Documentary Spotlight

Documentary Spotlight: We have met the “Visitors” and They is Us

Visitors—Directed by Godfrey Reggio—2013—87 minutes

Godfrey Reggio’s “Visitors” is probably the best black-and-white photo gallery exhibit ever made into a motion picture. I’m kidding, but only to prep you about what to expect with Reggio’s slow-lane meditation on what it may feel like, deep down, to inhabit our fast-lane 21st century. “Visitors” is a patient, visually sumptuous and occasionally frustrating film. It is also one that, in its wordless succession of images and music, calmly cajoles us to take stock of ourselves.

Reggio is still best known for 1982’s “Koyaanisqatsi,” his sensation-causing experiment in depicting a “life out of balance.” It started off slowly with contemplative images of the natural and indigenous worlds before eventually building up to frantic climax with sped-up images of big-city commuters and commotion, all matched to the ever-increasing tempos of Philip Glass’ celebrated soundtrack.

Two other films followed in the same vein: “Powaqqatsi” from 1988, and 2002’s “Naqoyqatsi.” The director has said that, like those earlier films, “Visitors” was about “humanity’s trancelike relationship with technology.” That may be true in a sense, but this 2013 work has a far different feel than the “Qatsi Trilogy.” Those works tended to bludgeon the viewer with relentless images of a world being nearly crushed under the weight of its own industrialization and materialism. It’s a point well taken, but also one which got tiresome over the course of three films. After a while the accelerated rats-in-a-maze images of train commuters going up escalators felt elitist. When you get right down to it, these are just productive citizens on their way to work.

Here, we are asked to look straight into the faces of our fellow humans, of all races and ages, not to mention meeting the haunting gaze of a female Lowland gorilla, a signature image of this film. Often, these shots last 90 seconds or more. These cinematic staring contests made for a somewhat squirmy viewing experience when I saw “Visitors” in a theater on its original release. In the solitary comfort of one’s home, this same device feels like a bridge to feelings of deeper human connections. If that sounds counterintuitive, so be it. It is so gratifying to take an empathetic look at our fellow travelers free of both the grievance politics and the ankle-deep identity affirmation that draw us away for our collective interests.

Some of this cinematic strategy must relate back to the director’s life story. Reggio was born in New Orleans in 1940, but by age 14 he had left home and soon became a Christian Brothers monk, spending his time in silence, prayer and mediation until age 28 (giving fair indication of his non-verbal filmmaking philosophy). He long since relocated to Santa Fe where he worked with troubled youth and was turned onto cinema after seeing the related “Los Olvidados” by Luis Bunuel. The devastations of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 led Reggio back to his stricken hometown and his location photography, as impressive as ever, features many locations in and around the Crescent City.

There are elegiac, time-lapse images of New Orleans’ Six Flags amusement park and Mercy Hospital (both closed post-Katrina), vaulted cemeteries and ghost-like bayous. These are beautifully filmed in a process that resembles B&W infrared still photography: think black skies and glowing white foliage.

Near the end, we return to an opening shot of sailing serenely over the surface of the Moon, like alien visitors gazing at the marbled planet Earth, accompanied by Philip Glass’ tranquil score. We have spent the last 80 minutes in a queer sort of communion with ourselves and our environment, not always sure if we are the watchers or the watched but assured that in the end it’s all the same. In the age of dizzying discord and snap judgments, Reggio’s hypnotic and humane film invites us to stare at the world until we see ourselves in it, along with everyone else.

Rock Docs Spotlight: “Herb Alpert Is…” (2020) Directed by John Scheinfeld

“Herb Alpert is… “ a pretty good documentary tracing the life and career of an introverted East Los Angeles kid who grew up to be the trumpet-playing leader of a band that for a while in the 1960s were arguably the biggest in the world, even outselling the Beatles for a spell. This is a story well worth telling, especially since the genial and low-key Alpert is still here to tell a lot of it himself. He is seen here in his early 80s, painting, sculpting, and running his charitable foundations—and still performing with his wife Lani Hall. Herb’s story is an encouraging tale of a creative life well-lived, in sharp relief to our age of trivialized Tik-Tok “stardom.”

Director John Scheinfeld takes the viewer on a compact trip thru Alpert’s early years as he takes up the trumpet in high school, spends a couple of years in the USC marching band and begins his professional career as a vocalist on a few L.A.-area novelty hits. Unsure of his future direction, he takes a break in Tijuana, and spends a day in the city’s traditional bullring stadium. He comes up with the idea for “The Lonely Bull,” a beautifully moody piece of music he records with his new band dubbed the Tijuana Brass. The single hit #6 on Billboard and its indelible melody still feels like a timestamp of the early Sixties.

This video for “The Lonely Bull,” nearly as evocative as the tune itself, was shot for a TV special in 1967. The original hit single was from five years earlier.

It’s probably for the good that the Herb Alpert and Co. got famous when they did. The group’s Mexican-American branding would be seen today in some corners as “cultural appropriation” much like some people now bemoan how surfing has robbed native Hawaiians of an important part of their heritage (really). Nobody in the band was Chicano (Herb’s parents were Eastern European immigrants), with members coming from as far afield as Staten Island and Newark, NJ. Back then, of course, the band’s bolero jackets and hits like “South of the Border” and “Tijuana Taxi” were just great fun. Their light and lively records were as an essential an ingredient to the success of a pre-Boomer party as was the club soda in a Tom Collins cocktail.

Alpert went back to singing for his #1 1968 solo hit “This Guy’s in Love With You.” The film also posits that the period following was a low point in his life personally We are shown a great archival interview on a bluff overlooking the Pacific, where he hesitantly questions his own happiness. This was around the time of the divorce from his first wife, while the fortunes of the Tijuana Brass were taking a dip during the ascendancy of rock music (Alpert even stopped playing for a few years and had to “relearn” the trumpet). Better times were to come with his subsequent marriage to Brasil ’66 vocalist Lani Hall and the founding of A&M Records with music mogul Jerry Moss. A&M would be a major player for the next two times, the two men personally shepherding the careers of such household names as Cat Stevens, Joe Cocker, the Carpenters, the Police, Janet Jackson and the Go-Gos.

The album cover that launched a million schoolboy fantasies (at least). This title track was later used as the theme music for “The Dating Game” TV show in America.

Interspersed among all the old gratifying film clips and photos of his heyday, are equally welcomed shots of the self-effacing and ever-active Alpert today—whether he’s painting or sculpting in his studio, attending an event at one of his many arts and music academies or performing with his wife. So while “Herb Alpert Is…” may run a little long at two hours (I would have cut out the extraneous testimonials from the likes of Sting and Billy Bob Thornton) there is a lot of inspiring stuff here to wow his many fans and maybe convince some of the younger folk that the successful life of a creative is based on running a marathon and not a 100-meter dash.

Rock Docs Spotlight: Christmas with the Sex Pistols (2013)

Few rock and roll Christmas stories are as heartwarming as the Sex Pistols’ tale of how they spent December 25th, 1977. You may well ask, huh? But look at the situation facing the England’s most notorious punk band at the end of that epochal year. Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee was celebrated that summer, with the one notable exception of the band’s blistering protest song, which took its title from the royal anthem. The Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” lambasted a “fascist regime” and an outdated monarchy that lorded over a population that needed a serious wake-up call. They had connected with a significant portion of the nation’s youth and the single is widely believed to have denied the #1 spot in the UK by industry chart-rigging at the very height of the festivities in June. Johnny Rotten and the crew had also spent the better part of a year earning their reputation as cultural enemy #1 in the eyes of Britain’s establishment.

The year wound down with a planned Sex Pistols tour, but local authorities saw to it that 27 gigs were cancelled, leaving the group in a bus that had a destination sign accurately reading “Nowhere.” That’s where we are at the start of Julien Temple’s thoroughly engaging 2013 documentary look-back. The one-hour film actually kicks off with an extended montage of hokey holiday B-roll of British holiday miscellany that shades into the darker side of that particular season: the country’s economic woes and desultory labor strikes.


Huddersfield from the hill.

It was then that the “Christmas miracle” mentioned in that montage’s ironic narration happens. The Pistols, disillusioned and all but destined to spend December 25th tooling around the rainy motorways in their Nowhere coach, got a call from the firemen’s union in the hardscrabble West Yorkshire town of Huddersfield. The firemen, who were stuck on wages of 170 pounds a week, had been on the picket line for nine weeks. They asked the band if they would be interested in doing a charity gig for the worker’s children on Christmas Day. Would they?

Here’s the complete film. Enjoy!

“Christmas With the Sex Pistols” (aka “Never Mind the Baubles”) is an object lesson in the random acts of kindness that can make our world a little better when tolerance and understanding win the day. The band’s anarchic outrageousness may have been necessary to shake up the country’s moribund state of mind, a process that would go on to reenergize Britain’s culture for the better. But it came at a price, esp. at the hands of the country’s tabloid press, led by the likes of Rupert Murdoch and his ilk. “Anything we did was transferred into a lie,” John Lydon (then Johnny Rotten) says in the film’s contemporary band interviews. “They just wanted to smear us,” he continues, “but you can’t beat the truth.” And the truth of that Christmas afternoon was that the Sex Pistols were accepted as (and presented themselves as) nothing more than good-natured benefactors, throwing an unpretentious Yuletide party for the kids (most of them grade-schoolers) with gifts and band memorabilia for all, a luncheon and a huge cake (more of that later).

Temple smartly compliments this angle by having the three surviving Pistols from this line-up (Lydon, Steve Jones and Paul Cook) relate their own childhood recollections of the Yuletide. The relatively stable home environments of Lydon and Cook contrast sharply with the backstory of Jones, whose sour holiday memories and it’s “fucking ‘orrible” TV specials are related to his abusive “shit family” (refer to his memoir Lonely Boy for details), only partially relieved by escaping to the house of his childhood friend, Cook. Of course, John Simon Ritchie (aka Sid Vicious) is not here to tell his tale but Lydon recalls that Sid, keen on coming across as a punk tough guy, needed a “serious talking to” before the party. He reminded Sid that that kind of posturing wouldn’t work with children. Jez Scott, who was about 15 and is the only kid there interviewed here as an adult, remembers that “Sid was brilliant.” He had ended up with two Sex Pistols soccer-style scarves and Mr. Vicious politely asked Jez if he could have one as the memorabilia were not meant for band members.


Sid and kids, with girlfriend Nancy Spungen, his partner in doom, looking on.

Jez also remembered that the Pistols delivered their usual furious set, even including their anti-abortion tirade “Bodies.” But the children, being “natural anarchists,” loved them and enthusiastically started a cake fight with the ample leftovers of the featured dessert. Johnny Rotten, as the lead singer, was apt to lean over the front of the bandstand or wander into the audience. So he soon had his head covered in frosting, much to his own delight. “It had all gotten a little too serious” by then, he recalls of the atmosphere surrounding the group. Both band members and a couple of greying guys who walked nine miles to see the night show, talk of the fleeting days of “punk unity” and the good vibes that permeated this gig. Near the end of this piece, Temple treats the true-blue Pistols fan to a chunk of great footage from the evening “adult” show. These performance clips are of particular interest as it was the band’s last UK show in their original run. Their chaotic U.S. tour soon followed and ended with the group’s bitter break-up a mere three weeks later.

That story could (and has) filled many a magazine article and book chapter. What Temple’s shrewdly charming film does is sprinkle a little holiday magic on the band’s inglorious ending. There were many factors that contributed to that; the group’s youthful inexperience, the tabloid nonsense and an older generation’s stark intolerance, not to mention the cynical machinations of the Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren. It’s a loving holiday card sent to the town of Huddersfield and a fine record of a notable moment of grace for a beleaguered rock legend in the making. With all the hype scraped away, it’s simply a tale of people doing a good deed where needed, when only a lump of coal was expected.

If you like my music documentary posts, feel free to click on the book cover above right to check out a 30-page excerpt of my Rock Docs: A 50-Year Cinemtaic Journey and/or join my Facebook group simply called Rock Docs. Thanks, Rick Ouellette

Rock Docs Spotlight: “White Riot” (2020)

This new documentary directed by Rubika Shah could not have been released at a more favorable time. It is a lively and concise look back at the U.K’s Rock Against Racism movement of the late Seventies. The group was a direct counter-protest to the rise of the virulent anti-immigrant political party the National Front. The RAR was a grassroots movement that were supported by many high-profile punk and reggae bands from that musically fertile era. Coming as it does during the hangover period of Britain’s Brexit fiasco, and the restive aftermath of the election that ousted American’s unapologetic bigot of a president, White Riot shows how this struggle against humanity’s inner demons is a perpetual, vital cause.

The only real beef I have with White Riot is its title. Also the name of the Clash’s first single, the song was a fervent call for multi-racial unity against a common foe: a government indifferent to the many societal and economic woes facing the working-class at the time. But the song could be misconstrued the other way (and occasionally was in 1977) and may also lead some to think that this is a film about Joe Strummer and Co. Although the Clash do make several appearances, this is squarely a film about a movement where music plays but a supporting role.
Central to this tale is Rock Against Racism founder Red Saunders, now an old grizzly bear of a man sitting in his office surrounded by the memorabilia of the time, esp. many back issues of the group’s handmade newspaper, Temporary Hoardings. Early on, Shah uses some of the available stock footage of National Front rallies and marches, with their drearily obvious signs (“It’s Our Country, Let’s Win It Back”) and speech snippets by those like the odious NF leader Enoch Powell and their paunchy and punchable “activities head” Martin Weber. Saunders came from a background in agit-prop theater and knew how to gain attention for a cause without being a bore about it. When Saunders, who is also a photographer, was asked to shoot at a punk concert, he was instantly bowled over by the Clash. Here was the musical energy that could match the drive of his upstart social movement. The Rock Against Racism manifesto was re-printed in many of Britain’s biggest music mags and that movement quickly spread. Bands that played at RAR-related shows were X-Ray Spex, 999, Steel Pulse, XTC, Sham 69 and the Tom Robinson Band; several members show up in interview snippets. But director Shah makes no mistake in pointing out that the National Front had made race prejudice an “acceptable point of view” in Britain at that time. This extended to some prominent old-guard rock stars. Included in this shameful category was David Bowie (who opined that the nation could “benefit from a fascist leader”) and Rod Stewart, who suggested (from the comfort of his new home in Los Angeles) that all of the UK’s immigrants “should be sent home.” Most egregious was Eric Clapton who, during an infamous 1976 concert in Birmingham, launched into a drunken racist tirade (“get the coons out”) while also asking minority fans in the audience to raise their hands and chanting the NF slogan “Keep Britain White.” Of course, Saunders was all over this, bitterly criticizing Clapton (who built his career on the blues) of musical colonialism and suggesting that the guitar-god may be suffering from a touch of “brain damage.” True, punk did sometimes dabble in Nazi iconography, but you always got the feeling this was for shock value and not the sort of contemptible white privilege on display in the examples above. An enjoyable aspect of White Riot is the emphasis on the inner workings of Temporary Hoardings and the current interviews with staffers like “Irate” Kate Webb, Syd Shelton and Lucy Whitman. The grassroots organizing, in an age before cell phones and the Internet, is inspiring as are the animated re-creations pf the newspaper’s cut-and-paste punk aesthetic. After months of rumbling with NF marchers and right-wing yobs, RAR had its moment in a bravura march from Trafalgar Square (see photo above) to Victoria Park, the ensuing demonstration and concert (headlined by the Clash) drawing close to 100,000 folks. The National Front fizzled at the polls in the ensuing general election (1.3%) but the vote also saw the election of Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher, who employed the dog whistle instead of the boot to exploit the cause of white grievance. Yet the celebration of cultural diversity promoted by Rock Against Racism has taken hold over the decades, even as populations seem intent on going backwards. So the struggle goes on, but Rubik Shah’s compelling work can act as a valued piece to show us again the way forward. ************************************************** You can check out the excerpt of my book “Rock Docs: A fifty-Year Cinematic Jorney” at http://booklocker.com/books/8905.html or by clicking on the book cover image above. If interested in purchasing, you can also contact me directly for a special offer and free shipping! Thanks, Rick. rick.ouellette@verizon.net

Documentary Spotlight: Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1959)

This summer, bereft of the outdoor music concerts so beloved at this time of year, is the perfect time to catch up with the classic festival films. So what better time to begin at the beginning and discover (or rediscover) the one that started it all. Famed New York commercial/fashion photographer Bert Stern came to Newport in 1958, with a somewhat different project in mind. According to film critic in his Boston Sunday Globe documentary page, “Stern initially planned to have the festival serve as a backdrop for a fictional narrative.” Apparently, he found the 1958 edition of the Newport Jazz Fest was far more interesting as a primary subject. How could it not with a line-up that included Louis Armstrong Mahalia Jackson, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Dinah Washington, Chuck Berry and other greats?


Louis Armstrong in full flight.

With its scene-establishing prologue, exciting close-up views of the performers and scanning shots of distinctive audience members, Stern’s film would be a table-setter for several notable rock festival documentaries to come: Woodstock, Monterrey Pop and Gimme Shelter being the most famous. It not only captures the giants of their genre in a live setting but also serve as sociological snapshots of their era. In the era that preceded those big rock music events, it was the annual Newport Jazz Festival that was the place to be for city hipsters and savvy suburbanites alike. While Jazz on a Summer’s Day doesn’t have the momentous vibe of those three rock films, Bert Stern’s work is a star-studded look back to a time when postwar jazz was at the height of its popularity and a partying youth culture was starting to butt up against the genteel high society of this Rhode Island resort.


Shades of summer: Fans at Newport ’58

Stern quickly establishes the breezy carnival atmosphere of the 1958 edition of the festival as a moderately rebellious beatnik crowd blends into the gauzy, Eisenhower-era comfort zone with relative ease. There’s some wild carousing at an oceanfront rental and a recurring theme where a roving Dixieland combo promotes the festival by showing up all over town, blaring from the back of an antique car or serenading on a moonlit beach. (This may be leftover footage from the aborted feature-film idea). The actual concert footage starts with Anita O’Day entertaining an afternoon crowd of more-formally dressed folks with some wild scat singing during her elaborate deconstructions of “Sweet Georgia Brown” and “Tea for Two.” Be-bop, the preeminent branch of the jazz tree back then, is represented with fine segments featuring Sonny Stitt and Thelonious Monk. Unfortunately, the intercutting of yachting footage (that season’s America’s Cup trial runs were also taking place) proves to be a considerable distraction during Monk’s number.

Saxophonist Gerry Mulligan is on stage as the nighttime segment starts and things begin to loosen up with a younger and more integrated crowd taking over. A few of them even look like they’re on drugs (the very idea!). Bluesy belters Dinah Washington and Big Maybelle wow an audience that’s all about dancing and singing along, and the good vibes peak with a sublime medley from the immortal Louis Armstrong. He starts with a tender “Lazy River” and finishes with a rollicking “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and along the way there’s at least one of Pop’s stratospheric trumpet solos. The only miscue in the performance clips is Chuck Berry doing a rather lackluster version of “Sweet Little Sixteen.” It hints at a tendency the Newport promoters would later develop when tastes changed and non-jazz performers became less of an exception.

But all is set right as Saturday night passes into Sunday morning, when Mahalia Jackson closes the film with a rousing gospel set. The ritual of a cross-section of people enjoying music al-fresco on a summer’s weekend would become a lot more common in the decades to come, but here it still seems new, which makes Stern’s idea of filming the fans as intimately as he does the performers feel prophetic. It’s something we’re all missing now and for maybe some time to come. The audience here at Newport—-the ones in cat’s-eyes glasses and plaid pants mixing with those in berets and turtlenecks—-didn’t “change the world” like those at the ballyhooed rock mega-festivals a decade later. But they and the musicians fed off each other in a communal rapture of the type that may feel new all over again once we ever get back to it.

For more info on the virtual re-release of the digitally restored Jazz on a Summer’s Day go to kinomarquee.com

You can check out the excerpt of my book “Rock Docs: A fifty-Year Cinematic Jorney” at http://booklocker.com/books/8905.html or by clicking on the book cover image above. If interested in purchasing, you can also contact me directly for a special offer and free shipping! Thanks, Rick.
rick.ouellette@verizon.net

Documentary Spotlight: “What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael”

The late superstar film critic Pauline Kael has left a complicated legacy. She could be both admirably thoughtful and witlessly cruel. She helped boost the careers of Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese and others who needed a break when they were trying to create a new and original American cinema at the start of the Seventies. Conversely (and perversely), she ripped others to shreds if for no other reason than she wanted to be a contrarian and/or more clever than anyone else. Sure, she crashed the boy’s club of professional movie reviewing when she landed the plum job of New Yorker film columnist in 1968. But their “ivory tower” was no where near as elitist as she perceived it and barely justified her bewildering personal attacks against establishment colleagues like Andrew Sarris. Suffice to say, that Kael is the type of person who is lauded by her own daughter as someone who “turned her lack of self-awareness into a triumph.” Um, OK. Not to bring politics into this too soon, but in an election year where we may faced with a choice of two bellowing absolutists (hello, Bernie and The Donald), Pauline looks like another disheartening early indicator of the distressingly coarse society we live in now. While “What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael” is a reasonably engaging documentary about an influential person, and recommended to film buffs and those who have followed the once-rambunctious world of cinematic analysis, the person herself earns a qualified thumbs-down.


Pauline Kael (center): The smartest person in the room, according to herself.

Kael grew up on a chicken ranch in rural California. The independent streak and no-nonsense attitude that helped her break away from Smallville USA is evident in the voiceover of her review of the similarly-sited “Hud.” An early affair produced a daughter named Gina James; Kael raised her as a single mom at a time when that was noticeably uncommon. She worked her way up inexorably, starting in the film scene at Berkeley (where she attended college), writing program notes and doing unpaid radio commentary. Eventually, she got a job reviewing movies for the woman’s magazine McCall’s, at one point gleefully skewering the super-popular “The Sound of Music,” esp. skewering the “sexless, inhumanely happy” Julie Andrews character and wondering (someone had to say it) why not even one Von Trapp kid rebelled against the rigidly enforced positivity. She moved on to the New Republic, which wasn’t keen on her positive take on the then-controversial, seeing it as an exciting and necessary catharsis that reflected the tumultuous late Sixties. Instead, the New Yorker took it and in 1968 hired Kael who would work there, with brief interruptions, until 1991.

Director Rob Garver spices up this bio with many, many film clips. They start in the late silent era (when Kael first started going to the picture shows) and are interspersed throughout to illustrate, sometimes confusingly, her life events. When they are joined to voiceover excerpts from memorable reviews, they work much better. But they can also serve to point out Kael’s often perverse inconsistencies. Much is made of Kael’s populism, of being tuned into more everyday tastes than were the “elitists” that she always overestimated. Yet her strong distaste for David Lean’s blockbuster “Lawrence of Arabia” stemmed from her disillusion in Peter O’Toole’s screen depiction of the historical figure she read about in highbrow books. That’s her prerogative of course, but hardly excuses her ripping Lean to shreds in a public forum they both attended. Elsewhere, her vaunted “populism” just seems silly; ripping almost everything Stanley Kubrick ever did (and with a strangely personalized venom) while praising such things as Cheech and Chong’s “Up in Smoke.”

As usual, “What She Said” is dotted with many of the expected interview snippets of celebs and colleagues, though my favorite talking head was Gina James, the mild-mannered daughter whose love and admiration for an often difficult person to live with blends with a matter-of-fact honesty that her mother often forfeited in the name of self-serving arrogance. Most of the others do fine, whether its filmmakers both pro and con (Ridley Scott, David O. Russell, Tarantino), cultural commentators like Camille Paglia or aging colleagues like Joe Morgenstern. Things can get a bit daft as when critic David Edelstein feels it necessary to inform us he’s not a “Paulette” (a Kael acolyte) but instead a “Paulinista.” Oy.

While I get that Garver wants to reserve the right to end up on the side of its subjects undeniable brilliance, something still seems lacking here. To wit, one can be feisty without being mean and one can also be confident without being self-aggrandizing. Indeed, one should be but things have gotten so out of hand in the digital DYI age. As reviewer Ty Burr noted in the Boston Globe, today “Kael’s voice fills every self-satisfied corner of the Internet.” Sorry, but there’s no “art” in that.

“Going Attractions” and Coming Distractions: The Coney Island Film Festival

Outside of the biggies like Sundance, Toronto and Cannes—with their star power and acquisition deals—film festivals are usually fun but rather sedate affairs. You go and see an indie movie or shorts collection, be supportive during the Q&A afterwards, maybe go to a wine and cheese reception and hobnob a bit. This is the kind of film fest I go to and there are plenty to choose from. But the one I attended in mid-September in Coney Island was a breed apart. It’s even smaller than most; situated in one building on Surf Ave. (parallel to the boardwalk) and run by the non-profit arts organization Coney Island USA. Inside they have two venues: bleacher seating downstairs at Sideshows-by-the-Seashore performance space and upstairs at the Coney Island Museum with seating set up in the main room.


Upstairs at the Coney Island Museum (All photos by author)

The Coney Island Festival emphasizes local filmmakers and this year’s program had many works that took place in the immediate vicinity of the venue itself. Moreover, Coney Island USA integrates the screenings with the larger subculture promoted in their mission statement. That is, to extol and carry on many traditional forms of popular entertainment (as we will see in a minute). It was fitting then that the opening night film was “Going Attractions:The Definitive Story of the Movie Palace.” This documentary is an engaging and thorough look (past, present and future) at the classic American “picture palace” which, at the height of their success in the Twenties and Thirties, were among the most opulent buildings ever constructed for a clientele of the average person coming in off the street.

Click to see the trailer!

These theaters, many of them extraordinary in their scale and richness of architectural detail, once crowded together in the entertainment districts of major urban centers and, in a more solitary fashion, graced the main streets of medium-sized cities and even small towns. Director April Wright has steered this project, obviously a labor of love, with a sure hand. The backstory is presented clearly but not ponderously, with most commentators (from star movie critic Leonard Matlin on down) beginning with personal anecdotes of their first visits to one of these amazing venues. Of course, times change and eventually the movie palace business model declined, post-WW2. Suburbanization and the rise of TV were two big reasons and the scale of these theaters were a big problem, they required big staffs and upkeep costs proved prohibitive.


Renovation or more neglect?: The Everett Sq. Theater in Boston is one of hundreds old movie theaters in limbo.

“Going Attractions” gives significant space to those who have played major roles in saving these now-treasured buildings from neglect and maybe a date with the wrecking ball, several of these good folks can be see in the trailer. Probably the most astounding rescue tale is told by former ballerina turned activist and author Rosemary Novellino-Mearns. It is hard to imagine that Radio City Music Hall, the exquisite Art Deco landmark known for the Rockettes and its stupendously popular holiday shows, was threatened with demolition in 1978. In an inspiring David-and-Goliath story, Rosemary and her future husband started a save-Radio-City campaign with their fellow employees. They attracted publicity and powerful allies in what ended up being a major embarrassment for the Rockefellers, who had to cancel plans for a lucrative office skyscraper on the family-owned site. Novellino-Means was blackballed out of her job as a full-time dancer within a year but in the Q&A afterward unsurprisingly told us she had no regrets.


Rosemary Novellino-Mearns, second from left, standing next to director April Wright after the screening of “Going Attractions.”


Another featured commentator for “Going Attractions” is photographer Matt Lambros. His book “After the Final Curtain: The Fall of the American Movie Theater” is a must-have for anybody with an abiding interest in this subject. Lambros has criss-crossed the country photographing the current, usually abandoned, state of these magnificent venues. Their beauty is typically still evident despite years of neglect, via Lambros’ vivid large-format photography. A new volume of “After the Final Curtain” is due out this fall. See his website for more details: https://afterthefinalcurtain.net/books/

Radio City Music Hall had been known for their elaborate dance numbers performed on its enormous stage before the movie. This inter-disciplinary spirit continues in film palaces that were saved (which often double as performing-arts centers) and was also on display at this festival. Vaudeville acts were also popular attractions at the old movie palaces and Coney Island USA has for years fostered this spirit. They put on the crowd-favorite Mermaid Parade on Surf Ave. every June and stage many sideshow-type events, including at the opening night party. For a reasonable fee, you got an open bar (topped by almost topless dancers) a generous buffet and a real live revivalist show, featuring an MC who doubled as a cigarette-swallower, a contortionist, and a few burlesque dancers before I was obliged to catch the Q train back to my Manhattan hotel.


This ain’t your granny’s cine club: Opening night party at the Coney Island Film Fest.

I had to head back to Boston on Sunday that weekend so I couldn’t catch the block of animation shorts. The festival’s local flavor continued here with this half-minute clip of the delightful-looking “Brooklyn Breeze”

The following night, inspired by the film, I took a stroll down that once-notorious stretch of West 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. The dense concentration of movie houses and theaters there were mostly pornos before being condemned and transformed into the “Disneyfied” Times Square that people like to complain about today. I’m not sure who really misses those places: I’m not a big fan of the Harry Potter plays, tip-seeking Elmos and distracted/compulsive selfie-takers that dominate now, but the danger and seediness are not exactly to be mourned. I wandered into a couple of multiplexes to see if there were any remnants of the glorious past. At the Regal Cinema, on the old site of the infamous XXX Harem Theater, the new decor features a beautiful retro-Deco mural, a nice surprise. (See detail below).

Across the street I hit the jackpot at the AMC Empire. Over the voluminous lobby of a multiplex, where escalators zipped you up to the latest blockbuster, was a gorgeous old-time dome where Egyptian and classical Greek themes intermingled. People don’t know what they have, it was only after some of them noticed me pointing my Nikon up at the ceiling that they looked themselves. Baby steps. I found out later that the original Empire Theater was located a little further up the street and that the entire cinema was moved 170 feet to its present location, with giant balloon figures of Abbott and Costello made to look like they were tugging it along (the duo performed at the old Empire). The the main part of the theater was pushed up towards the street to be the lobby while the modern multiple screens were built behind. Hey, whatever it takes! I love American ingenuity and American movie palaces. Find out where there is one close to you and support them, keep the tradition alive.
—Rick Ouellette

AMC Empire theater lobby, two details below.


Rock Docs spotlight: “Woodstock” (1970)

The Woodstock Music and Art Fair, held fifty years ago this month in upstate New York, was such a monumental event that there is little that hasn’t been said about it at this late date. Each significant anniversary has seen the media gorging on remembrances, reissues and reponderings of history’s most famous rock music festival and its relevance to the social sea change it brought on, or at least reflected. But still, now 50 years later, they have nothing over Michael Wadleigh’s sprawling, indispensable filmed record—a project that almost never got off the ground. Festival promoters Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld initially had no luck finding an investor to fund a camera crew to cover an event that no one thought would draw more than fifty thousand people. The only one willing to take a chance was newly minted Warner Brothers studio executive Fred Weintraub, a New York hipster who had owned the famed Bottom Line nightclub. Over the objections of others at WB, Weintraub advanced one hundred thousand dollars to finance the filming. When the humble “Aquarian Exposition” turned into an epic long weekend that attracted nearly half a million young folks, the demand for the finished film went through the roof. The only rock documentary to ever win an Academy Award (until 2012’s “Searching for Sugar Man” and the following year’s “Twenty Feet from Stardom”), “Woodstock” eventually grossed over fifty million dollars in its theatrical release and has enjoyed a long afterlife on home video, especially in the expanded 230-minute director’s cut introduced in 1994.

https://youtu.be/WEaMka89dM4
Premiering nationally on PBS is the excellent “Woodstock: 3 Days That Defined a Generation.” This trailer may lapse into cliche but this new documentary is a fresh look at the long ago events in upstate NY from a more sociological angle, with all the visuals being archival footage from the event, matched with the voices of those who were there (along with a smattering of key musical moments).

Wadleigh and his hastily assembled seventy-man crew, organized by a young assistant director named Martin Scorsese, spread out over the vast scene, diligently covering every aspect of that long weekend. The music and the hippie idealism are in great supply, of course, but as part of a microcosm of a time that sees past the expected clichés that have long since taken hold. Ironically, a lot of those clichés stem from this very film as well as from the soundtrack album with which it often overlaps. It starts with the warning about the brown LSD that’s “not specifically too good” and goes from there. “New York State Thruway is closed, man!” “If you sing really hard, maybe we can stop this rain!” “There’s always a little bit of heaven in a disaster area.”

“Blind Faith is a groovy group.” A popular clip in the Internet age is the “Emotional Colors” girl, later identified as the late Jeanette McCurdy of Buffalo, NY.

The frequent use of split-screen images showed the multiple perspectives of a situation that the crew saw as an unfolding story that could turn out either way. The “Biblical/epochal” scene described by a joint-rolling Jerry Garcia is established in a twenty-minute prologue before Richie Havens wows the first day crowd with his improvised-on-the-spot anthem “Freedom.” What follows is a steady stream of outstanding (and often career-making) musical performances by the likes of Santana, Sly and the Family Stone, Ten Years After, Joe Cocker, the Who, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and others.

The logistical and crowd scenes that pop up after every three or four songs are every bit as interesting, especially the bravura ten-minute sequence depicting the famous Sunday thunderstorm. It drenched a crowd that had just been galvanized by Cocker’s dramatic recasting of the Beatles’ “With a Little Help from My Friends,” and thrust the stage crew into the role of reassuring the sea of humanity while simultaneously fretting over the fate of their vulnerable light towers and staving off the possibility of electrocution. When the crowd comes out the other end of this mud-covered crucible with their good spirits intact, their reputation is made.

What is just as impressive is the tolerant, even admiring, attitudes towards the crowd from many “straights” in the surrounding area, especially considering the whole county was brought to a virtual standstill because of the event. There’s the genial portable-toilet cleaning man (“glad to do it for these kids”) speaking fondly of both his son at the festival and the other one in Vietnam; the chief of police pronouncing that the hippies “can’t be questioned as good American citizens;” the visibly moved Max Yasgur proclaiming that the legions camped on his farm “have proven something to the world;” and the middle-aged gentleman who suggests to another that he should care more about the kids dying in ’Nam and lay off criticizing the ones smoking pot and sleeping in the field. These people suggest there was too much emphasis on the generation gap back then and too little on the value of good character, regardless of demographics.

Michael Wadleigh would eventually become disillusioned with the film business, making only one more movie (1981’s Wolfen) and eventually turning to environmental activism. Sensing that these “3 Days of Peace & Music” were destined to be the high water mark of the counterculture, the director picked up a camera on Monday morning and filmed scenes of the muddy, garbage-strewn aftermath that he has said were directly influenced by T. S. Eliot’s poem The Wasteland. Because of the weekend’s many delays, the music was not over: When headliner Jimi Hendrix hits a cataclysmic guitar chord that introduces his decade-defining deconstruction of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the camera pulls back to reveal that the cheering audience now numbers around thirty thousand.

In an artfully presented sequence, Wadleigh first stays close to Hendrix as he transforms the national anthem into an implied antiwar protest with an astounding series of explosions, shrieks, and moans coaxed out of his white Stratocaster. He sticks with him as he roars through his monster hit “Purple Haze” (“Is it tomorrow or just the end of time?”) then switches to the dazed stragglers picking through the debris for the odd scrap of food or a pair of discarded sneakers. Hendrix finishes with an elegiac guitar solo that gives the film its soft landing. This thoughtful and somewhat sober ending underlines the feeling that if Woodstock the music festival was the brightest point of light for the ideals of the 1960s youth generation, Woodstock the film was the greatest advocate of those ideals.

Portions of this post were taken from my book Rock Docs: A Fifty-Year Cinematic Journey. Click on the book cover above, or the link below, to see a 30-page excerpt. Thanks, Rick
https://booklocker.com/books/8905.html

Documentary Spotlight: “My Generation” (2018)

I am fated to go to my grave as an unreconstructed Anglophile and that’s OK. From seeing the Beatles and Stones on TV at an impressionable age, to Dickens’ “Christmas Carol” inspiring me to try writing, to Monty python, to the early punk years to my later incarnation as an English Premier League nut, it’s never let up. Not even now, at the height of the whole Brexit fiasco—with its echo of the same disturbing societal trends that gave us Trump on this side of the Atlantic—has it wavered much.

So it’s not a big surprise that I’m giving a big Reel and Rock recommendation for last year’s nostalgic “My Generation,” co-produced and hosted by Michael Caine and now available online and on DVD. This is not strictly a music documentary, but you can’t make a film about Britain’s post-war generation without rock & roll being a huge part of it. Just in the introductory section you get two Kink Klassics (“Dead End Street” and “Waterloo Sunset”) and the Who’s titular anthem. The soundtrack is a continual parade of classic Brit rock, from the Beatles and Stones to the Small Faces and Thunderclap Newman.

This “My Generation” trailer is followed by a short clip from the film.

But it’s also about fashion, film, photography, pop art and even hairdressing (Vidal Sassoon got his start in Swinging London). Caine, a veritable rock star among actors, is a great host with his everlasting Cockney charm. When the music takes a break, he’s doing new, audio-only interviews with Twiggy, Paul McCartney, David Bailey, Roger Daltrey, Marianne Faithfull and mini-skirt inventor Mary Quant. while the intoxicating period footage plays over it. This is not a particularly in-depth social study (if you want to do deep-diving on this subject check out Shawn Levy’s excellent book “Ready Steady Go”) but it’s a highly entertaining primer and a valuable one too as its subjects are well into their seventies by now.


Twiggy, Twiggy, Twiggy: A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

Director David Batty does not play the “Debbie Downer” card; there is a bit about the era’s social divides and a sidebar towards the end about how the drug scene got a bit out of control (a section on Brian Jones’ death and funeral strikes a brief minor chord). But overall the tone doesn’t stray much from “wasn’t it all so great?” But for here, that’s OK. Let’s put away he uneasy thoughts about the unfocused grievances, latent (or blatant) bigotry and foreign-agent manipulation that has left us in such a precarious state that it makes us nostalgic not just for “My Generation” but for the highly-imperfect but reasonably-stable systems of government that we were rebelling against at the time.

You can check out the excerpt of my book “Rock Docs: A fifty-Year Cinematic Jorney” at http://booklocker.com/books/8905.html or by clicking on the book cover image above. If interested in purchasing, you can contact me directly for a special offer and free shipping! Thanks, Rick.
rick.ouellette@verizon.net

“American Dharma” Bum: The New Errol Morris Film on Steve Bannon Gets a Cold Shoulder

Lock him in! Lock him in! The Quonset hut at the closed South Weymouth Naval Air Station in Massachusetts. Photo by Rick Ouellette

I took the photographs in this post on January 2, 2017—after the election but before the inauguration of Donald Trump as U.S. president. The building in the picture above was one of the sites where Academy Award-winning documentarian Errol Morris interviewed former top Trump adviser Steve Bannon, the subject of his new film called “American Dharma.” It was a sort of stage set up for Bannon, who first rose to prominence (or infamy, as many of us would have it) as the executive chairman of Breitbart News, the alt-right, conspiracy-mongering website that is a favorite of the gullible current occupant of the White House.

A feature story in the arts section of the January 25th Boston Globe pointed out that the much-celebrated Morris has not found a distributor for the film, which has yet to see the light of day since it debuted at the Venice Film Festival last year. (There will be a screening at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center on Feb. 1st, just down the way from where Morris has his office). Part of the problem, might be in the blasé attitude that would let Morris indulge the highly controversial Bannon by having him blab away in the hut which resembles the one in his favorite World War II movie, “Twelve O’Clock High.” For Morris, the WW2 film title that probably best sums up his problems with his new documentary is “A Bridge Too Far.”


When I posted this photo of abandoned housing in early January of 2017, a friend wondered if it were a preview of “post-Trump America.”

That’s because “American Dharma” can be seen as the third entry in a loose trilogy of Errol Morris films about contentious men who were Presidential advisers or Cabinet secretaries: and they can also be seen as offering diminishing returns on the director’s artistic investment. (Like most people, I haven’t seen “American Dharma” and this post is about the idea of doing it in the first place). The first, 2003’s “The Fog of War,” was about Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense in the 1960s under Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Ten years later, Morris came out with “The Unknown Known” about the longtime Republican operator Donald Rumsfeld, who first came to the national spotlight as chief of staff and defense secretary in the mid-1970s under President Gerald Ford and, of course, held that latter position under George W. Bush during the calamitous invasion of Iraq in the early 2000s.

https://youtu.be/j4-jAfPHnPM

“The Fog of War” was an exceptional, riveting film that deservedly won Morris an Oscar for best feature documentary, an award that many thought he should have received fifteen years earlier for “The Thin Blue Line.” Robert McNamara was born in 1916 and in an early scene he tells of his first memory, watching victorious American soldiers in a parade after the end of World War I. Morris makes the film so much more than a filmed profile of the man who had recently published a book that was a semi-mea culpa about his role in escalating the disastrous Vietnam War. It expands into an incisive examination into nearly a hundred years of an increasingly mechanized and brutal evolution of warfare (McNamara used his exceptional analytical skills to increase the efficiency of the Air Force’s firebombing of Japan near the end of WW2). At the end, McNamara is dodgy when Morris presses him as to why he didn’t voice his grave misgivings about Vietnam policy to Johnson but, aesthetically anyway, he is not let off the hook. As we hear audio of a phone interview of McNamara declining a last chance to come clean, we see the now elderly man driving around Washington in inclement weather, the hard rain of history beating down on his windshield.

“The Fog of War” was one of the first projects on which Morris use his patented “Interrotron” which (Wikipedia definition) “projects images of interviewer and interviewee on two-way mirrors in front of their respective cameras so each appears to be talking directly to the other.” And by extension, it makes it look like the interviewee is making eye contact with the viewer. But if one thinks this method will necessarily out the truth, that notion is quickly dispelled by the ceaselessly obstructionist style of Rumsfeld in “The Unknown Known.” If you can get past his weasly double-talk (naturally, the film’s title is his own phrase) and the shit-eating grin, you might get something out of this film. But if you were someone outraged at Rumsfeld’s key role in the simplistic invasion plan in Iraq (“intellectually bankrupt” in the words of one general) that left the country in tatters and was based on a flimsy premise (the evidence-free accusation of Saddam Hussein’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks), or were upset at the policy of U.S. troops standing by during the wholesale cultural destruction of the Iraq Museum looting (“stuff happens,” said Donny) or revulsed at his enabling of the heinous treatment of detainees, many of them innocent, which devolved into the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib prison (aka “enhanced interrogation techniques”), the film will leave you cold. Rumsfeld doesn’t feel exposed, he is allowed to go on and on in the current fashion of unaccountable yammering. To him and us, it’s just another day in the grinding machinery of the media-industrial complex.


America’s favorite slovenly sociopath? Steve Bannon in 2010.

Can you blame potential distributors for thinking that “American Dharma” is more of the same, esp. in view of Bannon’s “toxic reputation” (in the words of the Boston Globe)? Breitbart is now all but the communications arm of a mindset that is not out of step with the Klu Klux Klan and neo-Nazism. I have no problem with Bannon having his say, but for God’s sake wasn’t he a top White House advisor, feeding his xenophobic notions to the already unscrupulous, spiteful and easily-manipulated Trump? That’s say enough. Any further exposure is just fodder for the ever-spinning media merry-go-round. But if you need further confirmation of what you already know, “American Dharma” will likely see the light of day in some form or the other. In the Globe article, Morris says “I think as the country becomes less angry, particularly the left, then it would be possible to look at the movie as a movie.” After Morris confirmed that Steve Bannon had seen the film and was asked what he thought, the director said “He likes it” and, according to reporter Mark Feeney, “barked out a laugh.” Forgive me if I’m not amused.