MOVIE REVIEWS
RECORDER: THE MARION STOKES PROJECT
A documentary by Matt Wolf. Rating unavailable
➧ THESE DAYS, there are many ways to gather news—true, false, and everything in between. But four decades ago, most people read newspapers and watched TV for their data points. Marion Stokes, the subject of this fascinating, if necessarily frustrating, documentary, looked into her sources a little more deeply, or at least more obsessively, since she took on the task of recording everything she saw, and more.
Born poor and adopted out, Marion was a genuine bootstraps hero: a black woman who secured a great education and worked as a librarian before producing local television shows, in Philadelphia. Archiving and TV would dominate the rest of her life.
Highly suspicious of her segregated country’s role in the world, she also became an activist, joining the Fair Play for Cuba group that also had Lee Harvey Oswald as a member. She and her first husband fought about her Communism and how they should raise their son, Michael Metelits, interviewed extensively here. The ailing husband is seen briefly as well, dryly recalling that Marion was “extraordinarily loyal to her own proclivities”. These included hosting a cableaccess show in which she jousted with coproducer John Stokes, a wealthy white philanthropist she would eventually marry, forcing him to abandon his previous family.
This TV-savvy woman was also tech-minded, early-adopting the Betamax format and, much more presciently, buying shares in Apple when they were cheap. When her archiving obsessions really kicked in—at the dawn of cable news, near the time of the Iran hostage crisis—her investment afforded her
the multiple dwellings, machines, and assistants necessary to record television news on all then-available channels, 24 hours a day. To her dying day, the younger Metelits insists, Stokes considered Steve Jobs “the son she never had”.
Filmmaker Matt Wolf, who has previously profiled eccentric artists Arthur Russell and Joe Brainard, here suggests there was something visionary about his subject’s compulsive taping, which eventually amounted to nearly a million hours of raw TV, recorded over 35 years. Stokes’s mistrust of media motivated her to catalogue events in real time, but there was no organizing principle to her collection, and no way to retrieve its information for refuting later cover-ups and distortions.
Except for a split-screen sequence showing how different stations covered 9/11, Wolf doesn’t really know what to do with it either. Instead, he concentrates on the personal angle, which proves more disheartening than inspirational. Like street photographer Vivian Maier, who ceaselessly
collected images of the world around her but left thousands of film rolls unprocessed, Stokes amassed a body of work that left a colossal shadow but sheds little light on who she was.
21 BRIDGES
Starring Chadwick Boseman. Rated 14A
➧ ORIGINALLY CALLED 17 Bridges, this routine crime thriller got an infrastructure upgrade somewhere along the way. No one gave it an injection of extra meaning, however, so 21 Bridges remains as forgettable as its title.
How routine is it? Well, it begins with a preamble showing the young Andre Davis getting traumatized by the death of his policeman father. More to the point, the dead dad’s boss is played by Keith David, the gruff black police chief in countless cop movies. Cut to the present day, and the gruff captain is now J.K. Simmons, chewing the N.Y. scenery (mostly Philadelphia, in fact) after seven officers and a couple of civilians are mowed down by weapon-toting crooks boosting a buttload of cocaine.
Briskly directed by Brian Kirk, an Irish journeyman with a lot of episodic TV under his belt, the movie shows some sympathy for the perps, a pair of small-timers played by True Detective’s Taylor Kitsch and, more prominently, If Beale Street Could Talk star Stephan James. They’ve walked in on a stash 10 times bigger than what they’d been told about, so you just know the big shootout that happens 10 minutes into the story will not be the end of their travails.
Their more immediate problem is that Mr. Wakanda himself, Chadwick Boseman—as the grown-up Andre—is the homicide detective assigned to the case. He’s one sharp dude, but worse, he’s famous for being one trigger-happy mofo. It’s Det. Davis’s idea to shut down all arteries going in and out of Manhattan— hence the bridge thing—and this limits urban exits, as well as exit strategies for screenwriters Adam Mervis and Matthew Michael Carnahan, who exercise some pretty basic procedural tropes, along with the usual thin-blue-line jargon.
They’ve also given Andre a female counterpart, in the form of Sienna Miller’s Brooklyn-accented narcotics cop, but the filmmakers show little interest in their relationship, or any others. They’re far more focused on elaborate chase scenes—in cars, on foot, in the subway, and more—and these are efficiently handled. The actors do themselves neither harm nor good with this cynical exercise. They simply got from Point A to B, letting the traffic take them where it will.