S A N TA M O N I C A
INSIDE SANTA MONICA HOSPITAL NAMED BEST IN STATE
REFLECTING THE CONCERNS OF THE COMMUNITY
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July 31 – August 06 , 2020 Volume XLVII, Issue 52
LA Marathon to Exclude Santa Monica
Photo: : LA Marathon (Facebook)
The finish line at the 2020 LA Marathon in Santa Monica.
Race organizers, citing “bigger footprint at the finish line”, choose Century City endpoint By Sam Catanzaro Santa Monica has been the location of the Los Angeles Marathon finish line for a decade
but starting next year the city will no longer be included in the racecourse with organizers moving the 26.2-mile marker east of the 405 Freeway. On Friday, the McCourt Foundation– owners of the LA Marathon–revealed plans for the 2021 course that begins at Dodger Stadium and finishes at Avenue of the Stars in Century City. The course will follow its traditional route until Brentwood, where runners will double back on San Vicente, Sepulveda and Santa Monica boulevards before finishing at Avenue of the Stars. “This exciting change allows for a more vibrant and interactive finish experience
than previously possible. It will provide the opportunity for much greater spectator participation for family and friends with enhanced post-race activities including the Finish Festival with concerts and sponsor activations and puts runners close to hotels, transportation, and nightlife in West Hollywood, Beverly Hills and the best of LA,” reads a statement from the McCourt Foundation. “We had a footprint challenge in Santa Monica, just from a space perspective,” added Murphy Reinschreiber, the chief operating officer of the Foundation. “We realized that there’s so much more we could do if we just
had a bigger footprint at the finish line.” The race–which has finished at the intersection of Ocean Avenue and California Avenue since 2010–has long been an economic booster for the City with 2,000 guests booking hotel rooms each year by some estimates and thousands visiting local restaurants and businesses. It has, however, presented residents and officials with hurdles including traffic, stretched security and neighborhood disruptions. The Santa Monica Mirror has reached out to the City–who could not immediately be reached–asking if it supports this move and if it had a voice in the decision.
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July 31 – August 06 , 2020
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July 31 – August 06 , 2020
Gabriela Cámara Cuts Ties With Onda of Santa Monica Is moldy jam behind the decision? By toi CreeL One of the biggest Santa Monica restaurant openings in 2019 was ritzy cafe Onda, but while the eatery is remaining open, one of its collaborating chefs is no longer a part of it. In October of last year, Chef/restauranteur Gabriela Cámara and Chef Jessica Koslow, owner of the Sqirl, announced the opening of Onda located inside of the Proper Hotel.’ Cámara announced on Instagram in a post that she only represented her restaurant “Contramar” along with a few others. Onda was not on the list. She also confirmed this in the comments telling an Instagram user she had no ties to the restaurant. h t t p s : / / w w w. i n s t a g r a m . c o m / p / CCyruxSDcYb/ “We’ve been asked if we’d recently opened a Contramar abroad, and I need to say ABSOLUTELY NOT. Contramar which opened in Mexico City almost 22 years ago is the one and only #contramar For now, @contramarmx @entremarmx @expendiodurango @calasf & @tacoscala are the only places I am responsible for. I do want to share I’m super excited about our upcoming project in downtown Mexico City: @itacatedelmar Stay tuned!” As far as why Cámara decided to cut ties with the restaurant, the chef did not comment but there may be some explanation judging
A moldy batch of jam at Sqirl.
Gabriela Cámara (left) Jessica Koslow (right).
from the recent speculation surrounding the restaurant.
Photo: Instagram (@gabrielacamara)
According to the Los Angeles Eater, recently
Koslow’s restaurant Squirl was under fire for
Photo: Facebook
allegedly “concealing moldy jam, erasing the creative contributions of its employees, and operating a hidden, unregulated second kitchen.” In addition there were also claims of contribution to gentrification and In an Eater investigation, “former Sqirl catering chef Balo Orozco — one of the creative forces at Onda — did not get equal input on menu decisions“ According to Onda‘s website, the restaurant remains open from 8 AM to 3 PM and 5 PM to 10 PM.
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Santa Monica Extends Local Emergency to August 31
THE BEST CANCER THERAPY Countywide cases continue to rise By Staff Writer
This week Santa Monica’s Interim City Manager and Director of Emergency Services Lane Dilg issued a twenty-third supplement that, with certain specified exceptions, extends Santa Monica’s local emergency declaration and all associated orders to August 31, 2020. Later expiration dates stated in specific supplements remain unchanged. Santa Monica extends its local emergency as key metrics continue to show community spread of COVID-19. Y “LA County’s 8.4% positivity rate demonstrates the seriousness of where we are in the pandemic and that we have to continue proven public health measures like wearing face coverings and not gathering,” said Interim City Manager Lane Dilg on Tuesday. “We extend strength for recovery to every Santa Monican who has contracted the virus and our deepest condolences to the families in our community who have lost loved ones. As a community, we join together in navigating these difficult and uncertain times.” Here are the specified exceptions reflected in the previous extension (the nineteenth supplement issued June 29, 2020) that remain in place for Santa Monica residents and businesses: • Parking citations associated with monthly street sweeping resumed July 1, 2020. • Please move your car for street sweeping next week, August 3-7. • The City’s plastic bag ban resumed on July 1, 2020. This means customers can resume bringing reusable bags when making essential trips. • Towing for violations of the California Vehicle Code relating to abandoned vehicles resumed as of July 1, 2020.
• The expiration of Santa Monica Fire Department annual permits of operation was not further extended, and they expired as of July 1, 2020. • Late payment penalties for unpaid or delinquent Transient Occupancy Taxes, Utility Users Taxes, and Parking Facility Taxes resumed as of July 1, 2020. On Wednesday Public Health confirmed 91 new deaths and 4,825 new cases of COVID-19. The high number of new deaths are from a backlog of reports received from over the weekend. The high number of new cases are, in part, due to a backlog of over 2,000 results received from Thursday through Sunday. There are 2,045 confirmed cases currently hospitalized and 28% of these people are confirmed cases in the ICU. There are a total of 2,599 confirmed and suspect cases that are currently hospitalized and 17% of these people are on ventilators. The hospitalization data is missing data from three hospitals not included in today’s update. “I know that we’re all eager and anxious to see our lives return to normal. We want our children to be back at school, seeing their friends and making cherished memories. We have the tools at hand to make this happen. We need compliance with our directives - so please continue to wear a face covering and do not gather with people you don’t live with,” said Barbara Ferrer, PhD, MPH, MEd, Director of Public Health. As of Wednesday, Public Health has identified 183,383 positive cases of COVID-19 across all areas of L.A. County, and a total of 4,516 deaths. Public Health anticipates continuing to receive a backlog of lab reports in the coming days due to problems with the state electronic lab reporting system. In Santa Monica, there has been 616 cases and 37 deaths. Testing results are available for nearly 1,683,000 individuals with 10% of all people testing positive.
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July 31 – August 06 , 2020
OPINION
Room to Breathe! SMa.r.t. Santa Monica Architects for a Responsible Tomorrow
Three days ago, your City Council gave away your land in the center of downtown for 30 pieces of silver. The giveaway did not produce any cash; instead, your city council proposed to give an out of town developer 2.5 acres of the people’s land at 5th and Arizona. This land is worth at least $62 million in today’s dollars, and the lease is for the next 99 years. We receive nothing, zip, zero, nada. Imagine what the parcel will be worth 99 years from now! For that very tidy easy to count sum of zero dollars, Santa Monica receives: • 11 stories of hotel, offices, and retail space, which we won’t need in the depressed postCOVID-19 world. In fact, flooding the market with so much un-needed commercial space will be detrimental to our existing office and hotel operators. • A very expensive 130’ skyscraper that is nothing but a warmed-over, scaled down, Jenga block, copycat version of the OMA designed building circa 2013 in Singapore (see picture above). It is not a unique architectural statement. It is outdated, not attractive, nor fitting in our adjacent seaside environment. • 3 years of downtown construction chaos followed by years of traffic gridlock. • Zero, I repeat zero, ground lease income. • No community space: the developer removed the initially planned 12,000 square foot facility. • Not a sustainable building (not net-zero), and it shades its neighbors’ buildings hundreds of feet away. Adjacent buildings will not be able to generate their own solar power. • This building will be entangled in litigation for years as the developer evaded the State Surplus Land Act with the presumed cooperation of Santa Monica’s economic development and planning departments. • The developer will give $24 million for affordable housing offsite rather than build the 48 units proposed initially within the project’s boundary. ~ The proposal’s fundamental problem is that it completely fails to meet the needed open space pressures facing downtown Santa Monica. In just the last five years, developers have already approved, have under construction, or have completed 1400 housing units and hotel rooms within a short walking distance of the site (Ocean to California to Lincoln to Colorado). A two-thousand-five-hundred person jump in the downtown population is coming. If these new residents were to have the same pitiful open space ratio as the rest of our town (1.52 acres per 1000 residents), it should realistically include at least 3.63 acres of public park space. The current site is only 2.57 acres, while the proposed “allegedly” publicly accessible open space (1/3 of it perched on the upper edges of the high-rise) is less than one acre. This public space is just a quarter of what is needed to absorb the last five years of runaway expansion
downtown, not to mention the upcoming Vons, Gehry, and Miramar developments. This project, if pursued, will be massively deficient and obsolete from an open space point of view, the moment it is completed. We can do much better than this. This piece of land should become Santa Monica’s “Central Park.” It is now the center of our downtown as “gravity” has shifted eastward from the Third Street Promenade with the tug of the development towards Lincoln Blvd. The parks adjacent to our downtown core, Reed, Palisades, and Tongva, are poorly located for downtown’s future growth. ~ In the last six months, we have learned that the ability of a City to shelter in place depends on the residents’ patience and periodic access to adjacent outdoor “safety valves,” which enhance their tolerance of social distancing. Without those breathing spaces, the citizens’ patience quickly collapses, and the health “rebels” start acting out. Our city will endure periodic virus outbreaks in the upcoming decades, so we need the space and capacity to experience extended periodic shutdowns. An urban park in the densest part of Santa Monica is not just a luxury. It is essential to our residents’ very survival. Starting in 2007, our City Council wisely pieced together this unique vital parcel downtown, and their foresight should not be squandered by trying to recreate a building from the past. The world has changed completely. We should take this opportunity to pivot away from this bad deal and prepare our downtown for a better future. The public process of choreographing our newest park should be an exciting time for our fatigued and bereaved residents. We need that uplift now, and we will benefit from it in perpetuity. Santa Monica residents need to rise and undo this horrible mistake. Our stakeholders, the residents of Santa Monica, rose against the ill-fated Hines Project on Olympic Blvd. Citizen-led action can stop this project, as well. ~ In 1906, Brothers Leo and Mo Fogel migrated to Santa Monica and settled on one of the city’s premier streets. Leo became the young city’s pre-eminent dentist while Mo became a noted attorney. Leo settled his family in a Victorian house at 1248 5th Street, where daughter Leila grew up. Leila’s mother was one of the founders of the Santa Monica Breakfast Club in 1935. The club has a singular focus, helping local children in need of dental care. Leila lives a vibrant life. She has served our youth both as a classroom teacher and as an active leader in the Breakfast Club. Leila is upset over the state of our Santa Monica. She gave me an earful about the city she loves. Her parents are “rolling over in their graves at Woodlawn” to see the city the way it is now. “Whatever the hell City Hall is doing” is ruining Santa Monica. “They just keep building and building.” “There’s a difference between growth to enhance and modernize the city and growth just for developers that destroy the community.” “We no longer have any sense of community, and we have lost our sense of being a seaside town.” Leila Fogel Brown speaks the truth!
Photos: OMA
“Three days ago, your City Council gave away your land in the center of downtown for 30 pieces of silver. The giveaway did not produce any cash; instead, your city council proposed to give an out of town developer 2.5 acres of the people’s land at 5th and Arizona. This land is worth at least $62 million in today’s dollars, and the lease is for the next 99 years,” writes SMa.r.t. in their latest column.
Oh, that Victorian on 5th Street? It bit the dust in 1937, and it made way for the landmarked Santa Monica Post Office. ~ John Cyrus Smith is a Santa Monica Recreation & Parks Commissioner and former chair of that commission. He was a council candidate in 2012. Here is his view: “I won’t be voting for any council members who voted to move ahead with the developer on the 4th, 5th, and Arizona project. You should not, either. The bad decisions are starting to add up. • That expensive City Hall Annex behind City Hall that we REALLY don’t need now... • A Taj Mahal “Lab School” at the Civic Center is a glorified Day Care for highly paid City, SMC, and Rand Employees, many of whom don’t even live here... • Ten big, new apartment buildings either built or planned along Lincoln north of the Santa Monica Freeway. Good luck driving anywhere near there. • Tongva and Reed Parks over-run by homelessness, despite the pleas from Rec and Parks Commissioners who can only watch while the council directs police and city staff to double down on programs that perpetuate the problem. • And we all had to sit back and watch our city get trashed by looters while our police got out-smarted. • And now yet another huge hotel planned on public land bought with public money for public uses. By a Council that claims to care about affordable housing. How many hotel workers who were paid to call into the meeting on Tuesday night will ever check into that hotel? How many residents? Councilmember Sue Himmelrich got it right Tuesday night. No one else.” ~ We’re used to wearing a seatbelt, stopping at red lights, and wearing clothes in public. It’s just not that hard to add a face covering over your nose and mouth. It’s our new fashion trend. Help revive our economy and our lives. Wear a mask, save a life. ~ In 2013, Planning Commissioner
An OMA hotel in Singapore
Mario Fonda-Bonardi joined a new group of concerned Santa Monicans whose specialties were in architecture or engineering. They wanted to improve planning and sustainability. Soon I received a call asking me to come along for the ride. I was the Chair of the Recreation and Parks Commission at the time, and they thought I could give perspective on open space and parks. SMart came to be, and we have “talked the talk” for the past seven years. Mario and I have decided that it is time to “walk the walk” and have submitted our names for two of the available City Council seats in the upcoming election on November 3rd. As such, our SMart colleagues will carry on each week writing about the city we love, but the names Mario Fonda-Bonardi and Phil Brock will be missing from the masthead. We will see all of you down the road! By Phil Brock for SMart (Santa Monica Architects for a Responsible Tomorrow) Thane Roberts, Architect, Robert H. Taylor AIA, Ron Goldman FAIA, Architect, Dan Jansenson, Architect, Building and Fire-Life Safety Commission, Samuel Tolkin Architect, Mario Fonda-Bonardi, AIA, Planning Commissioner, Phil Brock, Santa Monica Arts Commission. For previous articles see www.santamonicaarch.wordpress.com/ writing.
July 31 – August 06 , 2020
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OPINION
Nine-Bill Housing Package Derails Local Choices TOM ELIAS SMM News Columnist
The silver lining provided by some past pandemics has been that they opened minds, awakening entire nations and continents to what was wrong with the way things previously were. So it was, for example, with the bubonic plague of the 1300s, also known as the “black death,” which produced labor shortages that started the demise of the feudal system, turning serfs into free people if they could reach the walled cities of the time. But there is little evidence that California’s leading lawmakers have seen the many changes the coronavirus pandemic has wrought in California. No, even though COVID-19 has killed well over 8,400 Californians, current legislative leaders still pursue their old, pre-pandemic goals as if nothing were different. That’s especially true in housing, where seismic change is about to occur as businesses increasingly abandon office towers, creating vast new vacant spaces that will inevitably become housing units. This will create the dense housing sought for years by the likes of Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener and fellow Democratic Sen. Toni Atkins of San Diego, the state Senate’s powerful president pro tem. New and current reality, which sees office leasing around California at its lowest levels since the Great Recession, with more and more companies telling workers to operate from home, has not dented these folks’ thinking. They persist in fighting the last war, always a losing proposition for military leaders and often equally disastrous for
politicians. The best example of their thinking is a nine-bill package mostly sponsored by Wiener and Atkins, joined by other knee-jerk liberals like Berkeley’s Sen. Nancy Skinner and Assembly members Buffy Wicks of Oakland, Richard Bloom of Santa Monica, Lorena Gonzalez of San Diego and David Chiu of San Francisco. As the Legislature sort-of returns from its second virus-induced recess of the year – a period when lawmakers ceded virtually all state authority to Gov. Gavin Newsom – the nine-bill housing package will start moving quickly through committees. It has backing from developers and labor unions, both major financial backers of many Democratic lawmakers. Among other things, this package would effectively end single-family zoning in California, a longtime Wiener goal. It does this by allowing four market-priced homes on all lots that now have just one, with neither affordable units nor new parking spaces required. This alone could lead to wide disruption of residential neighborhoods if many homeowners take the wads of cash developers would soon proffer. Another bill allows city councils to overturn laws passed by local voters which protect openspace on shorelines or other green areas. The package also allows cities to rezone any parcel they like to allow 10-unit apartment buildings, in spite of any prior restrictions. It decreases the amount of affordable housing developers must include in a project to get it expanded beyond current local limits, giving developers a 50 percent “density bonus” if they build more affordable units than now required. And it allows tall apartment and condominium buildings wherever neighborhood businesses now exist. So much for city- or county-imposed height
Photos: Getty Images
“This package would effectively end single-family zoning in California,” writes Tom Elias in his latest column. “It does this by allowing four market-priced homes on all lots that now have just one, with neither affordable units nor new parking spaces required. This alone could lead to wide disruption of residential neighborhoods.”
limits. This package aims to encourage more and more Californians to move into high-rise buildings and abandon their cars for public transit. It comes just when, rather than flocking to mass transit and ride-sharing services, most urban Californians are opting to drive private cars. Fears of contagion on public transit of all kinds stoke this trend, which sees ridership on trains and buses greatly reduced from last year. None of this is needed. As more and more office space becomes vacant, there’s ever less call for new construction. What’s more, when conversion of office towers to residential use heats up, there will be more new housing than required to fill the state’s needs, estimated at about 3 million new units by 2025.
That timetable, of course, can be met easily by conversions, but not by new construction, which will inevitably be held up by lawsuits and environmental issues. It adds up to a picture of blinkered, singleminded legislators pursuing old goals with little relevance in the post-pandemic world to come. That’s why the current housing package deserves to disappear, just like Wiener’s past failed efforts to rid California of single-family homes. Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It,” is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net
Santa Monica’s UCLA Health Top Hospital in California U.S. News & World Report releases annual rankings By Sam Catanzaro Santa Monica’s UCLA Medical Center is the top hospital in California and one of the top 5 in the nation, according to recently announced rankings. On Tuesday, U.S. News & World Report published their annual rankings for hospitals in the United States with UCLA Health hospitals in Westwood and Santa Monica placing No. 1 in both Los Angeles and California and No. 4 nationally in annual rankings. Last year UCLA ranked No. 6 in the nation. Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota earned the top spot in the rankings this year, followed by, Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins Hospital and New York-Presbyterian HospitalColumbia and Cornell. This is the 31st consecutive year UCLA has appeared on the ranking’s national honor roll of the top-20 hospitals nationwide. “Every day, I am inspired by the teamwork of our physicians, nurses, health care professionals and support staff whose knowledge, skill, dedication and compassion make possible the excellence in health care,” said Johnese Spisso, president of UCLA Health and CEO of the UCLA Hospital System. “I am incredibly
proud of the work that our team members do each and every day to make a difference in the lives of patients and their families.” U.S. News evaluated the performance of more than 4,500 medical centers in 16 specialties and 10 procedures and conditions. To earn a spot on the honor roll, hospitals must earn high scores across many of these areas of care. “When people get sick, they need care. Even before COVID-19 struck, more than 33 million people in the U.S. required treatment in a hospital each year. Strokes, heart attacks and bone fractures haven’t ceased. And socalled ‘elective’ care can’t be delayed forever,” wrote Ben Harder, U.S. News Managing Editor and Chief of Health Analysis. “With more than 6,000 hospitals across the U.S., many patients face a choice about where they get treated. And which hospital they choose matters. Some medical centers have honed impressive expertise in complex specialty care, such as what’s involved in transplanting a heart. Others struggle with even relative basic procedures like knee replacement.” UCLA Health earned top 10 rankings in 13 areas of care, including geriatrics (No. 3), nephrology (No. 3), diabetes and endocrinology (4), gastroenterology and gastrointestinal surgery (5), ophthalmology (5) and pulmonology and lung surgery (5). “We pride ourselves on providing the best possible care to each patient, no matter the circumstances — from routine checkups in our community clinics to complex procedures in
UCLA Medical Center, Santa Monica.
our hospitals,” said Dr. John Mazziotta, vice chancellor for UCLA Health Sciences and CEO of UCLA Health. U.S. News’ methodologies in most areas of care are based largely on objective measures such as risk-adjusted survival, discharge-tohome rates, patient volume and the quality of
Photo: Sam Catanzaro
nursing, among other care-related indicators. In a separate assessment, Newsweek recently ranked Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center among the best hospitals in the world. Two other Los Angeles hospitals made U.S. News‘s honor roll: Cedars-Sinai Medical Center (No. 17) and Keck Hospital of USC (No. 18).
July 31 – August 06 , 2020
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S ANT A MONI CA COL L EG E
Let’s start this fall together!
Earn a Degree or Certificate Online Classes start August 31 smc.edu/fall
SANTA MONICA COMMUNITY COLLEGE DISTRICT BOARD OF TRUSTEES Dr. Nancy Greenstein, Chair; Dr. Susan Aminoff, Vice Chair; Dr. Louise Jaffe; Dr. Margaret Quiñones-Perez; Rob Rader; Dr. Sion Roy; Barry A. Snell; Joshua Elizondo, Student Trustee; Kathryn E. Jeffery, Ph.D., Superintendent/President Santa Monica College | 1900 Pico Blvd. Santa Monica, CA 90405 | smc.edu
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Atom Egoyan’s “Guest of Honour” Receives Mixed Reviews CENTER STAGE
With Beverly Cohn, Editor-At-Large
Atom Egoyan’s film is one that you will either love or hate. I fall somewhere in the middle as the following review will demonstrate. The movie begins with a haunting scene of a young girl “playing” wine glasses, emitting a beautiful sound. We immediately segue to Veronica (Laysla De Oliveira) who, wearing a red dress, arrives at a church to speak with Father Greg (Luke Wilson) regarding services for her deceased father. She describes his work in detail explaining that he devoted his life to being a Department of Health Inspector and spent his days going from restaurant to restaurant to ferret out any animal droppings with the preciseness of a skilled brain surgeon. In a series of flashbacks that take us into a variety of restaurants, we see Jim, embodied by the gifted actor, David Thewlis, doing his job. He pays meticulous attention to detail as he pokes his nose into every nook and cranny where an unwelcomed pest might be hiding. His mantra is that he has devoted his life to keeping people’s food safe and clean. It is about at this point, that a series of flashbacks begin, spanning a 15-year period, taking us from Veronica’s childhood to the present time. In one scene, we see dad giving his young daughter a baby rabbit, whose ears and feet will play a part later in both their lives. As Veronica talks to a most sympathetic Father Gregg, we learn that she was in prison for sexual misconduct with one of her students named Clive (Alexandre Bourgeois). A music teacher, Veronica was friendly and supportive of all her students but found Clive to be especially talented and gave him a lot of extra time. A school bus driver named Mike, played by Rossif Sutherland, has a crush on Veronica and becomes increasingly jealous of the friendship with her student. He fiddles with her cell phone, which was customarily left on the bus during recitals, figures out her password, and sends a seductive email to
Clive who thinks it’s from his teacher. Despite being innocent of raping her young student, she pleads guilty and goes to prison, which is somehow connected to her perception of her father’s behavior when she was a child. Before going to prison, driven by a flawed memory from her childhood, she had been acting out by indulging in a string of onenight stands. So, the plot gets a little tricky as sub-plot upon sub-plot is introduced. I know this all sounds a bit “soap operaish” and you would be right to some extent. However, the rotating timeline is executed so delicately as to be almost imperceptible, and it takes a bit of concentration to navigate these mercurial time-line transitions. Some might call it “clunky,” but I call it creative. In one mysterious scene, Jim carefully plants rat droppings in the bathroom of a Brazilian restaurant. At first I was surprised, but his reason becomes clear as to why he commits such a fraudulent, dishonest act and slowly, ever so slowly, the narrative begins to crystallize. Despite a flawed script, David Thewlis’ brilliant performance is worth the price of admission. I found myself hanging on to his every word, delivered in a precise, nonmelodramatic way, one of the real dangers of this script, but Thewes skillfully avoided falling into that trap. He is precise in his moment-to-moment reality and delivers a perfect, steady performance with the quiet sub-text permeating his every word. For any actor out there, it is a lesson in “not playing the text.” I also thought that it was interesting story telling, slowly revealing the reason for Veronica’s strained relationship with her father. Rather than being critical of the sometimes confusing timeline, I like to think of this film as a giant puzzle, with pieces scattered all over the table, requiring a patient assembly to achieve a coherent completion. It should be noted that the film was an Official Selection at the Venice International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, and is currently being screened via virtual cinemas through Kino Marquee.
Jim (David Thewlis) holds up a significant rabbit’s foot for his daughter (not pictured).
Luke Wilson as Father Greg in Atom Egoyan’s “Guest of Honour”.
Photos: Courtesy of Elevation Pictures
Veronica (Laysla De Oliveira) conducts a concert with her student musicians.
Department of Health Inspector Jim, wonderfully played by David Thewlis, in Atom Egoyan’s “Guest of Honour”.
July 31 – August 06 , 2020
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Rated PG-13 91 Minutes Released July 10th on Apple TV+
FILM REVIEW: GREYHOUN
BEHIND THE SCREEN By Kathryn Whitney Boole It’s easy to think that without the wireless electronics developments of the last 30 years or so, communications were limited to mail and the home and office telephone. However, in 1935 Sir Robert Watson-Wyatt established the first practical Radio Detection and Ranging system in England, and in1940 this crucial element of wartime air and sea calculations was coined “radar” by the US Navy. Today radar is utilized in MRI scans of the human body, and NASA has employed that detection system to calculate the distance between the earth and other planets. Radar happens to be one of the stars of the movie Greyhound. Tom Hanks worked for ten years to bring this story to the screen. His screenplay is clean, realistic, and presents the escalating drama visually. Short phrases encompass multiple levels of emotion. It’s based on a 1955 novel by C.S. Forester, inspired by the harrowing stories of World War II seafaring expeditions of international merchant marine ships that moved supplies across the Atlantic
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from the US to Britain. The US Navy and other countries sent battleships to travel with these fleets for protection from treacherous German U-Boats. The USS Keeling, call sign “Greyhound” is a fictitious ship. However it resembles the real boats that were involved in these missions and the actual tactics and methods used to track U-boats. The movie is straightforward and lets the action tell the story, as did many mid-20th century war movies. Though the backstories of the characters may be somewhat mysterious, their actions in this life-anddeath drama reveal their true characters. A great ensemble of actors handles this with expertise. Along with the legendary Hanks as “Captain Krause,” the cast includes two of today’s top character actors, Stephen Graham (Rocketman) as “Charlie Cole,” and the extraordinary Rob Morgan as “Mess Attendant 2nd Class George Cleveland.”
Greyhound Senior US Navy Commander Krause is on his first assignment, leading a multi-national maritime escort group for a merchant ship convoy on its way to the British Isles in 1942, just months after the US had entered World War II. The movie covers an area too far out to sea to be protected by air power from the US or Great Britain, an area called “The Black Pit.” This perilous gap took over 48 hours for the ships to traverse. In the film the countdown of time over these 2 days is measured by simple titles of each watch on the screen – “Forenoon Watch,” “Dog Watch,” Morning Watch,” imparting a sense of the hours passing excruciatingly slowly, as the soldiers on board the battleship would have experienced it. One of the key components of this story is how accurately the sailors were able to quickly calculate the location German U-Boats using radar, mathematics done by hand and mental
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decoding. No computers, no Smart Phones. Radar was their electronic communications system. The captain uses a high-frequency radio direction finder called “HuffDuff” to pick up communications between U-Boats sitting in the middle of the Atlantic with their land-based headquarters. HuffDuff was actually used during these battles. Trust, teamwork and total commitment to the purpose at hand frame the wartime tactical actions. Movies like Greyhound are a vital element of storytelling in a world where very few people remain who can relate an in-person experience of the bravery and selflessness of the soldiers of WWII. Kathryn Whitney Boole has spent most of her life in the entertainment industry, which has been the backdrop for remarkable adventures with extraordinary people. She is a Talent Manager with Studio Talent Group in Santa Monica. kboole@gmail.com.
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