompson seems to have written:

"As a director, [Rob Reiner] seemed more struck — or poleaxed — by the notion that niceness could save the world. It is a petty thought, but one that stifles so many human and social realities. And so his work turns to pie in the sky with good and bad all too clearly labeled. He's carried along by a fundamental decency and a sense of scenes that play. But his films are predictable from their first moments, and they begin to establish a weird, dumb orthodoxy that if we're good to our kids, everything will be okay. This is not true. Life is more interesting."

More interesting and, at times, far far more horrible. 

But Thompson's words are left to speak for themselves as Wesley Morris makes a quick turn to a happy ending. He says: 

"Stone became a kind of blinkered realist. His down-in-the-basement singing could sound depressed."

"Among the most pungent moments on these later albums is a version of 'Que Sera, Sera.' Stone makes it a gospel dirge, this smoky funeral march. It’s a touch bitter and sopping with rue. 'The future’s not ours to see,' he sings, as each verse unspools a childhood anticipation of what might happen someday. Stone imagines a baleful, shrugging acceptance of what is, rather than what’s possible. Possible, this version seems to ask, what’s that?"

Writes , in "Sly Stone and the Sound of an America That Couldn’t Last/The influential musician, who died on Monday at 82, forged harmony — musical and otherwise — that he wasn’t able to hold together on his own" (NYT).

Beautiful version of a song that one usually associates with Doris Day. Here's Day singing it as loud as possible in "The Man Who Knew Too Much." Here's how she sang it when it wasn't an incredibly intense scene in a Hitchcock movie. And here's a beautiful version by 2 young women on TikTok.

From the Wikipedia article about the song, I figured out that I'd heard the Sly and the Family Stone version before — every time I've seen the darkly comic movie "Heathers." It plays over the closing credits. A more cheerful version of the song plays over the opening credits.

The seeming lightness of the song has made it useful in dark comedy:

"The reason to bring up 'Porky’s' now is the laughter — the uproarious laughter. Last week, when Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was asked..."

"... what she most remembered about the night she says Brett M. Kavanaugh drunkenly assaulted her, she offered, with some quavering, that it was the laughter between Mr. Kavanaugh and his friend. She told the Senate Judiciary Committee: 'indelible in the hippocampus' — Dr. Blasey’s a professor of psychology — 'is the laughter, the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense," writes Wesley Morris in an article on the front page of nytimes.com right now, "In ’80s Comedies, Boys Had It Made. Girls Were the Joke."

Why talk about "Porky's" when Kavanaugh mentioned 3 movies of the time that influenced him and his friends: "Animal House," "Caddyshack," and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High"? Well, it's the movie that the NYT critic Wesley Morris "suddenly found" his "mind... on a journey back to."

Morris brings up a number of other 80s movies that centered on young men: “Risky Business,” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” “Three O’Clock High,” “Revenge of the Nerds,” “Bad Boys,” “Hot Pursuit,” “Weird Science,” “Teen Wolf,” “License to Drive.” “The Secret of My Success,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Soul Man,” “Losin’ It,” “The Last American Virgin,” “Stripes,” “Sharky’s Machine.” “Stakeout,” “Like Father, Like Son,” “Big,” “Goonies," and "Zapped."

Is there any evidence that Kavanaugh even saw these movies? Morris makes this very loose connection: "From the sounds of what Judge Kavanaugh has disclosed about his high school and college self, he seemed part of that landscape." Morris does name the 3 movies Kavanaugh mentioned, and Morris goes so far as admitting that "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" (a movie made by a woman) "could be construed as feminist."

Speaking of feminism, Morris remembers "Carrie," the 1976 movie in which a high school girl, enraged when her classmates all laugh at her, uses her telekinesis to (spoiler alert) kill them all.

Morris cannot resist asserting that men are laughing at Christine Blasey Ford now!

At a rally the other day in Mississippi, the president lampooned Dr. Blasey to big cheers. Even now, men are laughing at her.

It seems to me people took Christine Blasey Ford extremely seriously. We've been talking about her for over a week, giving her the top spot in the news, after she came forward with an uncorroborated memory fragment from 1982. Kavanaugh was mocked for showing emotion in response to the ugly accusation, but Ford was held immune from comedy. Trump mocked her statements, playing up their fragmentary nature, but he didn't imitate her voice or call her names or talk about how she looked and acted. She was not mocked. "Saturday Night Live" did a 13-minute cold open about the hearing and Ford wasn't even one of the characters! Only Kavanaugh was ridiculed.

Laughter is an interesting topic, and I like the idea of taking "a journey back" to the 1980s and to examine how young men laughed at the expense of women, especially with the inclusion of "Carrie," the movie about a young woman committing mass murder because she was laughed at. That's a fascinating parallel to Christine Blasey Ford!

What's the right kind of laughter? And what's the right amount? If the new idea is no laughing at the expense of women, it's not going to work (as Trump obviously knows and will use against all the no-laughing! crowd).

They're all going to laugh at you!!!

"Lots of men messed around with masculinity..."

"And for reasons that make no cosmic sense, a few of those men — Prince, David Bowie, Prince Be of P.M. Dawn, and now Mr. Michael — died in 2016, a year in which dismaying ambivalence about aggressive, invasive male behavior was matched by the reinstatement of duller performances of masculinity in both our pop music and our politics. The Princes and the George Michaels seem as radical as ever."

Writes Wesley Morris in "George Michael Mattered Beyond the Music."

The Princes and the George Michaels — sorry, there is only one of each — let's put them to the side now. I give Prince and George Michael all the love the deserve — which is a lot — but I want to focus on what Wesley Morris said about the "performance of masculinity" in the music and politics of 2016. I almost had to diagram that one sentence to understand it. But clear out the stuff about artists who died this year, and you have a statement about the keeping-on-living men of 2016.

These  unnamed men of 2016 showed us 2 different masculine presentations: 1. "aggressive, invasive" and 2. "duller."

And we were ambivalent. Dismayingly so.

Presumably, Morris thinks the dead radicals — Prince, George Michaels — marked the path away from the unappealing choice between the 2 styles of masculinity — ugly or boring — that prevail among us the living. I say "presumably," because the sentence I want to talk about is a sign for an exit ramp Morris zooms past.

Who are the Masculinity Style #1 men and the Masculinity Style #2 men of 2016 that Morris didn't bother to name? It seems as though he had 1s and 2s for both politics and pop music. I don't follow pop music enough to know who the men of 2016 are and whether they are "aggressive, invasive" or "duller." There's Justin Bieber, I know. Which is he?

Politics, I follow. I'm sure Donald Trump was the whole reason for the words "aggressive, invasive." And yet... "In fact, I took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said, 'I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture.' I took her out furniture...."

Trump's "performance of masculinity" is just as complicated as Prince's.

"I live knowing that whatever my blackness means to me can be at odds with what it means to certain white observers, at any moment."

"So I live with two identities: mine and others’ perceptions of it. So much of blackness evolving has been limited to whiteness allowing it to evolve, without white people accepting that they are in the position of granting permission. Allowing. If that symbiotic dynamic is going to change, white people will need to become more conscious that they, too, can be perceived."

So writes Wesley Morris in a long New York Times Magazine article "The Year We Obsessed Over Identity" with the long subtitle: "2015's headlines and cultural events have confronted us with the malleability of racial, gender, sexual and reputational lines. Who do we think we are?" The article has some topics that I've covered on this blog over the year — Rachel Dolezal, Atticus Finch — but the reason I wanted to blog this is that it ends talking about a book that I happened to notice for the first time yesterday, "Far From the Tree," by Andrew Solomon. Here's how Wesley Morris uses that book:

It could be that... it’s... in our natures to keep trying to change, to discover ourselves. In ‘‘Far From the Tree,’’ Andrew Solomon’s landmark 2012 book about parenting and how children differentiate themselves, he makes a distinction between vertical and horizontal identity. The former is defined by traits you share with your parents, through genes and norms; the latter is defined by traits and values you don’t share with them, sometimes because of genetic mutation, sometimes through the choice of a different social world. The emotional tension in the book’s scores of stories arises from the absence of love for or empathy toward someone with a pronounced or extreme horizontal identity — homosexuality or autism or severe disability. Solomon is writing about the struggle to overcome intolerance and estrangement, and to better understand disgust; about our comfort with fixed, established identity and our distress over its unfixed or unstable counterpart.