Category Archives: Cinema

Gorgeous Lady of the Week — Felicity Jones

No, Felicity Jones didn’t win the Best Actress Oscar last Sunday. But anyone who’s seen her remarkably brave and touching performance in The Theory of Everything knows that the lovely young Englishwoman’s future is nevertheless guaranteed to be golden. Ms. Jones’ Jane Wilde Hawking opposite Eddie Redmayne’s astonishing, Academy Award-winning portrayal as her physically impaired astrophysicist husband, Stephen Hawking, gives the film its soul and its heart. Her work is subtle and never mawkish but still communicates a woman pushed to the very limit by her belief in selfless love, her sense of guilt and honor and the slow motion tragedy of taking care of a husband with incurable neuromuscular disease. By turns strong and shattered, the actress achieves that rare thing in film acting: a fully realized human being with whom anyone with half a heart can empathize.

The 31-year-old Birmingham beauty began her career as a teen sorceress-in-training on ITV’s The Worst Witch and after 3 seasons she took time off to attend university. But acting remained her calling and she returned to it a young woman on a mission with an impressive run of supporting roles alongside major league actresses like Emma Thompson, Michelle Pfeiffer and Helen Mirren. That steady work with top notch professionals eventually led to her own star turn in 2011’s dizzyingly romantic Like Crazy, where she played a British exchange student abruptly separated from her American lover when her visa expires.

She was also carried away by love in 2013’s critically acclaimed Breathe In, where Ms. Jones was again an exchange student, this time falling for Guy Pearce’s married music teacher and leading him astray with her vulnerability, musicianship and big blue eyes. That same year she picked up a British Independent Film Award nomination for her very moving work as Charles Dickens’ secret mistress in the ambitious period biography, The Invisible Woman. Directed with a fine, restrained touch by Ralph Fiennes while he simultaneously portrayed Dickens, it was clear that Felicity’s portrayal of Nelly Ternen and her May-September romance with the great author confirmed a major acting talent reaching full maturity. The fact that she had now held her own and then some with Pearce and Fiennes in two consecutive pictures announced to the world that this was a young lady unintimidated and ready for big things.

And what could be bigger than her breakthrough in The Theory of Everything with its massive success and resultant accolades? Now everyone knows Felicity Jones, not just British film buffs. And with several more films in post-production and a secure spot as one of Hollywood’s new, young A-list actresses this should only be the beginning. Between those eyes, that face and all that talent we’re sure to be looking at Felicity for years to come. Which suits us just fine.

Classic Movie Watch — The Magnificent Seven (1960)

Very few movies have ever packed more star power into their two hours than John Sturges’ 1960 Western extravaganza The Magnificent Seven. Featuring a presciently well-chosen collection of actors who would go on to become massive stars, the film is also fascinating for being a remake of Akira Kurosowa’s Seven Samurai with a perfectly logical transformation of milieu from the classic Samurai period of feudal Japan to the Old West of the United States/Mexico border. Highly skilled mercenaries are hired to defend a small, poor village from the depredations of a rampaging bandit and his gang, and Sturges shrewdly swaps swords for six guns even while the plot and characters of the two films remain largely identical. Of course, the ultimate irony is that Kurosowa was in fact striving to emulate a John Ford Western with Seven Samurai, so Magnificent Seven winds up being a Hollywood Western refracted back to its source by way of Japan. But it was Sturges’ singular genius to see how seven huge stars (eight if you count the bandit super villain) could fit together in one action-packed epic.

Sturges had already succeeded brilliantly with several other high wattage blockbusters like Gunfight at the OK Corral, which featured the always sparkling tandem of Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas; Bad Day at Black Rock with a one-armed Spencer Tracy being menaced by all-star heavies Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin; and the WWII action adventure Never So Few, which starred Frank Sinatra, Peter Lawford and Gina Lollabrigida but was stolen by a young Steve McQueen in his breakout film role. Sturges immediately saw McQueen’s potential after the remarkable reaction to his supporting role in Few and teamed him that great bald showman, Yul Brynner, already famous for playing grand exotics like the King of Siam and Pharaoh, as the twin leads for his new project. Continue reading →

Gorgeous Lady of the Week — Emily Blunt

Talent, intelligence and beauty — sloe-eyed actress Emily Blunt has those attributes in spades. Descended from a prominent English family of over-achievers, Emily was precocious enough to go directly from secondary school to starring opposite Judi Dench in a revival of George S. Kaufman & Edna Ferber’s classic lampoon of theater prima donnas, The Royal Family. After more well received stage work, including a very fitting Juliet, it was natural that her lovely visage and electric acting should grace British television, where she had a breakout performance in the award-winning dark and complicated My Summer of Love.

Following yet more British television success in Gideon’s Daughter, Ms. Blunt broke through across the Atlantic in 2006 in the hugely popular The Devil Wears Prada. Her pitch perfect Emily Charlton, the icy veteran assistant to the great Meryl Streep’s Anna Wintour-like fashion doyenne, served as the ideal foil for wide-eyed ingénue Anne Hathaway and her performance was just as important to the overall success of that picture. Nominated for a BAFTA and Golden Globe for the role, Emily was now on the A-list in Hollywood. She followed up that breakthrough by de-glamming and teaming with Amy Adams in Sunshine Cleaning as very funny misfit sisters trying to start a business cleaning up after dead people. She showed more comedy chops alongside Ewan McGregor in 2011’s charmingly offbeat Salmon Fishing in the Yemen and with Jason Segal as a couple perpetually thwarted on their journey to the alter in 2012’s The Five-Year Engagement.

Showing her versatility as well as bankabilty, Ms. Blunt then jumped easily into high-concept sci-fi action with standout support to Joseph-Gordon Levitt and Bruce Willis in the trippy and original 2012 time travel thriller Looper. Caught in another time loop this year, she was more than a match for Tom Cruise trying to repel alien invaders in the would-be blockbuster Edge of Tomorrow. Emily is also slated to be part of the cast of the upcoming big screen adaptation of Steven Sondheim’s Broadway musical, Into the Woods. If she sings as good as she looks in a futuristic exoskeleton battle suit, or most other clothing really, we’re there.

Still only 31-years-old, Emily has been married since 2010 to The Office actor John Krasinski and the couple welcomed their first child into the world this past February, daughter Hazel. To which we can only say, congratulations. And also: keep taking those improv classes, fellas, because it seems that funny guys get all the babes. That’s definitely QED by Emily.

Documentary view — Beware of Mr. Baker

Rock musicians are notoriously eccentric as a whole, particularly those whose heyday was back in the anything goes, drug-infused 1960s and 70s. But legendary drummer and wild man Ginger Baker stands out from the crowd in terms of pure insanity and fearsome ill temper. A very large redheaded man with a seriously bad attitude and a taste for mind-altering drugs, Baker is most famous for being one third of the best power trio of all time, Cream. Along with the late Jack Bruce on bass and primary vocals and the inimitable Eric “Slowhand” Clapton on guitar, Cream redefined the sound of heavy blues in the late 1960s and made an incredible impact on Rock despite the fact that the volatile trio could only keep it together for 2 years. The outstanding 2012 documentary Beware of Mr. Baker chronicles those heady days as well as the pure obstreperousness of its larger-than-life subject who left a trail of destruction in his wake across several continents in the years that followed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqrigN8jxj8

With his gaunt appearance, madman’s eyes and predilection towards random acts of violence and self-destruction, Baker makes an ideal subject for a film. Beginning in the present at Baker’s fortified South African compound and horse farm and tracing his life back to his boyhood during Blitz-ravaged London, Beware makes use of lovely interstitial animation to add graphic novel vividness to the biography and never flinches from recounting the legendary drummer’s troubled life starting with the loss of his tough father in WWII. Baker, who might today have been diagnosed with ADD as a boy, subsequently finds his special quality when he realizes that he has “perfect time” and becomes enthralled as a teenager with Jazz drumming. He was taken under the wing of Phil Seaman, the greatest of the English Jazz drummers in the Gene Krupa style, who turned Baker on to two exceptionally important things that would impact the rest of his life: African rhythms and heroin. By his late teen years, Baker was not only a smack addict but also one of the most preeminent and technically accomplished drummers in England or anywhere else. This naturally led to his contributing to the intense and percolating London R&B scene and he quickly established himself as a force to be reckoned with in The Graham Bond Organisation, one of those big-in-England-but-not-in-the-States-type groups. With an appetite for drugs even greater than Baker’s, Bond’s band soon collapsed but not before Baker fatefully met Scottish bassist and vocalist Jack Bruce. These two polar opposites somehow attracted and were soon to become the fiery odd couple of British R&B making Rock history in the process.

While Ginger Baker disparages Bruce throughout Beware (as well as pretty much every other non-Jazz musician on the planet except Clapton), it’s clear that despite their mutual antipathy the two men fed off each other to achieve the greatest of musical heights. When Eric Clapton tired of his purist exploits in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and chose to return to the heady world of amplified R&B, Bruce and Baker were a ready made fit for Rock’s first power trio, emphasis on power: The Cream. Continue reading →

Classic Movie Watch — Sorcerer (1977)

For years, decades even, William Friedkin’s 1977 existential thriller Sorcerer was more infamous legend than actual cinematic experience, a sort of ghost story used to scare overly ambitious directors. And this was for the simple reason that almost no one had ever seen it. Coming off the double-barreled successes of The French Connection and The Exorcist, Friedkin chose to follow that incredible duo up with a re-imagined remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s excruciatingly intense and fatalistic Wages of Fear. But instead of continuing his winning ways at the box office the film very nearly ruined Friedkin’s career. To be honest, as a “force” he was never quite the same having spent all his accumulated juice to make this flawed but compellingly nihilistic epic. And so it became one of the famous “disasters” used by Hollywood studios to claw back the power that they had ceded to the creative types during the brief but fruitful “Auteur” period of the late 60s and 70s, the beginning of the end of letting the inmates run the asylum and a sort of bookend to 1980’s Heaven’s Gate.

Sorcerer was a quixotic, almost resolutely anti-commercial endeavor pushed by a hot director, went predictably well over budget and then was relegated to near total obscurity by the seriously bad timing of its release against a movie that completely changed the Hollywood paradigm: Star Wars. As Friedkin has aptly put it, when Lucas’ sci-fi epic erupted in 1977 it was a vacuum cleaner that sucked audiences from nearly all competing movies leaving very little oxygen for more challenging works. So Sorcerer never had a chance and literally lost something like $10 million dollars, which used to be a lot of money. To make matters worse the inherent risks in the production led to two studios co-producing the film so that in future years, when Sorcerer might have been re-released into the lucrative home theater market first on VHS and then DVD, no one had the legal authority to do so until Friedkin sued to recapture those rights. That finally enabled Warner Brothers to assume control of video distribution so Friedkin could remaster and reassemble his lost classic for DVD and Blue Ray. And that is a great thing for cinephiles in general and especially for those of us preoccupied with 1970s films.

Because while Sorcerer may not be the greatest film ever made, it is certainly a damn site better than most of what passes for cinema today and absolutely holds its own in terms of intensity with Friedkin’s two more commercially successful predecessors. Expanding on HG Clouzot’s superb original, Friedkin devotes the beginning third of the movie to the backgrounds of the four outcasts who will come together to haul nitro-leaking dynamite in jerry-rigged trucks over treacherous Central American roads to an oil well that is burning out of control. Continue reading →

RIP Robin Williams — 1951-2014

Ok, I’ve been procrastinating on posting this because it is so fucking sad. Robin Williams died this August 11th of suicide by self-asphyxiation. The great actor and comedian had been battling depression, as well as falling off of the sobriety wagon in recent years. Williams was just 63 years old. His New York Times Obituary is here and a very good A.O. Scott appraisal with video is here.

Obviously the tragic irony of one of the world’s funniest men succumbing to depression is well-trod ground by now. To think that someone that successful and accomplished could not get the help they needed to make it through the darkness is simply frightening. But in the end we often walk alone in this world and what drives an amazing artist, which Williams undoubtedly was, can come from the dark places of insecurity and sadness deep within, even if the art in question is comedy with a capital C. I can’t think of another person funnier than Robin Williams when he was at his manic improvisatory best. If a talk show appearance can be called art, Williams performed it, on Carson or Letterman or a million other venues that should never have had room for such pocket Dada free associative miniature moments of brilliance. He enlivened the most mundane show business rituals with electric bolts of inspirational lightning. The sense that he was barely in control of his manic energies only added to the thrill ride.

As the years went by, well after his comet-like appearance on the scene in the late 1970s, Williams evinced a melancholy sensitivity in movies like Good Will Hunting, Awakenings and Dead Poets Society that saw him turning into a sounding board for people in need of compassion, especially young people, and an outsider’s point of view to deal with a stifling world. But that sad smile has been there from the start like the tears of Pagliacci, at least as far back as The World According to Garp, Moscow on the Hudson and bursting to raw fruition in Terry Gilliam’s revelatory The Fisher King. That undercurrent of melancholia was probably a major part of Williams as a person when he wasn’t “on”, obscured in the early days by his irrepressible, some would say uncontrollable, daffy genius when he seemed to be very nearly Bugs Bunny come to life. To be sure, Williams felt loss and sadness keenly through the years with the deaths of such friends as John Belushi, Andy Kaufman, Christopher Reeve and, most recently, his mentor and idol Jonathan Winters. Maybe we just didn’t want to believe that such real life losses would take their toll on our favorite comedian.

A genius in more ways than one, Williams’ gift must have also been something of a curse, creating the expectation in his audience that he must deliver to them transcendental moments of hilarity on demand and at all times. Continue reading →

Documentary view — Salinger

One of the literary world’s great mystery men, J.D. Salinger famously disappeared from public view in 1965, when his last work was published and 14 years after the release of The Catcher in the Rye, arguably the most influential novel of the post-World War II era. Immensely private almost to the point of mania, Salinger’s opaque personal history and life in seclusion have fascinated generations of fans, literary peers, critics and the media. Shane Salerno’s 2013 documentary Salinger, which can be viewed via streaming with a Netflix membership, attempts to “find” the reclusive author by investigating and fleshing out his pre-fame life and examining the motives behind his self-imposed exile after achieving literary immortality. For the most part, it succeeds extremely well at this daunting task.

Not a great documentary but a pretty damn good one, Salinger features interviews with lifelong friends and acquaintances dating back to his pre-WW II days in New York City when he was just an aspiring writer striving for success and any sort of recognition. Significantly, it explores his engagement to the fetching debutante Oona O’Neill, Eugene O’Neill’s daughter, who eventually dumped Salinger for the much older Charlie Chaplin. Shortly thereafter Salinger was sent to Europe as a combat soldier in the Army. Salinger saw action on D-Day, in the Battle of the Bulge, the Battle of Hurtgen Forest and was at the liberation of one of the Dachau concentration camps. The documentary posits convincingly that it was these twin traumatic experiences, particularly his harrowing war service, which informed all his future work and lead to his compulsive focus on unspoiled youth, eventually driving Salinger to seek to create and control his own private universe.

It also chronicles how he was constantly submitting to and being rejected by his dream venue, The New Yorker, before during and after the War, even as he achieved modest success in the so-called “slick” magazines. He finally found a sympathetic figure at the The New Yorker in fiction editor William Maxwell, who agreed to publish “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”, which became a major success. It also introduced the world to the brilliant and strange Glass family through its troubled eldest son Seymour Glass, a shell-shocked war veteran. The history of the Glass family would later become Salinger’s lifelong obsession. But before that detour, several more short stories were published by the New Yorker, including “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut”, which Salinger eagerly optioned to Hollywood for a film version. The result, a Dana Andrews-Susan Hayward romantic vehicle retitled My Foolish Heart, was so unfaithful to his original story that Salinger never again allowed a film version of his work despite his obsessive love of cinema and constant entreaties from producers, directors and actors.

But if Salinger was smarting over Hollywood’s betrayal he put that anger to good use, channeling his rage at the “phonies” into the archetypal youth novel, The Catcher In the Rye. Continue reading →

RIP James Garner, 1928-2014

When James Garner passed away the other week at the age of 86 I felt as if I had lost a favorite uncle. Wry, worldly wise, down to earth, a little cynical, a little cranky, very funny and definitely a man’s man, Garner was a uniquely successful and uniquely American actor. The native Oklahoman started out in 1950s television after a very brief theater apprenticeship, and quickly achieved fame in Maverick as the title character Brett Maverick, the dapper and quick-witted Old West card sharp who preferred talking his way out of trouble to shooting. He then rose to stardom as a romantic lead and action star during the last gasp of the old Hollywood studio system: alongside Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson playing the Scrounger in the all-star POW epic The Great Escape and wooing Julie Andrews in Blake Edwards’ sly, sophisticated anti-war comedy, the Americanization of Emily (Garner’s own favorite film). After the excellent Western comedy Support Your Local Sheriff and a foreshadowing turn as a bemused Marlowe, he found cultural immortality back on TV as the iconic and perpetually harassed ex-cop, ex-con gumshoe Jim Rockford.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StcJVOIxLdo

For those of us who grew up in the 1970s, The Rockford Files was omnipresent, from the jaunty Mike Post theme song after the answering machine sequence to the initial run from 1974-1980 to the endless repeats in syndication. The series gleefully embraced a non-glamorous LA with the laconic and perpetually broke private eye working low rent bars and strip clubs while living in a cheap trailer home on Malibu beach, getting his meals from taco and hotdog stands and bouncing checks at the local grocery. It was a unique persona for a hero PI, totally at odds with, say, the slick rich kid mastermind of George Peppard’s Banacek. But then, maybe that’s why The Rockford Files went on to television immortality while Banacek, for all its tacky turtlenecked pleasures, is more of a fun footnote. There was just something so original about Jim Rockford as a hero: the loud sports coats with wide lapels; the wrongful conviction that gave him his cynical perspective; the beatdowns given and received; the clever ruses and identity games when on assignment; his meddling and very funny father (Noah Beery); and always a good old fashioned car chase in the mysteriously overpowered and rubber screeching gold Pontiac Firebird.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pruex3pgX1g

I told you that theme song was omnipresent! Garner was, in fact, an excellent driver and racer — he caught the bug starring in John Frankenheimer’s seminal racing movie, Grand Prix, competing in several grueling Baja 1000s thereafter — and did much of his own driving on the series, as well as many of his own stunts. Continue reading →

Gorgeous Lady of the Week — Zoe Saldana

Born in New Jersey and raised in Queens and the Dominican Republic, the lithe and lovely Zoe Saldana has emerged as a talented and strong leading lady in big budget epics. Overcoming childhood tragedy when her father was killed in an auto accident to find her love of performance through dance in the DR, the part Dominican, part Puerto Rican, all-lovely Ms. Saldana started out doing youth theater in Brooklyn in the mid-90s. But it wasn’t long before professional work came calling with a role on a Law & Order episode in 1999 and the melodramatic youth ballet feature, Center Stage in 2000.

From such promising beginnings, she soon caught the eye of Gore Verbinski to play one of the many pirate types seeking revenge on Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow in 2003’s mega-hit Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. Steven Spielberg also saw that special something in her, presciently casting her as a Star Trek-loving customs agent sympathetic to Tom Hanks’ stranded immigrant in 2004’s The Terminal.

After more blockbuster supporting work in the Roshomon-like political thriller Vantage Point (2008), 2009 saw Zoe have the breakout year that most actresses can only dream of: First, her dancer’s training and ultra-sophisticated motion capture brought to virtual life Neytiri the blue Na’vi princess and the main female character in James Cameron’s monster hit, Avatar. As if that wasn’t enough of an achievement, she also stepped even further into Sci-Fi immortality by assuming the pioneering role of Lieutenant Uhura in JJ Abrams’ rebooted Star Trek. That is what’s called a banner year, folks.

Not only has the 36-year-old already appeared in 2013’s hit sequel Star Trek: Into Darkness, where her fiery portrayal of Uhura assumed even more prominence among the crew of the Enterprise, but she is currently shooting a whopping 3 sequels to Avatar in New Zealand. Continuing with her Sci-Fi/crazy costume bent, Zoe is currently starring as the very green Gamora in the Marvel comic book adaptation, Guardians of the Galaxy, alongside newly minted leading man Chris Pratt. And after playing the title role in NBC’s miniseries remake of Rosemary’s Baby it’s somewhat heartening to know that Ms. Saldana will be starring in the soon-to-be-released and decidedly non-occult Nina Simone biopic, Nina. Bewitching as she is in tight latex costumes and weird skin colors, we’re looking forward to this lovely and intelligent lady playing that real live woman of great soul and complexity, thereby showing us even more of her inner beauty and acting chops. Then we sincerely hope Zoe gets a vacation because the girl is seriously working overtime!

A little Thursday comedy — Slap Shot (1977)

The Stanley Cup Playoffs may be over (proud of you Rangers, congrats LA) but Slap Shot is forever (clips definitely NSFW).

Sure, 1977 was one of the all-time great years in cinema history with the release of Star Wars, Close Encounters, Saturday Night Fever and Annie Hall, not to mention such crowd pleasers as The Spy Who Loved Me and Smokey and the Bandit. But it also saw the premiere of the best, most profane and funniest hockey film ever.

The late, great Paul Newman, Strother Martin, one of the finest character actors of the 60s & 70s, and director George Roy Hill of Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid and The Sting fame team up to create not just an uproarious sports comedy but a great movie with the backdrop of the Recession in the Rust Belt grounding the hijinks in place and time and giving the rollicking plot a desperate, melancholy undertone. And for the hockey-oriented, the film serves as a knowing commentary on the eternal existential dilemma of the sport: goonism vs. skillful clean play.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDXBsKnK4G8

Yes, ’77 was a landmark year for Hollywood where popular entertainment also achieved incredible quality and originality. And Slap Shot is a part of that magical run, a little gem among that year’s remarkable cinematic treasure trove.

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