Tonight I watched the recently Oscar-nominated "Roman J. Israel, Esq." (2017), starring Oscar winner Denzel Washington, who over the years has turned into one of the best actors in the business in my opinion. This time he plays a lawyer who seems like he might be a savant, a possibility that is mentioned by another character. He has the mental recall of someone with Asperger's, and also has the mannerisms of a socially unconventional person. He is a throwback, both culturally and professionally. He still wears his hair in a medium-sized Afro, his glasses and suit are straight out of the 1970s, and as a lawyer he is more interested in advocacy and activism than in getting rich and moving up the corporate ladder. But as the movie gets underway, his mentor - a legendary Los Angeles attorney who was a proponent of civil rights (and African-American himself) - has suffered a heart attack and is in a vegetative state. In his stead, another high-powered L.A. attorney, the white Colin Farrell, has been sent in - at the Legendary Lawyer's previously written request - to take over the practice and to close it down if necessary, which he does, due to the firm's financial imbalance.
Now the idealistic and legally brilliant but socially challenged Washington is suddenly out of a job that has been his anchor for all of his professional life. The slick-looking Farrell offers him a position at his firm, partially out of sympathy but also because he realises that Washington is exceptionally skilled as a lawyer. Also, Farrell himself had once been inspired by the Legendary Black Attorney to aim for true justice as a career goal, before he went corporate and sold-out to the L.A. way of doing things. But Farrell is not really a bad guy. As he gets to know Roman J. Israel, his own youthful passion for real justice is rekindled. Now he is re-imagining his high-priced firm as a force for judicial reform in a big-city system where court cases are processed on an assembly line, and the accused are led to plea-bargains like cows in a slaughterhouse.
Roman J. Israel accepts Farrell's offer and soon adapts to working in a high-powered environment. He is trying to maintain his desire to be an advocate for the disenfranchised, but now he also has to take on some hard-core criminal cases, including one where he is slated to defend a young gang member who is accused of first degree murder. While working on this case, Roman J. Israel makes a decision that changes the course of the movie and will ultimately affect his life.
This is as much as I will tell you, and anyhow, this being a recent movie you may have seen it anyway. It was written and directed by a guy named Dan Gilroy, who made his directorial debut with the excellent "Nightcrawler" from 2014, which took a metaphorical-but-realistic look at the way in which local nightly television news operates, and the fear of crime that is it's operating principal. Gilroy seems to be an Activist Director, concerned with bringing social truth to his scripts. In both of his films that I have seen (don't know if he has made others and too tired to IMDB it), he mixes real-life scenarios with other situations that border on dramatic fantasy or exaggeration. Characters will behave "in character" for a long time and then veer off.......in order to create an unlikely situation that relates to a moral point that writer/director Gilroy is trying to make. This style worked very well in "Nightcrawler" but slightly less well in "Roman J. Israel, Esq.", simply because he tried to do too much. He added a love interest, which is nice but not necessary here, and there are many extraneous scenes of Israel going to the beach, for instance, or moving about and interacting in other ways that could have been cut to make a tighter film. A good 20 minutes could have been cut, and several marginal and unnecessary characters too.
Denzel knocks it out of the park, however, and overall the movie is pretty good. I will therefore give it Two Regular Thumbs Up. See it if you have not already done so. ///
Today on my final day off, I drove out to Newhall and wound up at William S. Hart Park, which we used to call "The Hart Ranch" when my Dad took us there as kids in the 1960s. The park was named for Mr. Hart, who owned the very large property and who was a Silent Movie Star who made many early Westerns. I began my drive this afternoon intending to go to for a hike at Whitney Canyon, which is just off Sierra Highway and is about two miles east of Hart Park. But at the last minute I changed my mind and turned left instead of right. "I always go to Whitney", I thought. "I haven't been to 'The Hart Ranch' since 2014". So that's where I wound up, and it was meant to be because I discovered all kinds of stuff I had not seen before, like the old locomotive that I posted a picture of on FB this aft. There were some old houses on the property that I had never seen, and an old church and a schoolhouse. None of these buildings nor the train was in place in until the 1980s. They were all moved in from other nearby locations to create a kind of time capsule museum, but it was a joy to discover them, and in retrospect I believe that my friend David F. may have mentioned all of these things last year in a conversation about Newhall, and perhaps it stuck in my brain, and that's why I turned toward The Hart Ranch today instead of Whitney Canyon (which is awesome too). It turned out to be a perfect visit, and I even stopped at Aliso on my way back home, just to walk along the creek bed and get a few miles in at the same time.
This was a great few days of time off work. I was able to really recharge, and to get back out there. All hikes were magical, and I did my most epic hike to date on Monday, to Mission Point from O'Melveny,
I had a chance to sleep in, and to play guitar and work on my latest drawing too.
I still wish, most of all, that I had somebody to do things with. But at least I got a lot of things done, and most importantly had fun doing them.
See you in the morn. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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