Out of print for more than 30 years, now available for the first time as an eBook, this is the controversial story of John Wooden's first 25 years and first 8 NCAA Championships as UCLA Head Basketball Coach. This is the only book that gives a true picture of the character of John Wooden and the influence of his assistant, Jerry Norman, whose contributions Wooden  ignored and tried to bury.

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Click the book to read the first chapter and for ordering information. Also available on Kindle.

The Assistant (3/10)

by Tony Medley

85 minutes

R

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovic this is not. One day in the life of Jane (an unhappy Julia Garner who has done such exceptional work in the Netflix show Ozark) is something that seems to be of no interest to anybody. Unlike Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s protagonist, Jane is not a prisoner. Rather, she’s an assistant in some kind of film company with a goal of becoming a producer. The first half of the movie is her doing the mundane deeds of a gofer, making coffee, running errands, etc.

When we meet her in the morning she’s frowning and she continues to frown throughout the entire film, although she doesn’t seem to have any reason to frown at this point, and, frankly, even at the end of the movie it’s difficult to see that she has any reason to frown.

Written and directed by Kitty Green, Jane appears monumentally unhappy. Apparently this part of the film shows sexual exploitation but if that is there it was too nebulous for me to recognize. Green apparently wants to make some kind of #MeToo message about women being exploited, but this is not the way to do it. Just because a newcomer is kind of ignored by all the men workers does not mean that there is sexual harassment going on. Any new hire to a mundane position is basically nobody and it takes time to establish oneself.

About halfway through, one of her tasks is to take a new hire (Kristine Froseth) to an assistant’s job, a beautiful young woman, to a hotel. Later she is told that her boss (never seen) is apparently at the hotel with the new hire, although she doesn’t know that for sure. This alerts her ultra-sensitive anschauung and she reports it to a guy who is apparently IR, although he’s not identified.

The concept is ludicrous. To think that a new hire (she’s been at the job for only five weeks) would get upset suspecting that her boss (the big boss of the company) is having sex with a new hire and would report that to someone who reports to the big boss is beyond the realm of reason. Does Green suggest here that it is Jane’s responsibility to take action if she thinks that the boss is having sex with a new hire? If she thinks that’s what’s happening and she doesn’t like it, she can quit. I didn’t see anything in this film that indicated that the big boss was hitting on her or sexually exploiting her.

So what’s the message Green is sending? That all women should take immediate action if they have vague suspicions that their boss is taking sexual advantage of someone else? In this movie the new hire seems happy and satisfied. But Jane isn’t.

There is no denouement. The film just ends as she goes home at the end of the day. By equating mere suspicions with horrific Harvey Weinstein-type activity, this movie bolsters and encourages the kind of gestapo-type thinking inspired by the #MeToo Movement that threatens to make society unlivable.  By doing so, it diminishes Weinstein-type activity, and enables/encourages things like the ridiculous fallacious allegations against Brett Kavanaugh.