I am Helen Kaplow, writing as Helen Highly: I'm a little bit high. ...highly suspect ...highly sensitive ....highly enthusiastic ...highly educated ...highly humbled ...highly intoxicated? ...highly likely.
When not posting articles here or at IndieNYC.com, I am being a culture vulture in my adopted home of New York City.
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by Guest Contributor, Ron Simon (w/ Comments by HelenHighly)
Note: This review of Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project was originally published 4/27/2019, as part of my coverage of the Tribeca Film Festival. It has been updated for the national theatrical release of the film, beginning 11/15/2019 at New York’s Metrograph Theater.
Television thrives on the neurotic lunacy of hoarders, but rarely do we experience the passion and purpose of a methodical collector, who really made a difference. Matt Wolf’s masterful documentary, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Projecttakes us into the visionary psychic and cluttered physical worlds of a woman who turned her acquiring fury into a unique archive of contemporary history. Recorder had its world premiere at Tribeca Film Festival 2019.
Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project poster
Marion Stokes was obsessed with how the media framed the crucial issues of the day. From the Iranian Hostage Crisis in November 1979 until her death during the Sandy Hook School Shootings in December 2012, she secretly recorded various news channels twenty-four hours a day. Stokes amassed over 70,000 videotapes, maintaining a record of how television interpreted or misrepresented events. But Stokes herself remained very much of an enigma, with director Wolf relating her incredible legacy through stories of her son and assistants.
Born poor in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, the African American Stokes found her calling as a librarian. But her professional career was scuttled because of her Communist leanings. She became active in progressive causes, producing a local Philly series Input in the late sixties, which was a revelation in local television and an impressive accomplishment for a Black woman of that era. Input provided a platform for citizens, academics and activists to debate frankly about social justice, race, and culture. (Clips can be found here.) Marion also found an intellectual partner in the show’s host John Stokes, a wealthy white philanthropist. The excitement of the duo sharing ideas on this program is palpable.
Stokes and Marion became married partners in life, and he underwrote her technological curiosity, moving her beyond newspaper and book stockpiling. Always the librarian, she was gripped with innovative ways to share information. Although she never sent an email or used the Internet, she amassed hundreds of Apple computers. But video recording was her mission, having tapes carted to her apartment on ritzy Rittenhouse Square in anonymous black bags.
VHS tapes in the Marion Stokes collection
There is little existent footage of Marion outside Input, but her archives speak volumes. Stokes planned every outing so that she could be home in six hours to change a VHS tape. Wolf creatively uses images from her off-air recordings to perhaps probe her subconscious. Using her tapes, he creates a mosaic of how the major networks initially broadcast news of 9/11. It is chilling how silly morning news suddenly became sober. Stokes’ archive gives us the perspective to compare the instantaneous reactions of several news gatherers grappling with live events.
Stokes’ story has been passed around via a 2013 Fast Company article, which inspired Wolf to make the film. Her taped treasures found a home at the Internet Archive, which is making the contents available online*. Her preservation of local news programs in Philadelphia and Boston is particularly invaluable for researchers.
Internet Archive
Wolf’s illuminating documentary is part detective work to uncover an unconventional life and part love story of two individuals devoted to preserve that which everyone else takes for granted. Stokes was an activist-archivist and her tenacity of holding on to our media past can only be completed by future historians. Stokes lived a life well saved.
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* But note that none of Marion Stokes’s recorded footage is identified as hers; there is no indication that any of her archival materials were collected by her, which HelenHighly thinks is a little odd, if not Highly Odd. I guess this answers the question “What’s the difference between a hoarder and a collector?” Answer: an archive — an index or log by which to sort, manage and identify what has been saved. If Marion had created an index system, then the Internet Archive would not have had to make one of their own (and in the process, make the entire collection their own).
Helen Highly Compelled to Comment:
Takes one to know one!
Ron Simon is Senior Curator for Television for Paley Center for Media, and as a devoted archivist and historian (and possible obsessive hoarder), he surely sees a kindred spirit in Marion Stokes. His ability to understand the extraordinary historical significance of what Marion created speaks to his expert insight. His admiration of her speaks perhaps to something else, more personal.
I find it interesting and odd that Ron sees a romantic love story behind the film’s pained narration by Marion’s long-suffering son Michael and her husband John’s reported fear of Marion learning of any interaction he had with his deserted daughter from a previous marriage. Marion’s son Michael Metelis was born to her first husband, who is seen in the film speaking of Marion’s “withering criticism” and her making it nearly impossible for him to maintain a relationship with his young son.
Marion Stokes at home in Recorder
In Michael’s caring for the things his mother left behind — things she seemed to care about more than she did him, the emotion that was “palpable” to me was that of a neglected and rejected son still trying to please his deceased, controlling mother. Helen Highly Cynical suggests that the only love she sensed was between Marion and John’s money. My impression is that she managed to recruit John into her cult of one. But maybe I don’t understand the unique passion that beats in the hearts of hoarders.
Engrossing as the film is, there is no joy in it, nor in Marion’s compulsive collecting. The documentary portrays a reclusive woman who was so suspicious of the world that she secretly recorded using multiple TVs and VCRs and organized her life around changing the VHS tapes — not even trusting TIVO to know what she was recording. In the film, her personal chauffeur remembers Mrs. Stokes by her strict rules of “no talking” and “no touching.” Usually I am thrilled by stories of craziness giving birth to genius, but there was no brilliance in Marion’s obsession – only a dark world view against the flickering of TV tubes.
Savvy director Matt Wolf paints of complex portrait of a complicated woman, and it becomes something like a Rorschach test for viewers — seeing what you take away from it all. Any way you look at it, this is a fascinating and startling film. And Ron is clearly right to recognize the highly important story it tells about modern American history and the nature of television. The human story… that is something much more murky. But of course, that is what makes it so compelling. Despite the disturbing darkness, Helen Highly Recommends Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project.
It’s great to live in New York City, land of film festivals. Following the two biggies, Tribeca Film Festival and New York Film Festival, is the country’s biggest and best documentary film festival, DOC NYC, and this year’s 10th anniversary fest is bigger and better than ever before. It’s a tremendous opportunity for New Yorkers to view what in some cases will be your one-and-only chance to catch a film that may not find a distributor and will be here and then gone forever, and also to connect in person with more than 500 filmmakers and industry experts who will speak and otherwise participate at the festival. For those outside of New York, DOC NYC is an insightful forecast, cluing you in to what to look for that will be playing at theaters near you in the coming months or available for streaming via Netflix, HBO or elsewhere. Watch for reviews on this website with detailed recommendations and commentary (starting with my Part 2 DOC NYC article). But in the meantime, this article will offer an overview of Helen’s Pre-Fest Picks.
DOC NYC 10th Anniversary
Documentaries – The New Cinema
To say that this is the heyday of documentaries can only be a great understatement. Thanks to advancements in technology and easier access to equipment – an iPhone in every hand, more and more people are able to tell their stories with moving pictures. But having a camera doesn’t necessarily make you a “real filmmaker,” and that’s a judgment that critics will make when assessing documentaries (and a reason for you to read reviews), although in the documentary universe, sometimes a highly relevant subject will outweigh artistic merit. Home-movie docs have become almost their own genre. (See my review of 17 Blocks). At the same time, master filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese are also making docs.
Today’s world seems more serious and urgent than ever, in terms of understanding the facts and truths that surround us – demand pushing the supply of doc movies. Or is it that the more we know, the more we want to know more – supply pushing demand? Either way, this is the golden age of knowledge and awareness, perspective and insight. And it’s also a time when many filmmakers are looking backward – creating retrospectives and analyzing pieces of history, both due to a desire to learn from the past and a sentimental sense of nostalgia for what has been lost in the all the rapid changes. It’s fair to say that documentaries are the new cinema.
What to See
DOC NYC 2019 will run from November 6 – 15 and include more than 300 films and events, with 28 world premieres and 27 US premieres. Films are curated into 21 different Sections. It’s an overwhelming amount of content to contemplate, and I’ll do my best to help you sort through it. (See my Overview Part Two for a detailed breakdown of all the sections.) I would have liked to offer a catchy headline such as “Top Ten Docs to See,” but ten barely scratches the surface. Even twenty seems to leave out films that warrant a mention. So… without counting, here are the films that Helen feels Highly Compelled to suggest. I will organize my list loosely by category (or categories), to assist in matching viewers with the right movies. Although, I need to repeat here what I always say about film festivals: The best parts are the films that surprise you and that challenge your assumptions about what you think you care about, so I encourage you to at least read outside the categories that are of obvious interest to you. Because I am listing so many films (really a small percentage of films at the festival, but still), I will mark my MOST recommended with asterisks. And I confess that I also recommend a few other documentaries that seem relevant, even if not part of the DOC NYC festival.
“Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band”
(Special Events: Opening Night Film and unofficially Sonic Cinema, otherwise known as Music Movies)
Section Note: The official DOC NYC section is “Special Events,” so that’s where you will find it listed, but for your information I am also identifying it as a movie about music, which the festival calls “Sonic Cinema.”
Helen Highly Recommends this documentary film based on the story of The Band (Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson). The Band originally formed as The Hawk, a backing band for rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins but came to prominence during its time backing Bob Dylan on tour and later grew into a legend in its own right, widely credited with being on the forefront of three different musical revolutions. The Band was one of the first rock groups to appear on the cover of Time. This is one of the few films I’ve already seen as of this posting, so I can to tell you more than the official synopsis. (It seems I just went ahead and wrote my review. Here it is.) If you are in New York and are able: Go see it. Otherwise, keep your ear to the ground for when Magnolia begins its national theatrical run early next year.
As both music films and biopics go, Once Were Brothers is a Must-See.
Note: I feel I must qualify that statement by divulging that I am neither a music historian nor expert. I will bet that there are others who will view this film differently. So, this is a Helen Highly Impressionable review. I am not a source of music intelligence, but I do know movies and this film easily won me over. But don’t take it from me; take it from Martin Scorsese.
Executive producers Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer give this film a pedigree that sets it apart from the average music-history documentary and elevates it on every level – including a well-paced and smartly arranged narrative structure, some amazing archival footage and a cast of music legends to provide commentary. Plus, Robertson’s own intelligence and reflection make this seem like a truly valuable document about the history of American music. (The film is based somewhat on Robertson’s 2016 memoir, Testimony, which covered the first three decades of his life, but this documentary goes both deeper and wider.) First-time feature-length film director Daniel Roher may have had something to do with the film’s success, but he surely gets a ride on some long coattails.
“Testimony” by Robbie Robertson
Once Were Brothers is an ideal film to open the DOC NYC festival due to its multi-dimensional timeliness, most notably its connection to Martin’s Scorsese’s new mob epic, The Irishman, currently in theaters, coming to Netflix next and one of the hottest films of the year. (Click here to read IndieNYC’s Irishman review.) In addition to Scorsese executive producing this film (and filming The Band’s spectacular 1976 farewell concert and turning that into a documentary – The Last Waltz), Robbie Robertson created the score for Scorsese’s latest film (in addition to four others since 1980). The tight Scorsese/Robertson relationship seems unlikely and is fascinating to me. Scorsese also participates in this film as a commentator and gives a detailed description of how he shot The Band’s famous, swan-song concert – what camera angles he used, why he chose not to show the audience, etc. This film feels very much like a collaboration of two great artists and thinkers and surely that’s what helps to make it so good. Plus, there’s the music.
There is even more to the timeliness of this film: At about the same time as this documentary first premiered at Toronto International Film Festival, Robertson also released his sixth solo album, Sinematic, and some of its tracks, including the Van Morrison collaboration “I Hear You Paint Houses,” are part of his score for The Irishman. Plus, coinciding with the documentary’s premiere, it was announced that The Band’s seminal sophomore album – declared “better than the Beatles’ Abbey Road” when it was first released – is getting a deluxe reissue later this year. That album includes two of the important songs from this documentary, “Up on Cripple Creek” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” both rich with cinematic stories and eccentric Americana characters that are explored in the film. “The Weight” –perhaps The Band’s most significant song and number 41 on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time – also figures prominently in the film, with tales about its inspiration and influences.
“The film excels in its humanity. It is about the great possibilities and painful frailties of human nature.”
All this is to say that this documentary is about the music of The Band as much as it is about the people in and around The Band. It manages to be a thoughtful, candid and compelling biopic of Robbie Robertson, The Band’s lead songwriter and guitarist (more on this later), in addition to exploring the uniquely close and crucial relationships – for better and worse – between The Band’s members, while balancing all that with broader historical perspective and commentary from other major musicians, including Eric Clapton, Bruce Springsteen, Peter Gabriel and Bob Dylan, which may be worth the price of admission in itself. (And music. Did I mention lots of great music?)
So… for you Bob Dylan fans, yes indeed you will get your Dylan fix in this film. A hefty and heartfelt amount of time is spent recounting The Band’s infamously troubled tour with Bob Dylan (in which they were booed across America and throughout Europe) as well as their move to Woodstock, NY due to Dylan’s invitation and the vitally important time they all spent huddled together up there changing the very nature of popular music while creating “the basement tapes” in their little pink house. Yes, car crashes, heroin and romance too.
Bob Dylan and The Band
You don’t have to be a music history buff or even a particular fan of The Band’s music to appreciate this movie. It may also be true that being a serious music history buff may diminish your appreciation of this film. I get the impression that not every tale in this film is being told for the first time. Perhaps more importantly, three of the five Band members are now dead, and one in relative obscurity, so this film sometimes has the tone of a last-man-standing version of history. It is part biography but also part personal memoir of one man – Robbie Robertson, although he is one super-talented and articulate fellow. To my eyes, the film seems to bend over backward to be fair, but if you’re looking for an earth-shaking confession of some sort, you won’t find it here. We learn that members of The Band had some dispute about the equitable distribution of income and some other unresolved tensions, and while the film does not reveal any long-hidden secrets, it thoughtfully addresses the issues and moves on to what Robertson thinks is more important, and I believe the average film-goer will agree.
The film excels in its humanity. It is about the great possibilities and painful frailties of human nature. And it’s about the process of creativity – what it is, how it works, how it falls apart. It’s full of music. It’s full of wisdom. It’s full of inspiration (despite the profound sadness).
Once Were Brothers is pretty much the direct opposite of The Quiet One, if anyone remembers that documentary from earlier this year, about bassist Bill Wyman, founding member the Rolling Stones. (Click here for myQuiet One review.) That film also featured its lead character speaking extensively about his past – a sort of end-of-career self-assessment, an attempt to break through the veil of myth and mystery that had long shadowed him. But The Quiet One failed in every way this film succeeds; that film was shallow where this one goes deep and that film evaded controversy where this one explores it.
For example, The Quiet One didn’t even mention any tension between Wyman and the rest of the Stones, but this film discusses the late-in-the-game internal problems at some length. (It never does mention that before the final, official break-up, the group toured briefly without Robbie, to mixed reviews, but at that point he was technically “on a break” and waiting for the others to clean up their acts, which they never did. One might credit Robertson for taking the high road and not dwelling on their failures or contributing to gossip. This is more a movie that attempts to understand success.) Both films have Eric Clapton doling out praise, but this one includes an amusing and telling moment where Robertson and Clapton were out of sync and Clapton passes some small judgement. Both Robertson and Wyman poignantly tell us their childhood tale of how they acquired their first guitar. Both men’s careers share significant milestones and tragedies. But their memoir films couldn’t be more different.
Robbie Robertson goes deep
I compared The Quiet One to Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape, feeling as if I were watching Wyman fade into a confused, disappointed silence and this would be the last we heard from him. In this case, we learn that Robertson is still very much alive and well and working productively, and he has managed to transform his past pain and success into new artistry. He’s mentally inquisitive and emotionally connected and speaks with a surprising humility that seems genuine to me. It might be worth noting that Robertson’s wife – the same one he originally married in the early days of The Band – is said to now be an addiction therapist, which I would guess helped him to be as self-aware and honest as he is in this film. Wyman is on wife #3. Just saying.
Helen Highly Recommends Once Were Brothers. I don’t think there’s a trailer yet, so get a taste by listening to the “Once Were Brothers” song from Robbie Robertson’s new album:
(Shortlist Features and unofficially Sonic Cinema)
Note About the Short List: Each year, DOC NYC’s programming team picks 15 films for their Short List for Features, representing the best of the year. These films are distinguished by festival honors, critical accolades, audience enthusiasm and strong distribution. For the past eight years, the festival has showcased the film that went on to win the Oscar, making the Short List a strong prognosticator for awards season and a category worth exploring. I am personally also suggesting that this film would topically fall into the festival’s Sonic Cinema section, although don’t look for it there on the website or in the festival book.
From Roger Ross Williams, the director of the Oscar-nominated Life, Animated, comes this rich history of Harlem’s Apollo Theater. For 85 years, this cultural landmark has played host to legendary African American artists and to newcomers willing to take the stage on the venue’s famed Amateur Night. For many years The Apollo was the only theater in New York that would hire black entertainers. The Apollo served as a launchpad and/or artistic sanctuary for Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick, Gladys Knight, the Jackson 5, Stevie Wonder, James Brown, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and more (and you get to hear them all in this movie, including awesome footage of Ella Fitzgerald’s Amateur Night performance when she was 15 years old and Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit”). Framed around the inaugural staging of Ta-Nehisi Coates‘ acclaimed book, Between the World and Me, this Apollo portrait demonstrates the pivotal role that the arts play in the African American experience. (Common’s exceptional rap as part of Between the World and Me helps bring the film from the historical realm into present-day.)
In an interview with the film’s director, The Guardian, asked how hard it was finding archival materials about the Apollo’s history, noting that the struggles around archiving black history are well documented. Williams answered, “Oh, the challenge was massive. Lisa Cortez, who was a producer on this film and a Harlem resident, she would search through boxes in people’s basements. She would find moldy tapes and photos. It was really a treasure hunt. Especially because the Apollo had previously fallen into bankruptcy and disrepair and its basement in the 70s was filled with sewage. We don’t document black history as well as we should. That’s why I’m glad this film serves as its own document.”
“They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.” — Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Apollo is an HBO Documentary film, so you can wait and see it streaming, but if you have a chance to see it in a theater, do it. It’s full of enthralling archival footage and is a huge movie in every sense. You will want to stand up and applaud and best to do that in a theater rather than your living room.
Inside the Apollo Theater
The Apollo is another film I’ve already seen (at Tribeca Film Festival) so I can testify: This is much more than an astounding collection of music from many of America’s greatest and most influential talents, and more than surprising and poignant anecdotes about an iconic place (although some of the details revealed about Sydney Cohen and Morris Sussman, who ran The Apollo, are pure gold); it is as good as any documentary gets – entertaining, jaw-dropping, heart-throbbing, gut-wrenching, uplifting and enormously relevant. It’s almost an investigation film in the way it exposes untold truths. The effect on me felt earth-shaking. (Go ahead and see if you can make it through without welling up a tear or gasping once; I bet you can’t. See if you can watch it and not tell someone else about it; you will want to share this.)
Kind of like that ESPN documentary OJ: Made in America (which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary, by the way, and if you haven’t seen it, you still should), you think you basically know this story but you don’t. It’s American history they didn’t teach you in school but is crucial that you understand because it’s not over yet; it’s as much current event as it is history. And it’s also a personal journey. It works from every angle. And no, it is not preachy for even one moment. No matter who you are, it’s important that you see this film, and I also can guarantee you will be delighted that you did.
New News:It’s Out! Opened Nov. 6 on HBO! Go watch it immediately! Here’s the trailer:
“The Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese”
(Special Events: Visionaries and unofficially Sonic Cinema)
Section Note: This is part of DOC NYC’s “Tribute to Lifetime Achievement,” thus the “Visionaries” section. But topically it’s a music movie.
In 1975, Bob Dylan embarked on a two-year tour that became legendary. Now Martin Scorsese draws upon footage shot on that tour to create a documentary as unique as Dylan, with fictional elements interwoven. (Yeah — fictional elements interwoven, so it’s maybe not formally a “real documentary,” but close enough. It’s Scorsese, and Dylan, after all.) The film includes a parade of iconic figures including Allen Ginsberg, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot and Patti Smith. New York Times critic Manohla Dargis wrote, “It’s stirring how Dylan keeps coming back to film, with its beautiful masks and lies, and it is a gift that Scorsese has been there ready to meet him.” Rolling Thunder captures the troubled spirit of America in 1975 and the joyous music that Dylan performed during the fall of that year. Part documentary, part concert film, part fever dream, this film is a one of a kind experience, from a master filmmaker.
Why have I put this on my list? They had me at Dylan and Scorsese. Add in Patti Smith and “fever dream” and I am all in. Can’t wait to see it. (It’s ridiculous that I haven’t already; it’s a Netflix film. But surely best to see it in a theater if you can.)
Section Note: “Sonic Cinema” is DOC NYC’s official section for this film, but I am also calling it out as part of my own category – Literary World films, because that’s a special interest of mine and a few of this festival’s films intrigue me as touching on that subject, in this case journalism.
Cheekily declaring itself “America’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll Magazine,” Creem launched in 1969 Detroit as an irreverent upstart to rival the pre-eminent rock publication of the day, Rolling Stone. Scrappy, subversive and gleefully puerile, the magazine soon became wildly popular, thanks in large part to its forward-thinking publisher, Barry Kramer, and its gonzo journalist, Lester Bangs. Boy Howdy! offers a riotous look back on Creem‘s history, the dysfunctional family of outsiders behind its pages and its lasting impact on music and culture.
I mostly am including it on my list because it’s about journalism, and it seems like a fun angle on the music theme.
“Scandalous,” the National Enquirer documentary
***Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirer
(American Perspectives and unofficially Literary World)
Section Note: The “American Perspectives” section is intended to “Explore the USA.” How this is more USA than the Creem story, I do not understand. So, I am adding my own category – Literary World.
At the forefront of tabloid journalism for more than 60 years, the National Enquirer has left an indelible mark on American culture. Its brand of attention-grabbing headlines and sensationalistic coverage captivates curious readers even as it stretches the limits of truth. Director Mark Landsman delves into the shocking yet true story of the most infamous newspaper in US history, detailing its wild history and its surprising, continuing role in shaping what the news has become and what the enquiring public wants to know.
In my mind, the recent Donald Trump tie-in makes this all the more enticing and relevant. A full review of this film to come, but in the meantime: I saw the film and it’s spectacular. It’s way smarter than one would expect, with captivating settings and cinematography. It’s fun and politically important. And this movie opens in theaters Friday Nov. 15th, so go friggin see it! It’s really an appropriately bizarrely gorgeous movie — something you want to see in a theater.
Jazz bassist Buster Williams‘ storied career includes playing with past greats John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Sarah Vaughn, Miles Davis and Nancy Wilson, amongst others. Spend some time with Williams and his present-day collaborators—icons Benny Golson, Herbie Hancock, Carmen Lundy, Kenny Barron and more—as they jam, tell tales and create beautiful music. Buster Williams Bass to Infinity is a toe-tapping film celebrating the soul and magic of jazz.
I am excited by the prospect of this jazz film because it seems it might be the perfect companion piece to another jazz film I recently saw. ***Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes was excellent and enlightening but more a jazz-improvisation conversation than a musical film, and it seems Buster Williams Bass to Infinity includes lots of music from some of the same legendary musicians. Director Adam Kahan told me, “This is a true music doc that celebrates the music! No smoking gun, no drugs, and no one murdered – just a beautiful story, spirit, a deep cultural contribution.” Sounds like a reason to show up. (And I am told some heavy-hitters from the jazz world will be at the premiere.)
But I will also take this opportunity for Helen to Highly Recommend (again) the other documentary for jazz lovers: Blue Note Records screened at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, had a brief theatrical run and is now available for purchase on DVD and Blue-ray and streaming on Amazon and iTunes. (Click here to read IndieNYC’s reviewand click here to read me discussing it as a “Freedom Film.”) Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes explores the unique vision behind the iconic jazz record label. Through rare archival footage, current recording sessions, conversations with Blue Note artists and lots of way-cool album covers, the film reveals a powerful mission, details a visual as well as musical legacy and illuminates the vital connections between jazz and hip hop.
One of the most important record labels in the history of jazz — and, by extension, that of American music — Blue Note Records has been home to such groundbreaking artists as Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Bud Powell and Art Blakey, as well as present-day luminaries like Robert Glasper, Ambrose Akinmusire and Norah Jones. Founded in New York in 1939 by German Jewish refugees Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, the history of Blue Note Records goes beyond the landmark recordings, encompassing the pursuit of musical freedom, the conflict between art and commerce and the idea of music as a transformative and revolutionary force.
New York City. 1966. Truman Capote at his Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel.
(Special Event: Closing Night Film and unofficially Literary World and New York Stories)
Section Note: The festival officially categorizes this as a Special Event because it is the Closing Night Film, but it also topically belongs in the festival’s New York Stories section, which they call “Metropolis,” as well as Portraits and my own Literary World category).
Truman Capote was a singular figure in the 20th century; he’s been called a “candied tarantula.” He presented himself unapologetically on television at a time when most gay men took pains to avoid scrutiny. His books Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood were bestsellers and critical darlings and both adapted into Hollywood films. Now The Capote Tapes delivers a fresh portrait that reinvigorates our understanding of this vital writer. Among the film’s revelations are newly discovered tapes of interviews that The Paris Review co-founder George Plimpton conducted with Capote’s friends after his death.
The film dwells strongly on Capote’s final, uncompleted novel, Answered Prayers, which set out to viciously (at least nakedly) expose Manhattan’s social aristocracy after he befriended them. Plimpton’s tapes shed new light on what happened. They are interwoven with Capote’s notorious television appearances and insightful interviews with the likes of Dick Cavett. One unexpected interview is with Capote’s assistant, Kate Harrington, who introduces herself as his adopted daughter.
I’ve seen this one too, and Helen Highly Recommends The Capote Tapes. The film is the epitome of “meta”; both it and its subject are gossipy and scandalous, with unpublished tapes revealing insight into Capote’s unpublished book. It’s also a great writer’s film – getting into the nitty gritty of Capote’s research and writing habits, his literary struggles and inspirations. Plus, it’s a terrific old-New-York high-society flick. If you enjoy vintage, fictional films like All About Eve, The Women or even High Society, this one has all the bitchy glamour and it’s a true story (and it goes all the way from the Plaza Hotel to Studio 54). And finally, this film begins and ends with shots of a reel-to-reel tape recorder, which puts it squarely within my Archival Movie category, about which I have written briefly but intend to soon publish a more thorough and thoughtful essay, exploring the recent prevalence and significance of archival movies.
(Metropolis and unofficially Sonic Cinema and Portraits)
Section Note: Remember, “Metropolis” means “New York Stories.”
Turning trauma into precise and angry feminist rock, American singer, writer and actress Lydia Lunch helped birth the No Wave music scene in the late 1970s and early ’80s, and she’s still killing it today. Fellow No Wave pioneer Beth B constructs a lively portrait of this innovative performer, whose confrontational artistry resonates loudly in today’s feminist landscape. Critics, filmmakers, musicians and friends discuss the relevance of Lydia’s brilliantly vitriolic world.
As a new New Yorker, I dig New York stories, especially about the fierce old days in the 70s, with powerful female performers like Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson and Nico. I don’t know about Lydia Lunch but am eager to find out, especially if she is actually “still killing it today.” Plus, a photographer friend of mine says he has photos in the film, and he’s cool so… let’s all go see it. (Or let’s at least all keep an eye on it and wait for it to come to some streaming platform.)
(Special Event: Centerpiece Film and unofficially Investigations and Portraits)
Section Note: Just want to let you know that there is an official DOC NYC section called “Investigations,” including films that “reveal real-life tales.” This film would seem to fit into that category if not for its status as the Centerpiece film. It also qualifies as a Portraits film.
Bikram Choudhury was at the forefront of popularizing yoga in North America and around the world. An Indian immigrant with a Beverly Hills base, Choudhury was a born entertainer, known for dressing in nothing more than a black speedo and a Rolex. His teaching style was tough love sprinkled with salty language and punctuated by spontaneous bursts of singing. He built a franchise empire with hundreds of Bikram studios around the world. Filmmaker Eva Orner traces Choudhury from his rise in the 1970s to his disgrace in accusations of rape and sexual harassment in more recent years. She taps a vast trove of archival footage that demonstrates Choudhury’s charm and offers clues to his dark side. Over the years, Choudhury’s story has received steady press coverage, but there is a fresh power in this telling, with key figures going on camera for the first time including his longtime lawyer, Micki Jafa-Bodden.
The film raises larger questions about the nature of leaders and followers and the corruption of messianic figures. To this day, Choudhury has evaded prosecution and continues to attract yoga students from all over the world, bringing added tension to this rigorous investigation. It’s a Netflix film.
Okay, one more film from the Investigations category because it seems so bizarre. Remember, this is documentary, not fantasy: Welcome to the House of Latitude, where absolute discretion is demanded in exchange for entry into a mysterious social experiment in the form of an elaborate immersive experience. Drawing a community of curiosity seekers, this secret society becomes a way of life for some, putting increasing pressure on the organizers to maintain this sophisticated and fantastical parallel world. From the minds who inspired AMC’s upcoming series Dispatches From Elsewhere, In Bright Axion weaves an intriguing cautionary tale about the unforeseen consequences of embracing the unknown. (Note: I recommend another cult-themed film in my Part 2 article — Blessed Child, about a woman who grew up in the Moonie “religion.”)
(Art + Design and unofficially Politics and China)
Section Note: Politics and China are my own categories. DOC NYC has a section called New World Order, for “today’s most urgent issues” (politics), although they formally do not include this film in that section.
In 2013 artist Ai Weiwei and curator Cheryl Haines created an interactive art installation on San Francisco’s Alcatraz Island. Formerly imprisoned by the Chinese government for his art and political activism, Ai uses his experiences as inspiration. Through a unique combination of kites, Legos and postcards, Ai and Haines pay tribute to prisoners of conscience across the globe. Visually impressive and uplifting, this film is a celebration of freedom of speech, human rights and the power of art.
I haven’t seen it yet but it interests me for a few reasons: 1) I enjoy films that depict art and become part of the art experience in the process (such as Walking on Water – click to see my review); 2) I am particularly interested in political art because I think that is when art is most relevant and overtly necessary; and 3) I am especially concerned about the current, increasingly tense political situation in China and Hong Kong, which highlights the ongoing fight for freedom of speech around the world. Also, under President Trump, freedom of speech is on the verge of becoming an endangered human right in the United States, so it’s worth looking at how serious an issue it is to those who live without it.
Section Note: “Viewfinders” is described as films with “distinct directorial visions,” although it looks to me like what would otherwise be called Foreign Films, in this case, Chinese. And I added in my own “Comedy” category because somewhere in all the complicated literature I recall reading that the festival made it a point to include some “documentaries with a sense of humor,” which is an idea I welcome.
Documentary comedies are a rarity, even more so from China. But Weijun Chen has proven himself a master with such mirthful films as Please Vote for Me and The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World. Now he finds comedy in Wuhan, the biggest city in Central China. We watch over a year as the Urban Management Bureau tries to displace a cantankerous street vendor. Chen brings out the humanity of everyone, even when they’re pushed to their limits.
“Our Time Machine” movie poster
This film interests me because it’s a comedy and also because it’s Chinese. There were recently two Chinese fictional films screened at New York Film Festival, which I will soon be writing about, and I also wrote about a Chinese documentary at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, which Helen Highly Recommends – ***Our Time Machine(which does not yet have a distributor but is still doing the festival circuit, so keep an eye out, and click here for myOur Time Machine review).
China has recently created new, much stricter censorship rules for filmmakers and actually pulled two films last-minute from recent international film festivals, for political reasons, so the status of Chinese filmmaking, especially indie filmmaking, is an open question. We can expect to be seeing fewer films from China, so best to appreciate the ones able to make it out now. I anticipate this will depict China in a positive light consistent with the government’s values, which does not make it lose credibility but the political restraints are worth considering while watching.
As long as I’ve ventured into the foreign film (Viewfinders) category, it’s worth mentioning this Polish film, which looks strangely unconventional and like a bit of a genre-bender. Fires, heart attacks, acts of madness and even suicide—these are the consequences of the halny wind. This destructive windstorm regularly wreaks havoc in Poland’s Tatra Mountains, impacting the lives of several characters and their animal companions. Brilliantly photographed and with special attention to soundscapes, Michal Bielawski‘s mysterious tale of ecological revenge pushes the documentary form and keeps you on the edge of your seat while portraying humanity at odds with nature. Wow, right? Sounds like something that will activate all your senses and make you think.
“Corpus Christi” Polish film
And as long as I’m talking about an unconventional Polish film, I need to just type the title ***Corpus Christi– Poland’s submission for Foreign Film at the Academy Awards. I saw it just recently and it blew my mind. I plan to write about it but in the meantime, if you get a chance to see it… go. It’s not a documentary but is strangely based on a true story. It’s the perfect example of the kind of movie I would assume I would not like, but it grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me hard. I am still processing it. Subject matter becomes a non-issue when a brilliant film is a brilliant film. I think maybe Polish filmmakers are having a moment. So, put both The Wind and Corpus Christi on your to-watch list.
Section Note: Continuing on this foreign film tangent, I will explain that DOC NYC has another confusing category called “Winner’s Circle,” which are “international award winners.” These are films that have won major festival awards, in many cases from Oscar-qualifying festivals but might fly below the radar of American audiences (such as Corpus Christi, above, although that is not part of DOC NYC). Films in this category are the prime examples of the hidden gems that good film festivals unearth and the reason to pay attention.
Filmmaker Hassan Fazili documents his family’s journey as they’re forced to flee their home in Afghanistan under threat of death. We follow him, his wife Fatima and their daughters Nagris and Zahra over several years and through several countries. They travel with few possessions besides the cell phones used to shoot this remarkable documentary. Indiewire writes, “The film is designed as a homeopathic antidote to apathy; it… renders visible what so many of us tend not to see.”
I will add that there are many films at this year’s festival that deal with the global refugee crisis in a variety of ways. My list of suggested films disproportionately represents them (okay, mostly ignores them), perhaps because I am so often confronted with the great injustice of it in the news and am weary of feeling powerless against the devastation. It’s not fair but it’s my gut reaction. I include this film in my list because it seems to have the flavor of a road trip movie, and I’ve always liked road trip stories, especially ones that take me through multiple countries. Also, this is one of those new documentaries made mostly from cell-phone footage, which makes it current on an aesthetic level. So, on that basis, I pick this one film to represent all the others with similar themes, most of which I assume are very worth watching. But I suggest we start with this one.
Charming and engaging, with a youthful curiosity well into his 80s, Elliott Erwitt has always let his photos speak for themselves. His iconic black-and-white shots of presidents, popes, celebrities and everyday folks span over six decades and multiple countries. Narrated by his assistant, this film takes us inside his extensive photo archives and along with Elliott as he travels to Cuba to take photos for his newest book and exhibition.
This 62-minute film will be screening with Tasha Van Zandt’s One Thousand Stories: The Making of a Mural(14 min.) Follow artist JR in the creation of his first video mural project, “The Chronicles of San Francisco.”
Why is this on my list? Well… just photos. I love photography (and archives), and I am intrigued by the global perspective. There is also another photo-filled film in this festival that I have already seen and Helen will Highly Recommend, next:
(Masters and unofficially Art + Design and Literary World)
Section Note: DocNYC has officially put this in their “Masters” category, which they define as “films by nonfiction auteurs.” Not sure exactly why that needs its own category separate from all the other nonfiction films, but if you’re looking for it, you will find it in that special category. For your information, I am also suggesting that it would fit within the festival’s Art + Design category due to its focus on photography and within my own Literary World category, due to its focus on journalism.
Composed almost entirely of newspaper photographs, Letter to the Editor is New York native Alan Berliner’s personal journey through 40 years of pictorial history culled from daily printed editions of his beloved hometown paper, The New York Times. Berliner approaches documentary like a collagist and memoirist in films such as Nobody’s Business and First Cousin, Once Removed (2013 DocNYC Short List), and this film is his greatest project.
Part musings of a self-described news junkie, part heartfelt elegy for the death of the printed newspaper in the digital age, the film is filled with observations, stories, opinions, humor and idiosyncratic reflections on the news—good, bad and fake, past, present and future. This is a playful and profound visual essay commenting on photojournalism and what will be lost if print newspapers go away. It will air in December on HBO.
I’ve seen Letter to the Editor and will write a more detailed article about it later, but Helen Highly Recommends this astonishing film that portrays Berliner’s roughly 70,000 photographs (!). And this film will certainly figure prominently in my upcoming article about Archival Movies. In the film, Berliner states that he is creating the movie for an audience in the future, telling them “I am writing from a time in history when we are about to lose a source of news you have probably never heard of – a newspaper.” He talks about how newspapers are “on the verge of extinction.” So, it’s a film about news as much as it’s about photographs.
It’s also a film about the nature of archiving and the compulsion to keep a record of what is happening. Berliner talks about the 1,600 categories he used to organize his photos and the obsession it became for him. In some ways, I felt he was articulating what Marion Stokes might have said in ***Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project if she had been alive to narrate her own story. Stokes collected over 70,000 videotapes of televised news, recording 24 hours a day for over 30 years, and hers is an extraordinary tale. (Click here for our Recorder review.)
Marion Stokes in “Recorder”
Stokes was in many ways quite a different personality than Berliner, but there are significant connections. Coincidentally (or not), they both began their collections about the time of the Iranian hostage crisis, inspired by the news coverage it was getting. That documentary premiered at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival and is scheduled to open November 15th at New York’s Metrograph Theater, so absolutely go see that film while you have a chance. After the Metrograph, it is scheduled to play for limited runs at select theaters around the country. Click here to go to theRecorder: The Marion Stokes Project website, where they list all the upcoming screenings and dates.
Pierre Cardin forever changed fashion in multiple ways. He freed women from figure-molded clothes and introduced new shapes, styles and colors. He was a pioneer in crossing over from haute couture to ready-to-wear. And he brought his designs to multiple products beyond clothes. From the premiere at the Venice Film Festival, Variety wrote, “This is a deliciously entertaining and perceptive take on Cardin’s life and how he shaped both the silhouette of fashion and branding in the fashion world and beyond.”
I enjoy a good fashion film. Fashion is a metaphor for so many things. I don’t know yet if this is good film, but if Variety gave it a thumbs up, I’m gonna guess it’s worth seeing. And then I will add it to my ongoing list of Recommended Fashion Films, which never go out of style (click here to read my Fashion Film List).
Okay, one more art doc. Believe it or not, I am only listing the ones I can’t resist. This year’s festival is brimming over with them; it’s an art-lover’s paradise.
Clyfford Still’s striking compositions and idiosyncratic personality made him one of the preeminent figures of the American Abstract Expressionist movement. Through interviews and previously unreleased recordings, Still’s artistic philosophy and his relationships with contemporaries Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock are revealed. After his death, the legacy of the enigmatic artist faces further uncertainty, as museums vie to be the permanent home of the Still collection—if they can meet the strict demands of his will.
“If they can meet the strict demands of his will”?! Ooh, intriguing twist there at the end of the synopsis. I love a demanding, cantankerous artist who knows his own mind and wants to control everything even after his death. I want to see this.
Section Note: Just want you to be aware that there is an entire section in the festival called “Portraits,” featuring “singular individuals” – films otherwise known as biopics. Also of interest is one about Cory Booker, one about Mike Tyson and one about a woman with Multiple Personality Disorder (with a twist). The Portraits film I’ve chosen seems attractively odd and compelling and of course I like the literary angle.
For 30 years, Terry Gilliam struggled to make a screen adaptation of Don Quixote, including an abandoned attempt chronicled in Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s 2002 documentary Lost in La Mancha. Gilliam never gave up and neither did the documentarians. He Dreams of Giants represents the culmination of all their efforts in an epic and poignant portrait. We watch Gilliam bring all his talent, obsession and humor to confronting self-doubt, the pressure to compromise and the need to realize a long-held dream.
(Shortlist Features and unofficially Natural World)
Section Note: Remember Shortlist? They’re the ones that might win an Oscar. You’ll want to have seen these. I picked this one because it seems like a beautiful nature film of the highest quality and is also highly important.
This extraordinary portrait of African elephants focuses on the matriarch Athena as she leads her extended family on a heroic journey in search of water. The sensitive story appeals to all ages with suspense, humor and hope. The stunning cinematography captures a whole ecosystem, from the majestic giant tusked mammals to the tiny dung beetles at their feet. Filmed over four years, The Elephant Queen belongs to the highest rank of films about nature. This epic story of love, loss and coming home is a timely love letter to a species that could be gone from our planet in a
Update: Okay, now I’ve seen this film, or at least enough to turn it off. It really only took hearing the first line: “Oh wise and gentle spirits…” in addition to their obnoxious screener-link policy that gave me a mere 48-hour time limit for viewing the film, required I download their software onto my computer and then sprawled my full name in giant letters across the entire bottom half of the screen (to prevent my stealing it). No worries; no interest in even watching it in full. Helen Highly Recommends you Skip this film. However, I have a much better elephant-film suggestion.
“When Lambs Become Lions,” a documentary about survival
The wonder of film festivals, as I have mentioned, is that you get a chance to see small films that may not find a distributor and will be never see again. That was the sad fate of a documentary I saw at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival and called “what every documentary aspires to be” — When Lambs Become Lions. I flat-out loved that film, and I was amazed it got so little attention and seemed to go nowhere. Well, as film-festival-miracles would have it, When Lambs Become Lions is suddenly BACK and getting a limited release in LA (starting 11/22) and NYC (starting 12/6) and hopefully a national rollout to follow.
It’s a film whose story uses elephant poaching in Africa as a setting, so it’s a would-be competitor to Elephant Queen, but Helen Highly Suggests that it is really a film about so much more than poaching; it’s about family and a fight for survival (of people, more than elephants — a human story more than a nature story). Unlike Elephant Queen, When Lambs Become Lions has no narration, no romantic scenes of elephants at sunset running in slow-motion across the plains, and it could never be mistaken for a Disney film. This documentary film tells an astoundingly strong narrative tale and plays like a thriller. It will captivate and give you a lot to think about when you leave the theater. I urge you to go see it if you possibly can. Click here to see my full review of When Lambs Become Lions (and the trailer).
In the 1980s, an Army wife-turned-glamorous party girl named Tish ruled New York City’s downtown nightlife, often out on the scene with the likes of Michael Musto. Just a few years later, after more than a decade as a woman, Tish transitioned back to being Brian. Now, in his sixties, Brian Belovitch reflects on the unique and fascinating turns his life has taken as he’s learned how to feel comfortable in his own skin.
New York just finished up with its LGBTQ film festival, NewFest. There is an endless stream of cutting-edge, brilliant, entertaining and urgently important LGBTQ films, and I would have covered that festival, but I am just barely catching my breath after New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center and there are not enough days in the week or hours in the day. But this one film found its way to DOC NYC and it’s a true stand-out. I’ve seen it and Helen Highly Recommends it. You will watch this movie and you will get it; whatever you didn’t understand before or felt you couldn’t relate to regarding “trans” people… this movie is the answer. It couldn’t be simpler. It’s a simple, straightforward story of one person and it somehow explains the entire world of humanity – the pain, the joy, the difficulty, the humor, the singular fact of being alive.
“Born to Be’ documentary at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital
And I also have the perfect companion piece for it. At NYFF, I saw Born to Be, which is sort of the technical flip-side of I’m Gonna Make You Love Me, and also unofficially a New York Story. Born to Be follows the work of Dr. Jess Ting at the groundbreaking Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery in New York City-where, for the first time ever, all transgender and gender non-conforming people have access to quality transition-related health and surgical care. With extraordinary access, this feature-length documentary takes an intimate look at how one doctor’s work impacts the lives of his patients as well as how his journey from renowned plastic surgeon to pioneering gender-affirming surgeon has led to his own transformation. Helen Highly Recommends it. I will keep you posted about distribution and where to find it.
“The Graduate”: “Just one word – plastics.”
And finally, I end my list with two DOC NYC movies about plastic. Remember that famous quote from The Graduate? Mr. McGuire: “I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Plastics. There’s a great future in plastics.” We didn’t begin to imagine how wrong he was.
Section Note: Yup, there’s an entire section of “environmentally focused films” at DOC NYC. This is only one of at least six.
Plastic, a seemingly indispensable product, has wrought all sorts of innovations, but at what cost? The plastic industry’s success depends on consumers discarding the product and purchasing new items, creating an endless supply of litter that lingers forever. Filmmaker Deia Schlosberg‘s incredibly detailed investigation into the plastic-production pipeline will shock, horrify and forever change your perception on recycling. Timely and critical, this film is a must-see for anyone who uses this infamous product.
Sure We Can is a nonprofit in Williamsburg, Brooklyn founded by a Spanish missionary as both a recycling center and a community space. Here, a diverse group of immigrants, homeless individuals and outcasts engages in work, friendship and deep thinking, forging a surrogate family. Ana, René, Malvin, Pierre and Walter discuss God, physics, loneliness and UFOs while feeding kittens, playing music and recycling, in this artful observational film with touches of magic realism. In Spanish and English.
I saved the best for last. This film looks wild and wonderful. And it’s local too – a Spanish film that takes place in Brooklyn! What could be more interesting than a movie about UFOs, kittens and recycling? And remember, Winners Circle means it’s already won awards; you know it’s gonna be great. Let’s all go see it. (Winner Circle films have a reduced ticket price of $12.)
Imagine Rain Man meets Humphrey Bogart and you’ve got the eccentric gumshoe character that Edward Norton plays in Motherless Brooklyn, a film he starred in as well as wrote, directed and produced and which has the prestigious Closing Night slot of the 2019 New York Film Festival. Norton adapted his film from Jonathan Letham’s 1999 novel of the same name, changing the book’s gritty 1999 New York setting to a painterly 1950’s New York setting – an impressively ambitious if dubious decision (on an indie budget). “What is it like to be actor, director and producer?” asks someone at the Q&A session following the press screening. “It’s efficient,” Norton says, adding “My conversations with myself go very smoothly.” He goes on to explain that he wanted his film to be less like Reservoir Dogs and more like Citizen Kane, while managing not to claim himself comparable to nor give insult to either Quentin Tarantino or Orson Wells. Norton’s intelligence, sense of humor and earnest humility are also what define his character, Lionel Essrog, and make viewers willing to follow both Edward and Lionel on their odyssey through a mysterious, sometimes-confounding maze of murder, blackmail, deception and corruption. And they and you might even come out the other side.
“This is a sprawling movie with large-scale ambitions and a design team doing a high-wire act…This is real cinema.”
Edward Norton directing and acting in “Motherless Brooklyn”
In the first scene, we are immediately confronted with the fact that Lionel suffers from Tourette’s syndrome, as we see Norton’s carefully studied depiction of the symptoms and hear Lionel tell us in voice-over, “I got threads in my head” – a metaphor that instantly connects Lionel’s mind to the complex weave of the story itself, which will unravel and tangle throughout the next 144 minutes. In defense of my opening conflation of the syndrome with the autism that afflicted Dustin Hoffman’s iconic character, I will note that according to professionals, “Tourette syndrome (TS) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) share clinical features and possibly an overlapping etiology” and each is sometimes misdiagnosed as the other. Tourette is a neurological disorder characterized by involuntary tics and vocalizations and often the compulsive utterance of obscenities or strange phrases. Not that this medical definition matters to the story.
Edward Norton has Tourette Syndrome in “Motherless Brooklyn”
What matters is that Norton has convincingly turned his neurologically impaired character into a smart, crime-solving, romantically-appealing leading man, rather than an oddball sidekick shuffling along next to handsome Tom Cruise. Lionel’s mental challenges are reminiscent of Christopher Nolan’s Memento, although this character’s problem is more grounded in reality, which makes the story more than just a thrilling conundrum; the realism of both Lionel’s ailment and the historical details of the tale create genuine gravitas. This is one of many reasons to admire this film and Edward Norton in particular, despite the movie not entirely earning a designation as “masterful.”
Edward North and Gugu Mbatha-Raw in “Motherless Brooklyn”
But Helen Highly Prefers to watch an ambitious and admirable project not completely succeed than watch a clichéd, obvious, emotionally safe film that is as meaningless as it is overly lauded by the popular press (such as the Centerpiece film in this year’s NYFF). In his interview, Norton says he took inspiration from films such as Reds and Unforgiven, which “treat people [the audience] like adults.” Amen brother.
Lionel explains his condition in the film, saying “It makes me say funny things but I’m not trying to be funny” – as if speaking for Norton, who craftily scripts Lionel’s outbursts as clever commentary on the action as it unfolds, but without entering into the realm of comedy. Lionel also has super skills, such as the ability to precisely memorize information and conversations, even if he doesn’t fully comprehend their meaning at the time. And his obsessive tendencies send him on a relentless quest to solve the intricate puzzle of the story – a dedication greater than his fellow detectives (and realistically, most viewers).
My two cents regarding the team of private dicks employed at Lionel’s agency would be to cut out those largely superfluous mugs. After all, Bogart’s detective was a one-man operation, and that might have helped consolidate the complexity here. It is important, however, that the agency was initially owned and run by Lionel’s mentor and life-long friend, Frank Minna (played persuasively by Bruce Willis), who is murdered within the first few minutes of the film. The movie is essentially Lionel trying to track down Frank’s killers and understand how all the clues add up to something larger than anyone expects. The rest of the office team is expendable, as far as I’m concerned. But the “larger than anyone expects” story is part of the film’s larger problem.
Bruce Willis in “Motherless Brooklyn”
This is where most of the film’s criticism is based – its long run time and unnecessary plot twists that are difficult to follow and at times seem to be telling different stories — too many unraveling threads. My initial argument against this sort of complaint is to remind viewers that two of this genre’s greatest classics, The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon, had plotlines nearly impossible to follow and stories that didn’t seem to entirely add up. It’s all part of the nothing-makes-sense fatalism of this type of movie.
“One entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat.” — Vincent Scully
But the issue is larger than that defense – for both better and worse. Norton’s “mash-up,” as he calls it, seems to rely as much on Robert Caro’s non-fiction, Pulitzer-prize-winning book The Power Broker as it does on Letham’s fictional thriller. Norton is interweaving two very-different books and stretching the boundaries of a classic genre; it’s a lot to handle.
In Norton’s film, Alec Baldwin (with his typical smarmy aplomb) plays Moses Randolph, a thinly veiled portrayal of Robert Moses, the “master builder” of mid-20th century New York. Moses was one of the most polarizing figures in the history of urban development in the United States. Caro’s book sealed his fate to be remembered forever as a ruthless scoundrel with a lust for power and a racist agenda rather than admired for his visionary achievements as a builder of bridges, highways and parks. (Moses also helped Frank Lloyd Wright get the NYC building permits to construct the long-delayed now-iconic Guggenheim Museum — a story detailed in a recent New York Times article as the museum turns 60 this month.)
Moses combined extreme corruption with enormous competence; at one point he simultaneously held twelve political titles, including NYC Parks Commissioner and Chairman of the Long Island State Park Commission, but as Norton tells us, Robert Moses (that is, Moses Randolph) was never elected to any public office. His power was based on brutality and elitism. In pursuit of planning for a better future, Moses ripped out entire neighborhoods – mostly minority communities. He was also responsible for the demolition of the once-magnificent Penn Station, in which a scene in Norton’s movie remarkably takes place, using genius-level special effects.
How the Lost Penn Station Was Recreated in “Motherless Brooklyn”
Norton even manages to work in the famous quote about the ruin of Penn Station: “One entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat.” There are many films that can be said to be love letters to New York City, but this one is nostalgic for its distress as much as its nobility. Norton wants us to know about all this dark and dazzling history, and that well-meaning ambition to scale up both his set design and his message are part of the film’s unfortunate downfall. He’s trying to make an epic morality tale, and he comes close to getting there, but… back to the history lesson:
Supposedly, Moses ordered his engineers to build bridges too low for buses from the city to pass underneath and reach Jones Beach – intentionally restricting the poor blacks and Puerto Ricans that Moses despised. Norton includes this incriminating detail from Caro’s book in his film and increasingly shapes his sleuth story around this tale of real-life Gotham conspiracy and corruption, which starts to feel enticingly like an east-coast Chinatown, full of sociopolitical implications. It’s all fascinating and compelling, until it gets too bogged down in historically-accurate detail.
“For better or worse, this character experiences change, and even if it is sad change, there is a refreshing optimism in that twist. The time-loop stops here.”
Painterly Hopper-esque urban scenes in “Motherless Brooklyn”
But then… a classic gumshoe clue of a discovered matchbook (!) found in Frank’s overcoat pocket leads Lionel to a Harlem jazz club named The King Rooster, where Lionel identifies a central figure in the fictional mystery – Laura Rose (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), an attractive “colored-girl” community organizer who is daughter of the club’s owner. We get to spend a disproportionate but entertaining amount of time in this jazz club, where the music is wonderful, especially as played by a scarred-but-sexy trumpeter (with music actually played by New York’s own Wynton Marsalis). He confides in Lionel that his talent is actually the result of his own “brain affliction.” We’re back in the world of shadowy, sensual film noir. It’s terrific stuff.
“Motherless Brooklyn”
The best scene in the film is when Lionel is with Laura at the club and we see that the erratic rhythms in his brain match the syncopation of the jazz music. Finally he is in his zone! Then, despite his awkward shyness, Lionel is forced to dance with Laura in order to protect her, and she quiets his Tourette symptoms by rubbing the back of his neck with her fingers (like his mother used to do, before he became an orphan and acquired the name “Motherless Brooklyn”). Aaw. It’s a rare, emotionally touching moment in a movie that wants to be full of heart but ends up being kinda talky and educational.
William Dafoe in “Motherless Brooklyn”
And I haven’t even gotten to the addition of William Dafoe, who is excellent as always. How can you not like a movie that includes William Dafoe? He plays a perfect noir-ish character — a surprise wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a moral dilemma, but his arrival in the story comes late and his full impact is obscured a bit by the whirlwind of so many other swirling questions.
The whirlwind becomes a tornado of complexity, picking up pieces of history, chunks of classic genre, hunks of New York architecture, broken branches of dramatic fiction, bent blue notes of jazz, drenched greens of Edward Hopper, a few gratuitous camera shots, at least one completely irrelevant scene, lots of bravado acting, fragments of politics, suggestions of social commentary, all mixing into an imperfect storm. But it’s a doozy.
If you’re an east-coast intellectual liberal, this film is for you. If you’re out for an easy Friday-night date movie… you might walk away with a bit of a headache. This is a sprawling movie with large-scale ambitions and a design team doing a high-wire act, which leaves plenty of room to trip and fall, alas. Still, there is more that deserves to be written about this film.
Here’s part of the beauty that Norton achieves: Like Bogart in all his film noir detective flicks, we see Lionel get beat up by strangers in the dark, wake up in places unknown, wrongly accused by the cops, and double-crossed on a regular basis. But this confused character, who is nicknamed “Freak Show,” starts with none of the tough-guy swagger of Bogart, and Norton’s development of his confidence and consciousness is wisely timed and skillfully paced, so that when Lionel finally tosses his hat and coat into the arms of the gun-toting henchmen of his dangerous adversary and says “Hold this for me, will ya sweetheart,” it’s a grand little moment; he’s gone full Bogart. But the movie doesn’t stop there.
Edward Norton does Bogart
In his combined roles of actor, writer, director and producer, Edward Norton has taken the well-worn, film-noir detective genre and elevated it. This is not a bleak, fatalistic tale. Norton’s freak-show character has blown past Bogart. Lionel will not be back to make another dead-end detective thriller; for better or worse, his character experiences change, even if it is sad change, and there is a refreshing optimism in that twist. The time-loop stops here.*
This is a story about a man who learns for himself the relevance of morality and the definition of heroism. This is a movie that challenges us to rethink our apathetic habits and aim higher than self-preservation. It’s a traditional tale restyled for our times right now. (And yes, Alec Baldwin is playing Donald Trump. Alec Baldwin will never be able to stop playing Trump, and that’s okay too. This is another way for him to dig deeper into that archetypal persona, and it’s worth watching. He’s got a brilliant speech at the end of the movie that might be worth the price of admission in itself.)
Is the movie too long? Yes. Is it too complicated? Maybe. Is it too messy? Probably. Is it too grandiose? I refuse to say yes to that. I am inspired by Norton’s aspirations. What he achieved in 45 days of shooting, on a small budget, as an actor-turned-director, is impressive. Is this a masterpiece? No. But must everything be a masterpiece?
Here’s what this is: This is real cinema. Like the movies in the old days that were a special event, an adventurous outing – this movie is gorgeous to look at and has a reason to be. It’s not an insult to your intelligence or a waste of your time, like far too many movies are these days. Helen Highly Recommends you give this movie a chance. Root for Edward Norton. Root for William Dafoe. Root for Gugu Mbatha-Raw. You have every reason to feel good about rooting for this movie.
* Might I humbly suggest that I’d love to see Lionel come back and do a sequel where he’s a journalist and more closely involved with William Dafoe’s character? Dafoe deserves more screen time.
Including Top Ten Broken-Marriage / Divorce Movies
by HelenHighly
So: Marriage Story, a stylish romantic dramedy written and directed by Noah Baumbach with an all-star cast led by Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver and featuring top-notch talent such as Laura Dern, Alan Alda and Wallace Shawn, opened as the centerpiece of the 2019 New York Film Festival. Helen Highly Loathes this movie. I think perhaps I wouldn’t loathe it so much if everyone else wasn’t loving and lauding it so much. Sigh. Something about the gushing acceptance of this film into the “canon” of broken-marriage and/or divorce-themed movies creates a feeling of outrage in me – a feeling much deeper than any inspired by the self-consciously sentimental moments in the film.
Loving family in “Marriage Story”
But, to be fair (to my disdain), I did immediately feel insulted by what my directly-after-watching-the-film tweets right from my desk at my eXp Realty office expressed as “infuriating banality – worse than regular banality.” I didn’t expect to see so many credible and respected critics lavish praise on this film, which makes me feel déjà vu all over again – reminding me of when I stood alone in aggressively disliking Carol, directed by Todd Hanes. (Prediction: everyone believed that film would win an Academy Award for Best Picture and despite all the gushing, it didn’t, and I predict the same here.)
Part of my criticism in my Carol reviewwas my argument against critics who were erroneously declaring the film to be “Hitchcockian,” and I wrote a detailed break-down of how and why that was untrue, which I will skip here, because in this case the person comparing the director to the Master of thrillers and warped love stories is director Noah Baumbach himself. In the post-film Q&A, Baumbach declared that Marriage Story had “hidden genres baked into it,” naming thrillers, horror, screwball comedy and absurdism (wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong) and then adding “it’s also like a Hitchcock movie.” That is where my head exploded, although is a love story at the beginning and they spend a lot of time together and intimacy even using toys like wonderful rabbit vibrators. Really, there should be a law requiring at least a five-year waiting period before anyone can compare anyone to Hitchcock, kind of like declaring someone a saint. And it ought to be a crime for directors to compare themselves to Hitchcock. But that’s not the basis for my distaste for this film – just the cherry on top.
Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver in “Marriage Story”
Baumbach’s movie gives us an intimate view of an end-of-marriage agony-of-divorce story wrapped in a privileged-NYC-life vs privileged-LA-life scenario. His script manages to be a star-vehicle for some of America’s best acting talent; it’s a very-showy showcase for Adam Driver’s raw energy and Scarlett Johansson’s tour-de-force heartbreak, but as I said of Cate Blanchett after Carol, they don’t need this self-important display; they are better than this over-wrought cliché of a movie.
Writer Director Noah Baumbach
And that’s even true for Baumbach, who has an impressive talent for putting words together. But alas, he needs some fresh ideas. I appreciate that it’s not easy trying to be the voice of your generation, and there is always a hunger in audiences to crown the next king, but sorry, I don’t think Baumbach has even earned knighthood at this point. Clever is not the same as genius. It’s ironic that the lead character wins a “genius grant” in the film at such a young age – perhaps Baumbach projecting his wishes for himself. But it’s pure fiction.
As for Alan Alda and Wallace Shawn, they are only reprising the same old personas we have relished watching them play over the years; nothing new to see here folks. I can only assume that they both agreed to be in this film as a late-career last-chance to remind America what beloved characters they are, and again… there is no need; they’ve already done it in films better than this one, and this story has already been told too many times in films far greater than this non-“masterwork” (as some have called it).
Alan Alda and Wallace Shawn at NYFF with “Marriage Story”
The world already has Kramer vs Kramer, the quintessential divorce-with-a-kid story; we don’t need another one. And we already have Annie Hall, the quintessential lovers-in-trouble torn between New York and LA story; no one is going to do it better. Throw in the couples-with-competing-careers theme and Marriage Story becomes a full-on trope fest. For the record, let me list all the now-classic films that have mined these territories – as either drama or comedy or both (and a few others not-so-classic that are far more deserving of extravagant praise than Marriage Story).
The Ten Best Movies to See Instead of Marriage Story:
La La Land (Best Picture close but no cigar – like Marriage Story will be)
One True Thing (After Kramer vs Kramer, Meryl Streep makes the list twice and do we really need to keep trying to top her? In this film, the child-torn-between-alienated-parents is older, with stronger impact.)
The Way We Were (NY vs LA, check; competitive careers and ethical standards, check; more of a love story than a divorce story, check; they don’t have a child but wait… they throw one in at the end, so check. But let’s get real; this movie has So. Much. More. going on to make it worth watching — even worth watching again and again. Honestly, how many times can one bear to sit through Marriage Story?)
Note: A case could be made to add Funny Girl to the list, which would make Barbara Streisand another two-time end-of-marriage classic-film winner.
“The Way We Were” with Robert Redford and Barbara Streisand
Scenes From a Marriage (a Bergman genre-defining classic truly deserving of the much-overused word “masterful”)
Note: Scarlett Johansson is lovely and compelling but she is not in the same league as Streep and Ullman.
“Scenes From a Marriage” by Ingmar Bergman
The Wife (a Bergman-influenced film that earns its inheritance, with ten times the intelligence and profundity of Marriage Story. Glenn Close’s performance in this film is stunning and perhaps the final authentic word in broken-marriage career-challenged wives.)
Le Mepris (Contempt — a gorgeous and magnificent film by Jean-Luc Godard, with a storyline similar to Marriage Story – down to the opening breakup around a revised production of a Greek tragedy in which the husband is auteur and the wife stars)
“Le Mepris” (Contempt) by Jean-Luc Godard
L.A. Story (example of what a true screwball-comedy meets romantic-heartbreak movie looks like and a treatise on L.A.-lifestyle jokes that pack a serious punch) and/or War of the Roses, which has become the ultimate depiction of the pain and dark-comedy of divorce. Note to Baumbach: This is absurdist comedy; your movie is absurd only in its pretension.
It’s Complicated(again with Meryl Streep. Sorry Scarlett, find your own genre.)
One more for good luck: The End of the Affair, which isn’t a super-close story match, but in terms of depicting marital love that transcends divorce, with devastating effect, it merits a mention. And Ralph Fiennes with Julianne Moore – that’s the definition of on-screen chemistry, which btw seems to me completely lacking in Marriage Story.)
“Annie Hall” by Woody Allen
The other thing that all the films in the list above have going for them (with exception of La La Land) is that they have the historic timeframe with the associated literary conventions of their day to justify their lily-whiteness. Marriage Story points out its own fatal flaw in a domestic courtroom scene; after listening to the opposing $950-per-hour lawyers bicker endlessly, the judge finally interrupts and says, “There are people waiting to have their cases heard who do not have the ‘means’ you do.” duh. Hashtag: White People’s Problems.
Scarlett Johannson and Laura Dern in “Marriage Story”
And outside of the lack of on-screen chemistry, the banal clichés and tired lawyer jokes, this was a major factor in preventing me from caring about these characters; they are the embodiment of white privilege, and in today’s day, especially when casting the racially conflicted cities of L.A. and New York as characters in the story, to ignore any issue of class or race or fail to provide any realistic backdrop of social/political context… it’s both ridiculous and offensive and ultimately invalidates any effort at credibility. I would say this makes this story comparable to an animated Disney fairytale more than an authentic emotional account, except now even Disney has finally integrated and presented a black princess.
White People’s Problems in “Marriage Story”
To watch these two feuding spouses argue over whose Halloween costume for the kid is better (and more expensive) and who is taking the kid to a better neighborhood for the best Halloween treats is a disgusting display, in my opinion. Spoiler alert: The father loses that battle and is seen schlepping the kid through an inappropriately grownup Times-Square-ish neighborhood (albeit somewhere in L.A.), where a liquor store sales clerk gives the child a free lighter as a treat. Hilarious! Not. Touching? Not. Stupid and insensitive to the very-real and very-dangerous and humiliating class issues surrounding Halloween trick-or-treating for today’s children? Yes, that’s what it is.
“Kramer vs Kramer”
Is Noah Baumbach obliged to depict racial inequity in his romance movie? No of course he’s not – not unless he goes on and on about its contemporary authenticity and selects real-life troubled cities as its location. And other critics should also be ashamed of not noticing that even on the streets of New York City there seems to be not one person of color within facial-recognition distance – certainly none with a talking role. Just saying.
“The Wife” with Glenn Close
Following through on its all-too-adorable entertainment industry setting, the film ends with not one but two Stephen Sondheim songs from the 1970’s musical Company – one sung by divorced mom and the other by divorced dad. Variety called those back-to-back scenes “haunting,” and I suggest that might be true from a white-as-a-ghost perspective.
As for emotional power: There is a scene with the little boy reading aloud his mother’s handwritten list of hipster-sweet “Things I Love About Charlie” (his father), which is nausea-inducing. Then father Charlie overhears and listens to his son read the list of reasons his mother loves his father, which is full-blown puke-worthy, and then the father enters the scene and helps the boy pronounce the big words in the list of reasons for his father’s lovability — which the father had never read before and is now hearing for the first time from the mouth of his young son, which is choke-on-your-vomit-and-die worthy. (Just think for a moment of the revelatory and climactic scenes in last year’s The Wife, and recall how few words, how carefully scripted, how elegantly performed to such breath-taking effect, how non-cloying and unobvious and deeply stirring. Marriage Story fails at all of that.)
Have I gone back in time and am I watching an After School Special? Do they still exist? I think not. I imagine I am showing my age with that reference. But if this movie makes sense anywhere it would be on TV as an After School Special that a parent would force a kid to watch instead of his preferred cowboy series. It’s a reductive lesson in why you should love your parents despite their being self-centered dipshits.
“End of the Affaire,” with Julianne Moore and Ralph Fiennes
But seriously: What is at stake in this movie?! It seems that the worst possible outcome for anybody involved would still entail their living better, more beautiful, more satisfying and comfortable lives than anyone I know. Everyone is young and attractive and talented and well-positioned for a full, wonderful life ahead of them. The marriage was terrific while it lasted, both exes have already found their rebound romances, they both already have new and impressive career opportunities, they have plenty of emotional and financial resources to soothe the blow of the breakup, and the big divorce antagonism is revealed to be gratuitous game-playing that doesn’t seriously injure anyone. The deepest dramatic point seems to be that people change and grow, especially when they’re young adults.
The harshest effect on the kid seems to be inconsistent bowel movements, a problem fixed by special reward-gifts from mom (of which dad disapproves — ooh, conflict!) and his confusion over why they suddenly have so many plants around the apartment (to impress the divorce social worker). Truth is, this kid will likely win by growing up a little bit less of a spoiled brat than he would have been without the divorce, although without suffering any real, character-building challenges.
It’s all a lot of meaningless nothing, and my sense is that the harshest consequences will be to the careers of Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver, who I believe have both taken a step backward in their development as serious actors. I know that romantic dramedy is not intended to be heavy, thought-provoking fare, but this film is more pretentious and empty than most of its ilk, and I anticipate that five years from now it will not be found on anyone’s list of Best Broken-Marriage Movies.
Laura Dern is the best part of “Marriage Story”
So, my diatribe aside, it’s fair to mention a few good points in this movie. The best part is Laura Dern as a feminist divorce attorney. She’s got some of the funniest lines in the film, including a rant using the Virgin Mary and God as the origin of sexual bias in parenting, saying that God is the typical father who doesn’t show up. Ha. That’s a good one. She even manages to make the line “What you’re doing is an act of courage” a treasure-trove of comic and emotional nuance. Kudos to Laura Dern for milking every moment she is on the screen.
What else? Hmm… Laura Dern is awesome and what else? Adam Driver is always awesome and this movie does not deserve him. But I will say that when he breaks down and cries, it’s the only time I felt anything in this film, and that was quite an achievement. Oh, if you are a classic-theater lover like me, the opening bit about the revised theater production of Electra is pretty cool, and thankfully given more than a few seconds on screen; we get to hear enough dialogue to make a vague thematic tie-in to issues of female fury and women’s pursuit of justice.
“Marriage Story” press conference at NYFF
But in the end, the most encouraging thing I can say about this movie is that as a filmgoer you will be spared listening to Noah Baumbach’s self-congratulatory pontificating afterward in a live Q&A session. But you can find plenty of that blabbery by reading all the other film reviews. However, if majority consensus means anything, it’s safe to assume that they are all correct and I completely misunderstand, Helen being the Highly crass heartless heathen that she is. So be it. Go see this movie at your own brain-rotting peril.
Marriage Story premieres in theaters on Nov. 6, 2019. The film premieres on Netflix on Dec. 6, 2019. (Whatever you do, don’t pay $15 to see this movie in a theater.)
Sorry to sound so sour. Want to read about a movie released to theaters around the same time as Marriage Story that I liked a lot (despite criticism from others)? Helen Highly Recommends Motherless Brooklyn.
We have a special program to thank for two excellent indie films in the past two years – Lucky Grandma, by Chinese-American filmmakers Sasie Sealy and Angela Cheng, and Nigerian Prince, by Nigerian-American filmmaker Faraday Okoro. Both films were winners of AT&T Presents: Untold Stories, which is an alliance between AT&T and the Tribeca Film Institute. Now in its third year, the program awards a $1 million cash prize, mentorship and distribution to under-represented filmmakers with a story to tell. Okoro and Nigerian Prince was the first winner, in 2017, and the result debuted at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. I was impressed by the film and included it in my “TFF2018: What to Watch” article but unfortunately never got around to writing a full review of it, which I will try to remedy now.
Faraday Okoro gets his $1 million prize grant from the AT&T Untold Stories program
Lucky Grandma was the second winner, and the film debuted at TFF2019. I adored that unusual comedy and my research into it is what brought the Untold Stories program to my attention. It’s easy (and valid) to bemoan corporate greed and domination, but sometimes they do something worthwhile, and I believe we should acknowledge the good as well as the bad. So, Helen is Highly Grateful to AT&T for Lucky Grandma and Nigerian Prince, and Helen Highly Recommends both films. I will provide a slightly different perspective at the end of this essay.
“Lucky Grandma” filmmakers get $1 million from AT&T Untold Stories
Would I accept money from AT&T to make my movie? I probably would. Would I let AT&T put their float in my Pride Parade? I probably wouldn’t.
Lucky Grandma
First impression: What a delight! And what a relief from all the heavy, depressing documentaries that tend to dominate Tribeca Film Festival. I found myself laughing out loud for the first time in weeks – weeks of watching dozens of movies. To be accurate, there are actually quite a few comedies at TFF, and I typically don’t seek them out because my biased expectation is that they try awfully hard to be funny and usually annoy me.
Tsai Chin as Lucky Grandma
Why did I go see Lucky Grandma? I was drawn in by the poster – the weathered, tired face of an elderly Chinese woman, staring straight at the camera with a defiant scowl as she smokes a cigarette. It’s not often that you see a feature-film comedy with a woman as the lead character, much less an elderly woman, much less a Chinese woman, much less a grumpy, cigarette-smoking woman. And comedies from foreign countries, made outside the Hollywood system, tend to be more subtle, quirkier, or otherwise more appealing to me. My instincts were right; this film is fresh, funny, and fierce.
Veteran actress Tsai Chin (Casino Royale, The Joy Luck Club), delivers a bitingly honest, moody and hilarious performance as an ornery, 80-year old, chain-smoking grandma living in New York’s Chinatown. Recently widowed and angry at being left with little money to live on, despite working dutifully alongside her husband for many years, she nonetheless insists on maintaining her independence, which worries her modern, Chinese-American family. When a local fortune-teller predicts an auspicious day in her near future, Grandma heads straight to the bank, withdraws all her money, then takes a bus trip to the nearest casino, where she goes “all in,” loses her life’s savings and lands herself on the wrong side of luck, albeit with a huge bag of cash that belonged to a dead man and literally fell into her lap.
She soon becomes entrenched in the middle of a Chinatown gang war. Refusing to relinquish her “lucky” gains, Grandma employs the services of a bodyguard from a rival gang – out-haggling the brutes with her streetwise practicality. She turns out to be as bad-ass as any of the young thugs who chase her, all while cooking dumpling soup for her grandson and watching her soap operas on TV. It’s worth mentioning that Grandma’s toughest rival is the secret ringleader of the gang that’s chasing her, who also just happens to be a woman – young and beautiful, ruthless and smart, another commanding female role in this movie.
Does anyone ever consider calling the cops for assistance? Hell no; what happens in Chinatown stays in Chinatown. As wacky as the action sequences are, that I believe – the intensely insular nature of this community (which makes our access via this film all the more compelling). Grandma is simply the coolest curmudgeon you’ll find in any film; the fact that her exploits are wildly absurd does not put a dent in her immense authenticity and likeability.
With amazing dexterity for a first full-length film, director Sealy brings to life a dark comedy about immigrant life, the vulnerabilities of aging, and the primacy of family. Shot on location in bustling streets, a web of alleyways, casino buses and underground mahjong parlors, with a cast of richly drawn characters, including Taiwanese breakout-talent Corey Ha as the bodyguard, Lucky Grandma is a love letter to Chinatown and a tribute to tough old broads everywhere.
Lucky Grandma and her bodyguard
If Clint Eastwood were an old Chinese lady, he could maybe play Grandma in this film. But actually, he doesn’t have the emotional range. Nonetheless, I’ll go ahead and say this film is like A Fistful of Dollars meets Get Shortymeets The Joy Luck Club. It’s not easy to put together a lineage for this film – a gangland comedy with a good-bad-ugly protagonist who is also a nurturing Chinese grandma. And that’s no-doubt what made it special enough to win the Untold Stories prize at Tribeca (and exemplifies how female filmmakers do add unique value).
Lucky Grandma is currently still on the film festival circuit and has not yet had a theatrical release. I’ll try my best to keep you posted with updates.
Nigerian Prince
“Nigerian Prince” poster
Also a bit of a genre-bender, I initially included Nigerian Prince in my Pick List for Tribeca Film Festival 2018, without noticing that it was the first film to come out of the new “AT&T Presents: Untold Stories” program. In terms of choosing a category for it, I faltered; it feels like a documentary but isn’t, and I finally listed it as a foreign film, even though it really isn’t that either.
But it’s made by a Nigerian-American, Faraday Okoro, and takes place in Nigeria and was shot on location, vividly capturing a very foreign place. Nigerian Prince offers a snapshot of a world not often seen on film, introducing the reality behind the all-too-familiar junk-email scams that target Westerners and are surprisingly persuasive pleas from a supposed member of a royal family, urgently requesting financial assistance with the false promise of a generous return of funds with profit. These scams are so prevalent (and oddly successful) that they’ve touched all of us, in one way or another, and we can’t really fathom what it is on the other side of the world that produces them and brings them into our American lives. This debut feature from writer-director Faraday Okoro gives cinematic life to characters who have previously only lurked in the shadows of the American imagination.
“Nigerian Prince,” an AT&T Untold Story
When troubled American teenager Eze (Antonio J. Bell) is sent away to his mother’s native Nigeria against his will, to live with his aunt Grace (Tina Mba), he quickly finds himself entangled in a dangerous web of scams and corruption, with his desperate con-artist cousin Pius as his guide. Despite his Nigerian heritage, Eze is a stranger in a strange land where no one can be trusted. This film, built upon a framework of strong performances, seamlessly blends thrilling sequences of elaborate deception and dramatic tension with surprising moments of humor, making it much more than a fish-out-of-water tale. Newcomer Chinaza Uche is particularly brilliant as Pius, his magnetism and cunning matched only by the sadness underlying his performance.
“Nigerian Prince”
The film itself is a remarkable feat, shot on location in Lagos and finished in just under 12 months. It’s a feature film that often feels like a documentary. The intensity feels real, and you will sincerely worry how these dramatic circumstances will end. All the exciting con jobs make this movie part crime-thriller, and the good laughs make it part comedy, but its social conscience is what defines this as an important film. This is a movie to care about and think about and talk about.
For this film, I’m gonna say it’s The Asphalt Jungle meets Midnight Expressmeets District 9, except a little more light-hearted – not totally tragic. I am not especially good at this game of naming theoretical film lineages, but I think these Untold Stories films are particularly difficult to pigeon-hole. This is a uniquely original film experience.
Nigerian Prince was a promising start to the Untold Stories program. It was sold to Vertical Entertainment and somewhere along the way acquired Spike Lee as an Executive Producer. It got a theatrical run in October 2018 and is now available for streaming from Amazon Prime, among others.
AT&T’s Untold Story
AT&T has done a lot of good with their Untold Stories program. I cannot end this article, however, before I give fair complaint to AT&T on two counts. (Skip this section if you prefer to keep your ethical outlook simple.)First, I am being relentlessly hounded by a collection company that erroneously believes I owe money to AT&T. As many people have experienced, I am sure, AT&T internet/TV/phone service is one of many companies that – in addition to providing a valuable service – use their powerful position to employ unfair business practices and make it virtually impossible for the consumer to fight back. So even though my credit card investigated my complaint and determined that I was right and AT&T was wrong in auto-withdrawing money from my account that was not due to them, and my credit card refunded me the money, AT&T has now handed over my “case” to one of those ruthless collection agencies, and I will no-doubt pay a price in a decline of my credit rating. So, I am no fan of AT&T. But if my stolen money went to fund these two films, maybe it was worth it. These are the times we live in.
This is not my larger issue with AT&T in this article but nonetheless, it seems an ideal opportunity to include a clip fromJohn Oliver’s Last Week Tonight,which always has its finger on the pulse of what is going on (or going wrong). FYI, AT&T owns HBO, which owns John Oliver, so this contradiction is somewhat relevant. Enjoy:
AT&T logo
More importantly, right now in New York, we are hearing a dispute about the popular LGBTQ Pride Parade;some critics say it has become overrun by corporate sponsors, so they have organized an alternativeQueer Liberation Marchfor the same day. (Click here for the New York Times article.) It’s a worthy debate – the role of corporations and whether they serve to enable or restrict the advancement of minority-group agendas and their fights for rights and freedom. In its article, The New York Times explains, “The group calls the Pride March an advertising showcase for floats sponsored by major corporations…that distract from the message of Stonewall.” [This is the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, which are widely considered to be the start of the modern gay-rights movement.]
AT&T Pride Month logo
During Pride Month, many corporations unveil rainbow versions of their logos in a show of solidarity to the LGBTQ community, including AT&T, but their actions don’t always match the image they try to convey.According to a new report from Popular Information, AT&T donated $2.7 million to 193 aggressively anti-gay politicians from 2017 to 2018 while receiving a perfect score from the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), which declared them among the “Best Places to Work for LGBTQ Equality.” These politicians include Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, who opposed the Violence Against Women Act because it included protections for LGBTQ people. Blackburn is also against marriage equality. Click here to see John Oliver call out his new parent company, AT&T, for supporting Steve King, a well-known “white nationalist.”Or,click here to read about AT&T giving $200,000 to politicians leading abortion-bans in six states. Thus, corporations have the power to lift people up, or to crush them, or to co-opt and commercialize their interests, and they frequently contradict themselves and do all three at once. Life is so darned complicated; the line between right and wrong zigs and zags. And the two films featured in this article – made possible by AT&T, understand that dilemma better than most.
Watch the trailer for Nigerian Prince, below:
Sealy and Cheng talk about the process of getting Lucky Grandma made, below:
This is a good movie to watch when you’re stoned. (And being stoned for this review helps too.)
“Blue Note Records” film poster
Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes, a film by Sophie Huber, tosses you straight into a stylish mood poem. It’s medium-raucous to medium-mellow jazz with low-toned shots of “cool cats” opinionating on a range of topics – improvised jazz-chat. Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Robert Glasper, Norah Jones, Don Was, and more, these jazz musicians cross a discourse-portal to play in dimensions of possibility beyond the dilemmas of yes or no. Consequently, they have a points of view more engaging than your Average Joe. It’s conversation composition – hard and soft, tales of tribulation trumpets and triumph, high and low, cool and hot as jazz.
Alfred Lion heard American jazz as a wee kid in 1920’s Germany. Little Alfred was blown out of his lederhosen by the “good time Jesus” music of King Oliver. Cosmic connection was made – imaginings of N’awlins and self-expression; wow. The Nazis came, with their diabolical directives. No jazz. No decadent other-world music. No Jews. The Lion family fled. They landed in New York City, in the land of the free.
“Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes” documentary
Alfred worked in the music biz for a couple years and managed to open a studio in 1939, with Max Margulis, and later Francis Wolff. Blue Note Records was born. He loved the music and cared about the music-makers. A safe-haven for creativity arose. Legendary happenings were pressed into vinyl. Alfred had the sensitivity of an artist and enough steely resolve to navigate the stormy oceans of predatory Capitalism. Bravo! Lion had a brilliant ear. Wolff had an impossibly cool eye.
“For influence, it’s right up there with Democracy and Rule of Law.”
A pictorial history is presented with Wolff’s vintage photos and arty album covers, plus archival footage, giving a no-punches-pulled timeline from 1940s to present, featuring the heavy hitters from La Monde de Jazz, delineating the politics and protests, the fusion of high and low culture and influences of gospel, blues, soul, bebop, hard-bop, avant-garde and beyond, bringing it in, breaking it up, blowing it out, handing it down, and the fight to keep it free, the fight to keep it open.
Blue Note Records album covers
They take us up to the present, with young musicians embracing jazz and transforming to hip-hop – a newly defiant legacy-culture. We get their worldview, too. Hey, this reviewer wouldn’t mind spending an evening getting stoned with these guys. Perhaps some bread and butter and jam. Would be cool to jam with these hot cats.
Blue Note Records
This movie left this Brit wondering why a homegrown art form like jazz has such a limited support system in its country of origin. How does a jazz musician get a million dollars? Well, you start with two million… and chuckle at an old, sad joke. First line of the movie: “Why would someone start a record company not to make money?” And yet, with its smooth diplomacy, jazz has spread American culture all over the world. For influence, it’s right up there with Democracy and Rule of Law. Where is the justice? Go ask Jazz; it’s at Blue Note Records – still there, still smokin’.
I give this movie a two-toke rating.
I remain your humble, east-coast-elite servant.
Watch the trailer for the Blue Note Records film below:
News: This film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2018 and has since been shown at more than 50 international film festivals. It will screen in New York at the Metrograph beginning June 14 and in Santa Monica at the Laemmle Monica Film Center beginning June 28. The film will then roll out to cinemas across the nation this summer followed by television broadcasts and a DVD release later in the year.
A common criticism often heard in reviewing documentaries is “it’s more a Dateline segment than a movie;” even good investigative journalism does not in itself make a movie. It might be worth a twenty-minute watch on T.V. as an extended news story, but a real movie, especially one that we go to see in a theater, has a different set of qualifications. Sometimes “advocacy documentaries” can be forgiven their school-bookishness because the subject is so urgently relevant; their social or political importance overrides their artistic mediocrity. But how do you justify The Spy Behind Home Plate, written and directed by Aviva Kempner? This documentary, in theaters now, is more of an answer to a Jeopardy question than it is a movie. Or maybe it’s an entire Jeopardy episode – as chock full of rapid-fire bits of quirky trivia as it is. But Helen is Highly Reluctant to recommend this as a movie or even a Dateline news story.
Archival material from “The Spy Behind Home Plate”
I can give you the blurb from the press release: Morris Moe Berg was an enigmatic and brilliant Jewish baseball player turned spy. Berg caught and fielded in the major leagues during baseball’s Golden Age in the 1920s and 1930s, but very few people know* that Berg also worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), spying in Europe and playing a prominent role in America’s efforts to undermine the German atomic bomb program during WWII.
* Well, very few people beyond all those who read the New York Times best-selling book on the subject, or saw the feature film.
“The Catcher Was a Spy” movie poster
As intriguing as that description might seem, Kempner does not even begin to deliver a compelling story. Beyond sensationalizing the overt oddity of the facts, this film feels like Kempner had a thick stack of research material that she handed off to an editor and figured people would be too overwhelmed by the flood of detail to notice that she forgot to direct the movie. It really does remind me of Jeopardy in that it’s all answers and it seems the audience is expected to supply the questions or the relevance or the reason why we should care.
And in fact, there is already a much-better biographical film, starring Paul Rudd, that tells this story — The Catcher Was a Spy, based on a best-selling book of the same name. So what exactly does Kempner think she is adding to this part of history, other than her own name?
Oddly, this is Kempner’s second documentary about a Jewish baseball player. Her previous film was The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, about a Detroit Tigers slugger who combated bigotry by becoming baseball’s first Jewish star. Variety called the film, “good-natured” and “a natural for broadcast outlets.” Not exactly a ticket-seller. The New York Times called it “valuable as history,” despite its “flaws.” I did also see one of Kempner’s earlier efforts – Rosenwald (2015); it was well-researched and dry and rather pointless. I mean, it seemed like it was a thin but worthy chapter that had fallen out of an old history book and gotten lost. So, kudos to Kempner for retrieving it and putting it back on the shelf. But that doesn’t make it a movie.
Why do I feel so annoyed by this pallid little film that has found its way into actual movie theaters? It’s the smugness of calling yourself a writer/director when you are not especially talented at either — the pretense of being an auteur. And it’s taking up space of something better. There are so many excellent and powerful documentaries these days; it’s the heyday of documentaries, and many are truly works of art. It’s time for the hacks to step aside. There is too much great stuff to see to waste our energies on films like this one.
“OJ: Made in America” documentary
Remember OJ: Made in America, the five-part ESPN documentary? How much did we all not care to see that movie? Didn’t we all think we had already seen way too much of that drama when it played out in real time not that many years ago on national TV? But all you had to do (or should do now, if you didn’t see it in 2016) was watch fifteen minutes of the first part before you were hooked and knew that this was something much bigger and much more meaningful than you could have imagined. That’s what a talented filmmaker does — carves out a story from the mound of facts and reveals some deeper truth, rather than just throw information at you. Made in America (not to be confused with the other OJ films) premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, also screened at the Tribeca Film Festival and was theatrically released in NYC and Los Angeles, then debuted on ABC in 2016 and aired on ESPN. It received critical acclaim and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The Washington Post called it “a towering achievement.” I bring that up here because that’s the perfect example of a sports-related story about a complicated man that ultimately became a historically significant and socially and politically relevant story that had soul-shaking impact when it aired. That’s what a great documentary does. Just saying.
Moe Berg with his brother in a jeep
Kempner’s bio states that she is an American filmmaker, born in Germany, whose documentaries investigate non-stereotypical images of Jews in history. Her mother was a Holocaust survivor and her father a US army officer. Aviva is an activist for voting rights in D.C. In an online interview I read that she got her love of baseball from her father. Well… maybe PBS would want to run a biographical miniseries on Jewish baseball players? Aviva, do you have one more? Otherwise, maybe you should get a new gig. I would suggest that your own life story might make a good autobiographical film, complex and unusual as it seems, but you don’t quite have a knack for finding the heart in your characters or the pulse in their stories. You seem to enjoy historical research. Have you given the people at Jeopardy a call?
For three recommendations of recent, high-quality historical/social/political documentaries, check out my “Freedom Films” article. It includes one film that offers truly under-appreciated information about German Jewish refugees Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, who founded Blue Note Records in New York in 1939 — the most important record label in the history of jazz and also a major contribution to civil rights in this country.
For a review of a documentary that is a true work of art and is SO much more worthy of space in a theater, read about Our Time Machine.
Dear Beloved Readers: Helen Highly Encourages you to read this article in full, rather than skim to find my critique about any one film. I wrote this to be a commentary essay more than a set of film reviews, and it is not structured as three separate reviews, so it disappoints me when I learn that people are missing my larger point (and the larger message in each of these films) and deciding, in advance of reading, which film interests them and which does not. One of my key messages is that each film is about something more than its central subject. And I happen to think that “something more” is worth at least reading about, even if you don’t watch all three films. Feel free to leave a comment if you have a response.
“A Night at Switch n’ Play” poster
The live Switch n’ Play show has got underway – a neo-burlesque alt-drag “happening” at a small saloon in Brooklyn. After the weirdly sexy and comical introductions and instructions, there is the first act by Pearl Harbor (pronouns: they/them), to which…. truly, words cannot do justice, although I will merely mention that the act includes pulling a string of pearls from inside the body of a cooked chicken, and no nudity whatsoever, but soulful lip-syncing to an aching love song by Radiohead, after which I – viewing this via the documentary film, A Night atSwitch n’ Play, feel the impulse to cry and laugh and cheer at the same time but am too awestruck to make a sound. And then “Femmecee” Miss Malice returns to the stage and asks the audience:
“Have you said goodbye to your former selves yet? Have you come to accept that you will be changed by this show?”
Pearl Harbor at Switch n’ Play
She’s not kidding. This show and this film are all about transformation – for the performers and for the audience. And that’s art, y’all. In case anyone has forgotten, these young switch-n-players are here to remind us: Art Is Transformation. Art began with taking a stick to a prehistoric cave wall and transforming it into an imagined world of people and animals. And today art continues to transform materials into new objects and people into new personas that in turn stimulate transformation in their viewers. That’s what it’s all about.
“I don’t care if it hurts; I want to have control; I want a perfect body; I want a perfect soul… I wish I was special.” – lyrics from “Creep” by Radiohead Click to listen.
In this show, we see men dressing as women, women dressing as men, people bending gender roles to the point where we are not sure who is dressing as what, someone dressing as a Twinkie, someone doing striptease, someone doing horror, all body types, all ethnicities.* It’s wildly entertaining, and it’s much more than just weird. These performers are keenly aware of who they are and what they are doing. Whether they are on stage twirling tassels or tossing raw meat, this is some heady frivolity going on.
*The correct terminology, btw, is “trans, non-binary, and femme performers doing drag and burlesque.” My apologies for misstating, but I am leaving my error as evidence of Helen’s Highly Clueless “outsider” amazement. My point is that even if you are as clueless and straight as I am, this movie is for you. (And yeah, it’s time for all of us to get it right, me included, which I will, from here on out.)
A Night at Switch n’ Play is seductive and invigorating. The show manages to connect with our vital organs and the film takes the audience beyond the “play,” as we join its revelatory, thrilling, and emotional journey. At this seemingly ordinary neighborhood bar, the natural interaction between performer and audience is taken to the highest level; it’s a psychic collaboration, and even as the distant film audience, you will feel profoundly engaged.
In fact, the film audience has an advantage over the live audience because in addition to watching generous sections of the show, we are also privy to backstage interviews. These recorded chats are candid and personal as well as knowledgeable and thoughtful.
Miss Malice and Zoe Ziegfeld
Q: Do you feel sexy when you perform?
A: (thinks) I feel powerful. I feel a bit dangerous. I feel that I deserve and am demanding attention. That’s a good feeling. Is that sexy?
Q: How would you define what you are doing?
A: It’s maybe burlesque, maybe drag; it’s something in between. I always try to land in a grey area (laughs) on stage and in life.
One performer marvels that at Switch n’ Play, they were able to express their non-binary feelings and contemplate the possibility that there could be “a drag persona that isn’t gendered.” It’s not impersonation; it isn’t about how you look. It’s about feeling good about who you are and expressing yourself as vividly as possible.
K. James at the milkman at Switch n’ Play
In the interviews it is repeatedly reinforced that the unusual freedom and support at the Switch n’ Play Collective is what has enabled all these performers to develop as artists. One performer speaks about her South American Muslim background and how this experience has empowered her to accept her body and take ownership her sexual and individual identity. But this is not self-indulgence or group therapy; what we are watching could not occur without a disciplined process of creative exploration. These are some ambitious artists and some highly skilled performances. This is performance art.
It makes me feel old to say it, but these are kids – still talking about graduating from Sarah Lawrence college and such. And it’s inspiring to see these youngsters doing such great work: it’s innovative; it’s radical; it’s subversive; it’s delightful; it’s horrifying; it’s fantastically fun; it’s courageous; it’s freeing and it’s life-affirming. If you think we have lost our humanity in America, watch this movie.
The Switch n’ Play Collective
And though the artists don’t say it directly, I will add that it is apparent they are all speaking as part of an oppressed community – the “queer” community (as they call it in the film), which has suffered and continues to suffer from social and political abuse and injustice. It is worth remembering that 2019 is the 50-year anniversary of the Stonewall riots, which saw members of the LGBTQ community clash with police in New York’s Greenwich Village in what is widely seen as the start of the modern gay rights movement. What is happening nearby at Switch n’ Play, and at other venues around the country, is art born of adversity; it is the soulful song of struggle – with some strong similarities to jazz and to hip-hop, which brings me to the next part of this combo film review.
Side Note: Do you know origin of the term “drag”? It dates back to Shakespearean times, when the actors were all male because it was considered improper for women to take part in public spectacle or religious ritual. When the men had to wear the long skirts of female characters, which dragged on the floor, they referred to it is as playing drag. Drag was not associated with homosexuality until much later.
Cross-dressing was a pervasive part of American vaudeville acts from the turn of the century until the late 1930s and considered an innocuous comic routine. It is there that it became entwined with burlesque and striptease. The modern iteration of drag queens developed at underground clubs during Prohibition (when all bars had to go underground), and they were “supported” by the Mafia, who agreed to sell bootleg booze to gay clubs and provide protection from police raids. Jump forward to Stonewall, and Tim Curry in Rocky Horror Picture Show, then Boy George, consider the stylings of David Bowie, and then leap ahead to RuPauland that still leaves you in the dust of the ferocious freshness that is happening now in Brooklyn.
Hey, just for fun, I am adding in this recent event. Click for Variety news story: Taylor Swift Gives Surprise Performance at LGBT Landmark Stonewall Inn (GLAAD I Could Make it.) See the end of this article for video of the performance. AND also, for fair perspective, I am linking to the Esquire criticism of Taylor Swift’s new, pro-GLAAD song, “You Need to Calm Down,” which she released just 24 hours before her Stonewall appearance: “No Shade, But There’s a Wrong Way to Make a Gay Anthem.” If nothing else, that article, plus another at Esquire about Swift’s new activism, illustrates how raw and uneasy this social issue remains, and how history very much informs our understanding of current events (which makes the next two movies in this article all the more important).
A Night at Switch n’ Play, directed by Cody Stickels, premiered recently at Toronto’s Inside Out Film Festival. It’s film festival season, so I happen to have just recently seen two other documentaries that Switch n’ Play brings to mind, and it’s not due to subject as much as spirit – the spirit of change and of freedom.
Speaking of spirit, if you were to research the etymology of the word “jazz,” you would find that it’s based on an obsolete slang term from the 1800s – “jasm,” which meant spirit, energy and vigor. Jasm is derived from an earlier term – “jism,” which was defined as spirit, energy, or spunk, and “spunk” could also be interpreted to mean semen or sperm, making jism a taboo word. So, Helen Highly Suggests that calling the queer things happening at Switch n’ Play “jazz drag” might be worth considering.
“Blue Notes Records” film poster
Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes is a documentary by Sophie Huber about the history of the most important record label in the history of jazz – and by extension, that of American music. (See film trailer below.) Founded in New York in 1939 by German Jewish refugees Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, the story of Blue Note Records (Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, etc.) goes beyond the landmark recordings and encompasses the pursuit of musical freedom and the idea of music as a revolutionary and transformative force for African Americans and their audiences. The themes of this film are almost shockingly consistent with the themes in A Night at Switch n’ Play.
And it’s also worth noting that the term “blue note” is another connection. In jazz or blues music, a blue note is one that, for expressive purposes, is sung or played at a slightly different pitch than standard. This practice is also commonly referred to as “bending” a note. Again, Helen Highly Suggests that the gender-bending expressiveness in A Night at Switch n’ Play might also be aptly called “blue drag.” And the Switch n’ Play idea of performing in “the grey area” is also a key element of jazz. This documentary emphasizes that jazz thrives on musical diversity, experimentation, improvisation and emotional passion, and it requires a high level of skill. Plus, the music is always layered with life experience; it’s personal. And so that makes the Blue Note film an ideal companion piece for the Switch n’ Play film.
“Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes”
The focus of the Blue Note documentary is conversations with jazz icons as well as today’s groundbreaking Blue Note musicians. It is through this testimony that the film reveals the vital and enduring mission of the Blue Note company and directly connects jazz to hip-hop. The notion of handing the torch to a younger generation of artists who are addressing a modernized version of the same-old racial struggle, using newly inventive and resourceful methods while building on their heritage, is what makes this documentary more than just a tribute film.
Never has it been made clearer to this viewer that the music and culture of hip-hop is an act of reverence for the pioneers and heroes who came before them and a solemn acceptance of the burden that is being handed down. Of course, jazz expresses a wide range of human emotions, including supreme joy. It is delicate and it is boisterous. It manages to push the conventional boundaries at every angle. And this film captures that broadness of spirit and the powerful pleasure of free expression.
“Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes” documentary
There is not a lot of music in this film, however. It is more of a think-piece. But jazz-lovers will feast on it, I imagine. And even I, who am not a jazz aficionado, found Blue Note to be fascinating and emotionally compelling. It is an insightful and at times startling history lesson and also an intimate window into the creative process. It is full of gorgeous black and white photos and artfully designed album covers, but be prepared for lots of still shots and not much movement. Nonetheless, especially if you think jazz is dead, you should watch this film; it is aggressively political and relevant. And even though I wrote that this is more than a tribute film, it is in large part a tribute, and it’s a loving, satisfying, and thoughtful tribute to the one true form of American music and to the daring people who made it possible. If you think American democracy and freedom are dead (or dying), then you should watch both these films.
“Woodstock Three Days That Defined a Generation” poster
Speaking of art as it relates to freedom (and 50th anniversaries): There is Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation, directed by Barak Goodman, which premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival. It celebrates the 50th anniversary of the iconic music festival that has become a symbol for the power of youthful passion and vision when it comes together in the pursuit of freedom. More than 400,000 young people gathered on a farm in upstate New York, where there was not adequate space or supplies to accommodate them all. They came from far and wide with the unyielding determination of a crusade, and instead of creating an enormous disaster/riot that the press was predicting with near hysteria, they showed the world that the power of love and the spirit of peace, with the addition of music (art), can make glorious and unexpected history.
The crowd at Woodstock
Repeatedly throughout this film, via archival footage, we hear those young folks remark on how inspiring it is to find so many others who share their values and hopes and their sense of misfit-identity that in many cases had not been defined beyond a feeling, but that would be defined and empowered by the time that weekend was over. It was a transformative experience, by all accounts.
And in Switch n’ Play, we also hear again and again, in the performer interviews, that sense of wonder and relief at discovering a community of others who made them feel understood and accepted. One artist says specifically that in this collective group, whoever you are or want to be, “there is space for it.”
Peace at Woodstock
In contrast to previous Woodstock films, Director Barak Goodman specifically focuses his documentary on the audience and organizers and their process of discovering and then embracing their part in democracy – how the Woodstock music festival and the phenomenon it became intersected with national politics at the time and to some extent how it suggests possibilities for present-day politics. In his review, Ron Simon writes, “Goodman sees the sixties era ‘forged in crisis,’ much like today’s generation, with different threats, notably climate change and disillusionment with institutions. He wants his version of the festival to inspire, emphasizing how Woodstock tried to be ‘a new city.’” Goodman sees his film and that event as a testament to the power of young people to use their passion to achieve great things. (But again, the film includes more commentary than music.)
We learn in this documentary that Richie Havens’ famous song “Freedom” was created spontaneously on stage at Woodstock; he improvised based on an old spiritual, “Motherless Child” (not unlike jazz), and that song became an anthem for a generation. Later, Havens explained, “I think the word ‘freedom’ came out of my mouth because I saw it in front of me. I saw the freedom that we were looking for. And every person sharing it, and so that word came out…The establishment was foolish enough to give us all this freedom and we used it in every way we could.”
These three films seem to speak in concert, with the same underlying melody — young people wanting to claim their power, exercise their freedom, advocate for love and harmony. All three films celebrate the ways that youthful passion has reshaped the world. All three films depict despair transformed into optimism, isolation into solidarity, with art as the catalyst. All three stories come from a substantial heritage and yet are relevant right now. Happy Birthday America, and Happy Pride Month. Let’s all try to come together and make the most of it. #FreedomOf Expression
Watch the trailer for the Blue Note Records documentary below:
News:Blue Note opens 6/14 at Metrograph NYC and on 6/28 at Laemmle Monica Film Center in LA. The film will then roll out to cinemas across the nation this summer followed by television broadcasts and a DVD release later in the year.
News: Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation is now available online FOR FREE! Click here to watch.
Watch that iconic Richie Havens performance of “Freedom,” below:
Interested in a music documentary that is just plain full of great American music, some rare footage, and not too much talking? TryClive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives.
News: Less than 24 hours after she dropped her new single “You Need to Calm Down,” which includes shout-outs to GLAAD and the LGBT community, she made a surprise appearance before about 100 people at the Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich Village, helping to commemorate the 50th year anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. Watch Taylor Swift sing “Shake it Off” at the Stonewall Inn, below. (Is something wrong with this picture? Esquire can explain what seems off. Although… Stonewall Inn thought it was worth having Swift perform. What’s the point in putting limits on who is allowed to care? But that’s just Helen Highly Clueless speaking.)
17 Blocks, a documentary by Davy Rothbart, was included in my initial Tribeca Film Festival2019 Pick-List because of the compelling and devastating use of a home-video archive. I was interested in archival-themed films, and I probably would not have watched this film otherwise. But once you see this, it’s tough to forget; it’s a family memoir that grabs on tight. The film was created due to a chance meeting, in 1999, of two kids at a Washington D.C. public basketball court and director-producer Davy Rothbart (a frequent contributor to This American Life).
Fifteen-year-old Smurf Sanford and his nine-year-old brother Emmanuel lived in the neighborhood, which is only 17 blocks from the U.S. Capitol building but is a dangerous and decrepit part of the city that outsiders go to great lengths to avoid. Rothbart lived nearby and over time became friends with these boys and then their mother Cheryl and sister Denice. When Emmanuel expressed interest in becoming a filmmaker, Rothbart lent him a video camera.
17 Blocks, documentary at Tribeca Film Festival
The little boy began shooting home movies, a project that continued on and off among the family members for the next 20 years. The resulting footage, disjointed in its storytelling and often rough in its sound and light-quality, is earnestly pieced together by Rothbart and forms an intense portrait of a loving family dealing with life in a neighborhood defined by poverty, drug addiction and gun violence. Its authentic “cinema verite” approach includes filming of a brutal, real-life street beating and other harrowing scenes where the viewing audience will want to intervene, but we cannot. The pain of helplessly observing all the havoc and destruction in this film is part of its point, and its power. It is not surprising that this film won the Tribeca Film Festival Awardfor Best Editing of a Feature Documentary.
“This documentary sticks to its guns, so to speak; it shows what was recorded.”
One of the most memorable scenes in 17 Blocks is shot in a small, local store. The shop specializes in personalized T-shirts — the type that suburban-youth sports teams might wear. But this store’s most frequent order is for shirts honoring people who have recently died, their photos surrounded by messages of remembrance. The span between the printed birth and death dates is almost always terribly short. Watching mourners ordering these cotton tombstones is stunning in its ordinary, everyday nature. We get glimpses of how one person’s death affects others — the siblings, parents, friends, and how it ripples through the community. We watch in awe as broken people rise to take care of those around them.
The film insists on being entirely observational and objective and does not exclude scenes that are grotesque or offensive. Some critics are questioning the rightness of what seems at times like an invasion of privacy or superfluous sensationalism. But this documentary sticks to its guns, so to speak; it shows what was recorded. We do get some interviews and voice-over narration to soften and explain, but the film never looks away. It is a true document, for better or worse.
“Perhaps the most hopeful aspect of this film is that it exists.”
Not all moments are bleak; the film shows us gratifying scenes of family dinners, dancing, celebrations, also Emmanuel’s high school graduation. We see moments of triumph and reasons for optimism — a second chance, a new job, people growing stronger through adversity, a younger generation with a brighter vision, all very personal and very real. The most powerful force in this family is love.
I imagine the filmmaker wanted an uplifting conclusion to his decidedly humanistic movie. But late in the story, when the lightening bolt of tragedy strikes directly into this family that we have come to know so intimately, it’s hard for the film to recover. We are reminded how this decades-long documentary is entirely unscripted, unpredictable and raw. Perhaps the most hopeful aspect of this film is that it exists — that this family, even in their darkest moments, had the wisdom to understand the value in telling their story; they opened up their lives to the rest of us in an unusually courageous way. Viewers are left to draw their own conclusions.
However, before the credits roll, we are presented with a screen graphic that dedicates the film to Washington D.C. homicide victims and then lists all their names from the last decade. It requires very tiny text to fit them all in.
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From the Director’s Notes of 17 Blocks, we learn this:
“In honor of their slain family member, in 2010 the Sanfords and I started an organization called Washington To Washington (WashingtonToWashington.org), bringing groups of kids from their D.C. neighborhood on a week-long camping trip each summer to visit some of America’s most beautiful National Parks and Forests. We hike, swim, canoe, ride horses, play games, build campfires, make S’mores, and trade ghost stories. These trips can’t cure all of the challenges many of these kids face, but offer a chance for them to broaden their perspectives, experience the joys of nature, and discover worlds beyond the block they live on. In recent years, we’ve added groups from Detroit and New Orleans, and over the past 9 years we’ve brought over 500 kids to explore the Great Outdoors; this summer, we’ll celebrate our 10th Annual Trip. The idea of something positive coming out of tragedy has been heartening to us all.”
News: 17 Blocks will go back to where it all started, taking part in AFI Docs Impact Lab in Washington D.C., June 19-23.
News: 17 Blocks will be part of the 2019 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, starting June 28. This is the largest film festival in the Czech Republic and the most prestigious such festival in Central and Eastern Europe.
Walking on Water, directed by Andrey Paounov, is a new documentary about the latest exhibit / production by Christo, the renowned installation artist who transforms environments into experiential artwork, on an epic scale. The film had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, was acquired by Kino Lorber and is getting a theatrical run in the U.S. this spring (beginning this weekend at Film Forum in NYC). Helen Highly Recommends you see it – in a theater, ideally, on as large a screen as possible. Walking on Water chronicles Christo’s magnificent 2016 project, “Floating Piers,” in which he laid out a three-kilometer-long. buoyant, fabric-wrapped path across Lake Iseo in northern Italy, designed to let people stroll across the gently undulating orange surface. (It is orange, or golden yellow, or “saffron,” as Christo insists.) In the film, we see the artist’s sometimes-cantankerous sometimes-charming personality do battle with technology, bureaucracy, corruption and the elements, resulting in an installation that is spectacularly beautiful and a documentary that captures the chaos of creation.
It’s important to note that, despite what has been reported elsewhere, the film’s title, Walking on Water, does not refer to the floating piers in the project. Director Paounov is the one who named the film, independently from Christo, and he says that it refers to what he learned from his “experience of working with Christo” – Christo’s way of being an artist and handling the work. It’s about the creative endeavor – “the journey.” Paounov says:
“In the film, I tried to translate this experience and invite the audience to walk on water with Christo.”
The Enigma of Christo
I am a Christo fan. I was thrilled to be in New York in February 2005 to see “The Gates” – 7,503 saffron-colored free-hanging-fabric panels installed along 23 miles of pathways in Central Park, which seemed “like a golden river appearing and disappearing through the bare branches of the trees,” if you listen to Christo describe it. Some New Yorkers complained that the flowing drapes of the installation, which bragged of using 2/3 of the amount of steel used to build the Eiffel Tower, was an irritation to bikers. Others said it looked like a Halloween parade and decried the “claptrap” of Christo’s doggedness in describing the fabric as “saffron” when it appeared to the casual observer as clearly orange.
“The Gates,” by Christo, 2005
On the Subject of Saffron: The controversy of Christo naming his often-used orange as saffron has been an ongoing topic of ridicule and point of debate, which came up once again with the installation depicted in this new film. I feel compelled to defend Christo’s use of the word “saffron,” which is both a color and a spice. Appropriately, it is the most precious and most expensive spice in the world. Saffron filaments, or threads, are actually the dried stigmas of the saffron flower, Crocus Sativus Linnaeus. Each flower contains only three stigmas. These threads must be picked from each flower by hand, and more than 75,000 of these flowers are needed to produce just one pound of saffron filaments. But because of the intensity of its aroma and bright orange-yellow color, saffron is typically used sparingly in food. Paradoxically, the flavor of saffron is subtle and difficult to describe; it’s a taste that is hard to pin down, sort of an enigma, similar to Christo himself.
Maybe I’m too easy, but I liked it – “The Gates,” when I saw it in person. And in the back of my head, I can still hear my old MFA directing teacher whining, “I don’t care if you l-i-i-i-ke it or don’t l-i-i-ke it; I want to know what you think about it!” Well, Christo prefers you don’t think; he wants you to only experience. Christo defiantly spurns critics, reveling in his art’s “uselessness.” His accessible approach means you don’t need to read a museum’s explanatory wall panel full of intellectual terminology to understand what you are experiencing (arguments about saffron vs orange aside). It brings people together to engage with their environment, it delights and uplifts and creates a shared emotional bond between observers. One man’s frivolous is another man’s breathtaking.
“The Gates,” by Christo, in NYC
Personally, I found the experience to be the very definition of the word phenomenal – sensational in the sense of wonderful. The almost unfathomable enormity of it all, and the seeming impossibility of its logistical existence, in addition to its outrageously temporal nature – only two weeks in New York for all that tonnage of steel, is part of the dramatic appeal.
“The Gates,” people sharing the experience
Hey, in the old days, before formal theater became popular in America, people used to pack a picnic basket and bring the family to gather with their neighbors and watch public hangings – of people, not fabric. There’s nothing like watching real death to make you feel alive. And people have died due to their participation in Christo’s events, not that it was at all intentional (although perhaps inevitable). His installations are not designed to be dangerous, but his dare-devil personality does lean in that direction. For example, his most recent artistic endeavor had a more-than-mile-long walkway-on-water, which floated atop a lake with an average depth of 400 ft, and it had absolutely no handrails or guardrails whatsoever.
“Umbrellas,” by Christo
During “Umbrellas” (1991), staged in both California and Japan, in which 3.100 yellow umbrellas, each more than 19-ft high, were erected across many miles of land in both countries, a storm caused one of the 448-lb aluminum-framed parasols to topple, and one woman was crushed to death by an umbrella in California. After the event turned fatal, the artist and his wife announced that the project would be closed, which led to a second death, the accidental electrocution of a worker in Japan as he helped take down an umbrella.
But before those tragedies occurred, one woman, whose mobile home overlooked a cluster of the giant umbrellas in CA, declared “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen besides the birth of my daughter.” As beautiful as birth and as horrific as death – these are two of the reasons why Christo’s projects have consistently drawn enormous attention whenever they occur, all over the world.
Christo’s “Umbrellas,” in California
For “Floating Piers,” 1.2 million people showed up in this tiny town in Italy, over 16 days. In 1995, when Christo wrapped the Reichstag, five million people came to see the historic, German parliament building turned into a public art object. And part of this draw is the short-term nature of all Christo’s works; despite years of planning, the installations usually stand for about two or three weeks only.
The ephemeral quality of the projects is an aesthetic decision. Christo has gone on record as saying, “Our works are temporary in order to endow the works of art with a feeling of urgency to be seen, and the love and tenderness brought by the fact that they will not last. Those feelings are usually reserved for other temporary things, such as childhood and our own life. These are valued because we know that they will not last. We want to offer this feeling of love and tenderness to our works, as an added dimension and as an additional aesthetic quality.”
“Wrapped,” by Christo
A Study of Documentary Style
I was a Christo fan long before I saw “The Gates” in New York. Why did I consider myself a fan? How did I even know about his work? I certainly never learned about it in school. The answer is: Film. I had seen several documentaries that had managed to capture and communicate the splendor and grandeur and triumphant nature of the work of this eccentric, Bulgarian-born artist and his partner-wife Jeanne-Claude.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude
What I didn’t realize at the time is that while I was experiencing the work of Christo through those films, and learning about his process, I was also experiencing the talent and very specific insight of the films’ directors – the Maysles brothers. Their documentarian process and philosophy were as much a part of my appreciation as was Christo’s art itself. What has become their box-set of five documentaries about Christo projects is like a history lesson of documentary form by cinema verité pioneers David and Albert Maysles (Gimme Shelter, Salesman, Grey Gardens).
Note: Grey Gardens was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant,” largely due to the direction by the Maysles brothers.
Albert and David Maysles. documentarians
In fact, the Christo films might be as much about the enduring relationship between Christo and the Maysles brothers as they are about the relationship between Christo and his wife, who was both his personal provocateur and argumentative agitator. The films are certainly a collaboration, and Christo has often spoken about the essential part those filmmakers played in bearing witness to and recording the creative impulse, the technical challenges, the political drama, the emotional investment, and the transforming effect of the finished works – all massive-scale temporary installations that illustrate the intersection of art and everyday life. But as brash and bold as Christo’s art is, the Maysles brothers were equally restrained in their unscripted, observing-not-directing style of “direct cinema,” which became their defining legacy. Let it be noted, though, that this style as employed by the Maysles brothers is not any sort of critical analysis; it is more of an affectionate, stand-back-in-awe portrayal, although they never pretend otherwise.
Albert Maysles, Jeanne-Claude, and Christo
Christo and Jeanne-Claude met the Maysles brother in Paris in 1961, and a deeply personal, decades-long friendship was born. For a while, the brothers actually lived with Christo and his wife, following them everywhere and recording everything. The result of this devotion was an academy award nomination for their first collaboration, Christo’s Valley Curtain (1974), which watched as Christo, Jeanne-Claude and their team strung a quarter-mile curtain of nine tons of vibrant orange nylon across a gigantic cleft in a Colorado mountain range. The movie is a permanent record of a project that rocked the artistic community and turned skeptical iron workers into astonished fans.
Christo’s “Valley Curtain”
Following that were four more films that have collectively become historic for their observational approach to filmmaking, in addition to their testament that what matters most in art is the process. That belief is never more true than in the case of Christo.
“Surrounded Islands” (1983) was a three-years-in-the-making project in which eleven islands in Biscayne Bay, Miami were each surrounded by a skirt of pink. The finished project produced one of the most iconic images of 1980s art. At the time, however, the prospect of thousands of hot-pink polypropylene sheets swimming in Miami waters left environment groups aghast. A lengthy and costly legal battle with local wildlife groups was resolved in federal court, after “endless and nerve-racking negotiations.” You can watch it all happen in Islands (1986).
At Amazon.com, where the box-set of DVDs is available for purchase, Jeff Shannon writes, “The Christos are both deliriously self-indulgent and open-heartedly generous about their work and the impressive engineering that goes into creating it. For these and other time-consuming but fleetingly visible endowments of beauty on an epic scale, the Maysles were there with camera and microphone, capturing the impact, controversy, humor, and ultimate glory of Christo’s wondrous vision.” That’s a tough act to follow, but this new documentary is a worthy tribute to all that came before it.
“Surrounded Islands,” by Christo, in Florida
The New Documentary
Walking on Water offers another look at Christo’s process and its staggeringly complicated engineering and political manipulations. More importantly, it’s the first project he’s done without his wife and partner, Jeanne-Claude, who died in 2009. Christo is now collaborating with his nephew, Vladimir Yavachev. And it’s Christo’s first film without the Maysles brothers, who have also died since his last project, David in 2007 and Albert in 2015. In this documentary, Christo returns to his Bulgarian roots to bring in fellow compatriot, director Andrey Paounov (The Boy Who Was a King). If nothing else, those facts alone make this film inherently interesting; how will these new relationships compare to and comment on what came before them?
Christo and director Andrey Paounov
Once again, we get to watch the artist’s bull-headed personality as he, now 83 years old, pushes to complete an audacious project that was conceived decades previously but rejected in both Argentina and Japan. It is finally in Italy that Christo’s floating pathway enables visitors to explore their environment from new perspectives as they meander across the water on foot. But technology has changed over the years, and thanks to digital photography, cameras have never been quite as privileged to such immersive and up-close views of Christo’s craft as they are here.
Walking on Water draws from over 700 hours of footage, a daunting amount of material to sort. Yet Paounov succeeds in delivering a compelling portrait of the fine madness entailed in the pursuit of art – the passion, the devotion, the headaches, the screaming matches, the boredom, the flashes of inspiration.
Large crowd walking on water
Interview with Christo and Andry Paounov
I almost was able to interview Christo and director Andrey Paounov (AP, below) for this film’s release in New York City, but that fell through at the last minute, as I imagine is often the case with much of what they do. So, I am going to liberally quote from previous interviews they have done, primary with POV Magazine and live at Toronto International Film Festival, because I do think their own words are significant in appreciating the value of the new documentary. Note that these are selected snippets only and taken out of context, but they speak to the issues I have discussed so far in this article. I have bolded key statements:
AP: Christo always documents his projects. Documentation is always part of the art.
Ch: Yes, since the ’60s when we met Albert and David Maysles… When Albert and David came to Paris in 1961 to show their films, we became very close friends. I had photographers following me at the time, taking pictures of the project for books, and we [the Maysles and Jeanne-Claude and I] became like a family. It was an incredible chance that they could film my work. I had no films before that. That is how everything started. David died and Albert passed away after The Gates project [2005]. Then I was alone. With my nephew and friends working together, we were very conscious that we had to film this project, and have it covered by many cinematographers.
Christo, working on “Floating Piers”
AP:I got into the project at the end of “The Floating Piers. They had about 10 crews that were following Christo at different moments of the project. There were many crews: some were just doing aerial shots, some just following Christo, underwater cameras—there’s a lot that isn’t in the film… That was the challenge of making the film. There was so much footage that it took me three months just watching it 10 hours a day, every day.
There was no pre-concept or general direction in what the crews shot. We had no idea what was there. I had assistants and we were watching together, exchanging files, and finding out what was there. At one point, I started finding some tracks in the footage and what I was interested in finding — a character piece from all this chaos. Luckily, we live in the digital age, so there were days of cameras rolling, rolling, rolling, rolling. In between all this stuff, there were brilliant little pieces where you could see him and all the relationships with the family behind the Christo project. That’s how we started putting this puzzle together.
We also continued documenting his adventures. The end of the film [which sees Christo embark on a new project, The Mastaba] is something that we shot, but The Floating Piers was the other way around. It was like finding a suitcase of footage on the street.
Christo at work in his studio
Ch: You will see that I am not very technologically inclined. Of course, anyone can film, but the important part of all the films, especially this film, is that we were very conscious of filming a distinct period and the hard work. It’s very important when the physical project no longer exists. We never do the same things again. There will be no more Floating Piers, no more Valley Curtain. We do not know ourselves how the things will look. But we do know something: we know how to do it. All that work is so private and invisible for many people. We were very eager to show people what often isn’t seen by the public: the conflicts, the drama, the soul of the work. It is the reason I do not do commissions. All our projects over fifty years translate this energy when they are realized, not because some mayor of the city or corporate executive gives us some money to make a sculpture.
Young boy watching the floating piers
AP: But with the digital age, what has changed, especially since the previous films were made, is that the films were made in order to experience the project. Nowadays, it’s the opposite. We’re drowning in images. The Floating Piers destroyed Instagram there were so many images. I knew while making the film that I couldn’t just show the project as people had already seen it on TV, the news, and social media. I was also not interested in doing that because I’ve always felt that you have to make films about people and not things.
Christo at night, w/ “Floating Piers”
It [Walking on Water] was the first film I made outside of Eastern Europe. It meant coming to NY and working w Christo. The most fantastic thing about making documentaries is you get to live other people’s lives and dreams, and his world is incredible…
I thought, how can I come after the Maysles? In a way this is an homage to the Maysles brothers and also to direct cinema. [I got to utilize] everything I loved about American cinema from the 60s and cinema verité.
Christo, at opening of “Floating Piers”
HelenHighly: Well, Paounov does indeed offer a sort of homage to the award-winning style that preceded him, but he definitely also leaves his own mark. Starting with creating his own title, rather than taking the same name for the film as Christo used for the art project, Paounov has made a contemporary film that speaks to history and originality and the process of creation. I think it’s time for art-theaters around the country to roll out the orange carpet for Walking on Water.
