Seymour: An Introduction (***)

The title of the movie may grab J. D. Salinger fans who know it as the title of one of Salinger’s better known short stories. They’ll be disappointed to learn that, while the movie too is a character sketch, it’s of the wholly unrelated Seymour Bernstein, a successful pianist turned piano teacher and composer in New York City. This Seymour gave up the limelight for contentment, and it’s that sentiment that strikes you in Ethan Hawke’s documentary.

Hawke includes conversation with others in the film, but it’s the footage of Bernstein, nearing 80, interacting with his younger students that is most captivating. These students are advanced, already capable of playing the right notes, but if you’ve wondered what things make the difference between a very competent musician and a truly excellent one, you get some idea here. Listening to one student chop away at the keys, Bernstein notices not the student’s hands but his shoulders. Placing his own hands on those shoulders, he has the student play it again, now more relaxed. It’s these kinds of small observations, but also his manner, that must make Berstein a fine teacher. He is the opposite of the teacher in Whiplash, inspiring with calmness, confidence in the student, and even a little humor. “Not all notes can be passionate,” he say after hearing one loud performance.

But Hawke is not a piano student, and it’s not the technical skills that drew him to his subject. Both acting (notably in the partly improvised films of Richard Linklater such as Boyhood, Tape, and the Before trilogy) and in interviews, he’s struck me as someone who is maybe thinking too much, who never seems relaxed. Maybe he envies Seymour Bernstein, who strikes me as someone who is thoughtful but not overthinking; he’s gained wisdom with age and simplified the things he prefers not to think about, like where to live. (So he’s been in the same apartment his entire adult life.) Whether you are a music fan or not, he may inspire.

IMDb link

viewed 3/26/15 7:30 pm [PFS screening] and posted 3/30/15

Whiplash (***1/2)

This is kind of a sports movie in disguise. If conservatory student Andrew (Miles Teller) were a college basketball player instead of an aspiring jazz drummer, this movie might’ve made into a multiplex. And Andrew’s nemesis might’ve been someone like coach Bobby Knight, instead of the mercurial Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), who commandeers the school’s elite jazz orchestra and, like Knight, is not averse to throwing a chair.


Fletcher is warm and friendly to outsiders but uses strategic humiliation and browbeating to get his players to play better. In an early scene, a horn player gets booted for supposedly being out of tune. But he also gets Andrew to play and play until his hands bleed. Never has music seemed so physically punishing. Are such tiger-mother tactics the best way to get such results? Are they the only way? The film, an expanded version of a short by writer-director Damien Chazelle, ultimately leaves the conclusion to the viewer. Meanwhile, it’s a excellent bit of psychological and character drama with a fierce performance from Simmons, a great character actor.


IMDb link

viewed 11/13/14 7:15 at Ritz 5 and posted 11/13/14

Quartet (***)

This cinematic comfort food reminds us that advanced age needn’t mean the end of a creative life. Perhaps that especially appealed to Dustin Hoffman, who does not appear as an actor but makes his belated debut as director with this drama set in a home for retired musicians. Adapting a play by Ronald Harwood (with a screenplay by Harwood), Hoffman has gathered some elite English actors—Maggie Smith, Billy Connolly, Michael Gambon, Tom Courtenay, Pauline Collins—to embody strong personalities. Hoffman and his cast make these characters appealing without making them “cute,” as other movies with aged characters sometimes do. Even Connolly’s character, whose frequent flirtations with the young, female doctor who runs the place are played for laughs, becomes more than a running gag.

The main plotline has to do with whether the titular “quartet” will reunite for a performance of Rigoletto, notwithstanding that one (Courtenay) does not wish to speak to another (Smith), and the other does not wish to perform. The former problem is resolved with so little fuss as to make it seem retrospectively trivial. Despite being the setting, the infirmities of old age play a fairly small role, yet Collins’s portrayal of a woman in the early throes of Alzheimer’s is one of the most touching I’ve seen. While the movie is not exactly full of surprises, Hoffman makes this a pleasant production and nicely supplements Harwood’s story by setting several scenes with lush English countryside as background. Of note, retired English musicians play bit parts and perform throughout.

IMDb link

viewed 2/27/13 4:55 pm at Ritz 5 and reviewed 3/4/13

A Late Quartet (***1/4)

At least according to this drama, a musical partnership is like a group marriage. Maintaining it for many years requires a harmony among the members as carefully attended to as a Beethoven score. A sour note from any can affect the whole. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Christopher Walken, Catherine Keener, and Mark Ivanir, a quartet as accomplished as their fictional counterparts, play the title characters, who are collectively called The Fugue. Their successful 25-year union is threatened first by the unavoidable, a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, but this destabilizing news indirectly allows a series of personal and professional differences to surface.

Only a few people have professional lives as important to them as their personal ones. These people have all, in some measure, placed the group before themselves. Two of them, played by Hoffman and Keener, have put the needs of the group before the daughter they share (Imogen Poots), and perhaps their own relationship. Hoffman’s character has literally played second fiddle for decades for the sake of group harmony, though he believes himself equally qualified to play either violin part. The other violinist (Ivanir) has avoided emotional entanglements in the pursuit of perfectionism. And even Walken’s character, one of the least eccentric, most sympathetic men, in his filmography, places the group above his own love of playing, wishing to bow out before his decline is noticeable.

The other theme in the movie more directly involves music. (Incidentally, while there are a few significant musical performances in the movie, including one by the singer Anne Sofie von Otter, there are not that many, perhaps due to the difficulty of syncing the actors’ movements to the soundtrack.) The first violinist wants to try playing a familiar piece without a score. The second violinist prizes perfection over spontaneity, heavily annotating his own sheet music. The movie appears to suggest that there is value in both approaches.

IMDb link

viewed 10/7/12 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 10/11/12

Searching for Sugar Man (***1/4)

I’ve always been impressed by the ability of foreigners to appropriate America’s culture and make it their own. (It happens less the other way around.) We sometimes make a joke of it, as with David Hasselhoff’s popularity in Germany, or Jerry Lewis’s in France. But, on the evidence presented here, and it’s pretty good evidence, Sixto Rodriguez is bigger that Hasselhoff, or Lewis…in South Africa.

That the Detroit native made only two albums in the early 1970s and remained completely unknown everywhere else, including Detroit, makes the story unlikely. Even more unlikely, and impossible in today’s digitally connected world, is that Rodriguez heard nothing of his overseas following. Nor did the South Africans know anything about the man who was a household name there. (At least among the white population. Although Rodriguez is said to have been an inspiration to whites who opposed apartheid, his fan base does not appear to be multiracial.) Fans pored over lyrics for clues about the artist. There were rumors — he was said to have committed suicide before a hostile audience — but that’s all.

So this documentary — by a Swede, Malik Bendjelloul — is a kind of detective story as much as anything else. Bendjelloul also managed to interview the producers of the two albums, who attest to his genius, but that’s not the interesting part. What turns out to have happened to Rodriguez, including his missed opportunity for 1970s stardom, is both unusual and mundane. And the movie itself has provided its own touching ending to the story, with its soundtrack and Rodriguez’s re-released 1970 debut finally granting him the chart placings that eluded him 40 years ago. The music itself, incidentally, fits into the emerging singer-songwriter sensibility of the time, but with generally grittier lyrics and a haunting musical quality somewhat reminiscent of another 1970s artist who has re-emerged, Nick Drake, with some Bob Dylan influences. There’s plenty of it heard in the movie, which cannot explain its enduring qualities nor the vagaries of circumstance and coincidence that can affect what becomes popular.


IMDb link


viewed 10/17/12 7:45 pm at Ritz Five and reviewed 10/17/12

Country Strong (**3/4)

Some may forget Gwyneth Paltrow’s singing “Bette Davis Eyes” and Cruisin’ (a hit pairing her with Huey Lewis) on the Duets soundtrack in 2000. Evidently, Paltrow had the urge to do it (though not duet) again, this time as alcoholic country-music star Kelly Canter in this likeable melodrama. She’s not the only singing actor in the film. Leighton Meester (Gossip Girl) plays an up-and-comer with stage fright. Musically, her character’s a bit like Taylor Swift, but her voice is better. And Garrett Hedlund has such a fine baritone that I was surprised that his background was in acting. (Clearly, I failed to take note of him in Troy, Friday Night Lights, Eragon, or Georgia Rule, and didn’t see his concurrent role in Tron:Legacy.) Although set in the world of country music, writer-director Shana Feste’s (The Greatest) subject, broadly, is the price of fame. Roughly, the plot resembles A Star Is Born, the 1976 Barbra Streisand version, except that Paltrow takes Kris Kristofferson’s role of the self-destructive superstar.

Paltrow ably conveys a wide range of emotions, but the problem is that we never have an idea where they all come from. Maybe what Kelly says in the film is true, that you can have love and fame but not both, but Feste didn’t quite sell me on the point. Probably the movie would’ve made more sense if it began with her arrival at rehab rather than her premature departure. It isn’t clear exactly how fame has ruined her or her relationship with her manager-husband (actual country star Tim McGraw, who only sings on the soundtrack). I did like the performing scenes though, and not just because the songs are good, but because in these characters you really get the sense of how the performer feeds off of the audience—or fears it, in the case of Meester’s character. As for the ending, I had the same issue as with The Greatest, a drama about how a teen’s death impacts his family. As with that film, a little more subtlety would’ve improved it. Recommended, then, for those who will enjoy the tunes and overlook the unfocused narrative.

viewed 1/5/11 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 1/5/11

Nowhere Boy (***1/2)

This drama begins with a chord lifted from the start of the Beatles song “A Hard Day’s Night,” whose title might be some sort of metaphor for the career of John Lennon. The song was released in 1964, during the height of Beatlemania. The next year, they recorded “Nowhere Man,” which obviously inspired this movie’s title. The song, though, is about a man with no “point of view” making “plans for nobody,” whereas Lennon (Aaron Johnson), though without direction as a teenager, had a cockiness and drive that made him the opposite of the nonentity in the song.

Lennon’s fame came well after the period memorialized here, saving the producers a bundle in music rights. Beatles aficionados may recognize the early originals “Hello Little Girl” and “In Spite of All the Danger,” which didn’t make it onto their proper studio albums, and “Maggie Mae,” a non-original that did. They may notice John riding by Strawberry Fields in Liverpool near the start of the film. And they will anxiously await the inevitable moment when he’s introduced to the 15-year-old Paul McCartney after a performance by Lennon’s band, the Quarrrymen. But ultimately, this is the story of a teenage boy, not the story of a rock star. Judged strictly on that basis, the movie is still surprisingly entertaining, even moving.

It is the story of a somewhat rebellious teenager caught between two women. His magnetic personality seems drawn from his mother Julia (Anne Marie Duff), memorialized in a somber 1968 song of that name. But he was largely raised by his aunt Mimi, a hard woman portrayed with subtlety by Kristin Scott Thomas. In the movie version of things (a little simplified), Lennon barely knows his mother until he sees her at the funeral of his uncle, a surrogate father who dies at the start of the movie. It is the push-pull of these strong women that helps shape him. The one teaches him to play banjo, the other actually buys him a guitar. (Though in real life, Julia did both.)

Directed by Sam Taylor-Wood, Nowhere Boy is based on a memoir by Lonnon’s half-sister Julia Baird. The screenplay is by Matt Greenhalgh, who adapted another musical memoir in Control. That movie told the story of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, who committed suicide less than seven months before Lennon’s death. This movie, though, is full of life and worth seeing even for middling Beatles fans. Duff and Johnson capture the charisma and pathos of their characters. There is one solo Lennon recording, “Mother,” in the film. “You had me,” sang Lennon in the 1970 song, “but I never had you.” It plays over the closing credits.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 10/29/10

Greenberg (***1/4)

A moody, self-absorbed, depressive is one way to describe Ben Stiller’s character in Noah Baumbach’s third feature as writer-director. Slacker doesn’t quite work because he’s a little too intense. He spends his days doing things like writing complaint letters to airlines. A New Yorker (like all of Baumbach’s characters, so far), he’s in Los Angeles housesitting for his brother, meeting up with old friends, taking care of the family dog, and starting a haphazard relationship with his brother’s assistant/errand girl (Greta Gerwig).

Stiller is best known for playing slightly hapless but likable regular-guy types in comedies such as There’s Something About Mary or Meet the Parents. Less often he plays egomaniacal types who are simultaneously heroes and objects of ridicule, as in comedies such as Zoolander or Tropic Thunder. But he has occasionally played more three-dimensional roles—a junkie in the non-comedy Permanent Midnight, a rabbi in the existential rom-com Keeping the Faith, and an aimless narcissist only intermittently comedic effort.






IMDB link

viewed 5/13/10 at Ritz East and reviewed 6/6/10

The New Year Parade (***)

If you live in Philadelphia, where this drama is set, you know the parade in question is the Mummers Parade, where large string bands compete every year for prizes and prestige. Covering the twelve months in between the 2004 and 2005 parades, this somber feature debut by writer-director Tom Quinn looks at a parental breakup from the viewpoint of a musician and his teenage sister. Quinn makes a virtue of a low budget by shooting in a naturalistic style and making good use of South Philly location shooting. The actors, especially leads Greg Lyons and Jennifer-Lynn Welsh, match the low-key vibe. What the movie lacks in terms of fancy plotting it makes up for in authenticity and empathy for the characters, and although the fact that the father and son are members of a string band is not the only focus, it provides an element of novelty.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 11/5/09

Tetro (**3/4)

Right from the getgo, this movie gets your attention with black-and-white credits that look like something out of the French new wave. Only it takes place in Buenos Aires. Not what you expect from Francis Ford Coppola, the director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, to say nothing of the 1996 Robin Williams dramedy Jack. Vincent Gallo, who once wrote, directed, and starred in the very entertaining Buffalo ’66 (as well as 2003’s notorious Brown Bunny), returns from near oblivion to star as the would-of-been writer sought out by a teenager (Alden Ehrenreich) looking for his brother. But the writer—now an underemployed lighting technician—wants nothing to do with any of his family, especially the father, a genius conductor played by Klaus Maria Brandauer in color flashbacks. (Coppola’s own father was conductor/composer Carmine Coppola.)

After 1997’s The Rainmaker, Coppola made no movies until 2007’s less-commercial Youth Without Youth, and this one is clearly also directed toward an art-house crowd. Even so, what starts out as a small sort of movie with three characters—the third being the live-in girlfriend, who insists on taking in the teenager—develops into a full-scale melodrama, complete with a scenery-chewing Ehrenreich nearly burning down an auditorium. Despite this, or maybe because of it, the big family-history revelations don’t pack the emotional punch intended. But the variation in moods, including light comedy at times, and the cinematic sweep of the end is not without its charms. It could be worth a look for those looking for something different.

IMDB link

viewed 7/1/09 at Ritz East (Landmark Theatres screening) and reviewed 7/9/09

Departures (***1/4)

The surprise Academy Award winner in the foreign-language film category is, for awhile, something like a Japanese Six Feet Under. Happily married but unhappily laid off (from playing cello in a bankrupt, second-tier Tokyo orchestra), timid Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) returns to his hometown and half accidentally takes a job “encoffining” the deceased. Some of the early scenes are played for laughs, as when Kobayashi’s first job turns out to be playing the deceased in a training video. Gradually, the humor gives way to a sort of circle-of-life vibe, as we see how the job—one heavily stigmatized in Japan—is not about caring for the dead so much as comforting the living. Probably the sequences in which Kobayashi performs his rituals could be edited a bit more tightly, and the story arc is predictable, but the setting is novel and the actors playing Kobayashi’s calm boss (Tsutomu Yamazaki) and chipper wife (Ryoko Hirosue) are appealing. The movie works a little hard to be “moving,” but, aided by the Joe Hisaishi score, actually is at times.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed 6/24/09

Anvil: The Story of Anvil (***)

Canadian metal band Anvil graced the Billboard album chart just once, hitting #191 in 1987 with their fifth album, Strength of Steel. Yet 20 years later they—or at least the core duo of singer-guitarist Steve “Lips” Kudlow and drummer Robb Reiner—plod on.

With limited commercial success, staying together means having day jobs, recording low-budget albums on tiny labels, and traveling on trains, not tour buses. This is the story recorded by longtime fan Sacha Gervasi (a screenwriter on Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal). Notwithstanding his having followed Anvil for so long, the documentary barely covers their history; past members go unmentioned, and the current ones other than Lips and Robb have mere bit parts, aside from the musical segments. There are interviews with family members and a few associates, but no narration.

Mainly what the movie is about is the love-hate bond between these two middle-aged men and the drive than causes them to continue despite the practical difficulties and meager financial rewards. There definitely will seem to be a few Spinal Tap moments for those familiar with that mockumentary, whose director, Rob Reiner, is apparently unrelated to Anvil’s Robb Reiner. Gervasi follows Anvil on a European tour that includes a dismal gig at the hilarious-sounding Monsters of Transylvania show. Robb shows off his paintings, which include one of a toilet. Lips and Robb bicker over who-knows-what.

Although the documentary begins by establishing the band’s bona fides, with such figures as Slash (Guns ’n Roses), Lemmy (Motorhead), and Lars Ulrich (Metallica) testifying to Anvil’s influence and significance, the movie barely touches on the process of making music, and there are no full-length performances. To my ears, a lack of truly memorable melodies might have been as responsible as anything else for the group’s lack of a breakout hit, despite obvious instrumental prowess and power. (In the MTV age, the lack of a telegenic lead singer may have also been a liability.) With a sound that was once modern but doesn’t appear to have changed in the decades since, a significant expansion of their audience seems doubtful. But the movie made me root for them to at least find the means to stay afloat for another decade or two.

IMDB link

viewed 3/18/09 (screening at Ritz Bourse) and reviewed 3/18 and 3/23/09

Forgetting Sarah Marshall (***)

The ads tout this as “from the guys who brought you The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up”; those movies were both written and directed by Judd Apatow, but he’s only a producer here, and that doesn’t necessarily say much. However, in this case there is a certain similarity in the way the movies all feature guys who are well into adulthood but haven’t managed to grow up yet. They feature a certain level of frat-boy humor (played up in the TV ad) mixed with realistically played-out storylines and actual emotional content.

The star of the movie, Jason Segel (who appeared in Knocked Up) also wrote the script, making the opening, in which he gets dumped by the TV-star title character (Kristen Bell) while blubbering stark naked, kind of a bold move. Segel, an unconventional leading man (a la Seth Rogen in Knocked Up), looks like he could be Judge Reinhold’s younger brother. Anyway, off he goes to Hawaii, where, in a plot-convenient coincidence, she does too with her new boyfriend. Also conveniently, he manages to hook up with the hotel’s button-cute front desk clerk (Mila Kunis of That ’70s Show). The humor is mostly solid, though occasionally seeming forced, most notably when a restaurant host (Jonah Hill) loudly asks “Table for one?…We got a loner!” But the thing that makes the movie worth seeing is that it has a handle on the way relationships can fall apart. Sarah Marshall seems in danger of becoming a standard “bitch” character until, in a key scene, we get to hear her side of the story. Hence, while goofy, this is a movie for grown-ups after all.

IMDB link

viewed 3/13/08 (screening at Bridge); reviewed 4/19/08

The Band's Visit (***1/4)

This low-key charmer follows an Egyptian police force band that winds up in a tiny Israeli town after taking the wrong bus. The ask the vivacious woman who runs the store where the Arab Culture Center is and are told there is no culture center and no culture, in fact. There is also no bus until the next day, and no hotel. What could be an overly cute comedy succeeds by keeping it simple and quiet. (There’s no score.) For one day, we follow the troupe, primarily the stiff, timid band leader and a younger colleague whose pickup technique is to imitate the Chet Baker-sung version of “My Funny Valentine.” The band’s unwelcome detour is for the store owner a respite from boredom. The band and the locals communicate in their common language, English. Politics and religion are barely alluded to in this unexpected diversion about an unexpected diversion.

IMDB link

viewed 4/3/08; reviewed 4/6/08

I'm Not There (**1/4)

I'm Not There is Todd Haynes’s self-consciously clever attempt to tackle the life, or many lives, as he puts it, of Bob Dylan. No one actor, or cinematic style, can properly capture this arguably most influential American musician of the 20th century. There is young hobo Bob, tramping it in the midwest and calling himself—this is Haynes’s conceit—Woody Guthrie, after his then-dying folk idol. That Woody is played by Marcus Carl Franklin, an eleven-year-old black boy, may strike you as a heavy-handed attempt to depict both Dylan’s identification with the downtrodden and his formative musical state. Still, the scenes are not without some rustic charm. Hobo Bob/Woody will soon become folk-hero Bob (Christian Bale), troubadour of Greenwich Village and protegé of Joan Baez, who is played by Julianne Moore and called Alice Fabian here. Bob is called Jack Rollins. Haynes does these segments like a documentary, partly in black and white, complete with ersatz re-creations of famous album covers. (The Times They Are A Changin’ becomes Time Will Tell, which, like certain other parts of the movie, is funny if you know something about Dylan, and otherwise isn’t.)

Then there is Cate Blanchett's mod Bob, alienating his folk base, swinging through a Fellini-esque vision of London, and sparring with a “square” BBC reporter played by Bruce Greenwood. This segment, or segments, since the film isn't strictly chronological, is most representative of the overall theme. Bob, now called Jude Quinn, fends off the reporter's attempts to understand him. “You want me to say what you want me to say,” he says, which might be the message for the film—Dylan is whoever the audience wants him to be. Later, he is family-man Bob (Heath Ledger), unsuccessfully married to a French artist (Charlotte Gainsbourg), and born-again Bob (Bale, again), recruited for Jesus by a girlfriend. There are two other Bobs, one appearing only in ersatz interview segments, and one in which Bob appears only in the guise of the drifter he played in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Call him Billy Bob.

Don’t know any of these Bobs? This is probably not the right starting point. There's already the documentaries Don't Look Back and No Direction Home, or Dylan’s own recent memoirs. This is both too fictionalized and too scattershot to serve as biography. Granting that that wasn’t the aim, I still didn’t think the movie spoke to me. There are some good performances, notably Blanchett, but also the young Franklin, who really sings, too, and Gainsbourg, who brings the only true emotional notes to the film. The part where Blanchett’s Bob/Jude asks a coterie of acolytes and assorted hangers on, “Am I the only one with any balls around here” may be a sly nod to the unusual casting, which works surprisingly well. And the songs are very good, of course. Some are the original recordings, while others are faithful cover versions. Some are familiar, others obscure. (A few hits, like “Tangled Up in Blue,” are missing.) But interesting songs and casting may not be enough for the average moviegoer, who may find Hayne’s film, as I did, on the dull side. Obviously a lot of craft has gone into it, but the result is more admirable than enlightening.

IMDB link

reviewed 12/22/07 to 1/15/08

This Christmas (**3/4)

A feel-good melodrama about brothers and sisters reuniting for the holiday in not-so-festive Los Angeles. Not a Tyler Perry movie, but a similar feel to it.

IMDB link

Control (***)

Some lives are easier to understand than others, and the life of a introvert who committed suicide at 23, in May 1980, doesn’t present the most obvious dramatic arc. Ian Curtis was the singer in Joy Division, a UK band whose music may be best known to Americans, especially those under 40, via the version of “Shadowplay” by the Killers that plays over the closing credits here. The song, whose lyrics talk about “acting out your own death,” was a moderate hit on the rock charts and made #68 on the Hot 100.

Curtis (Sam Riley) obviously saved a lot of his words for his songs. He wasn’t flamboyant, and his stage mannerisms can be called dorky. His childhood was apparently ordinary enough to be left out of the film. Despite his affection for the punk rock scene that inspired Joy Division, he didn’t try very hard to act out the rock-star lifestyle. In one of the earliest scenes, a high school teacher catches him daydreaming, but he merely apologizes. Later, he walks around with the word “Hate” written on his jacket, but he’s still mild-mannered enough to were a tie during his day job helping the unemployed, and traditional enough to propose to his teen sweetheart, Debbie (Samantha Morton).

In the end it’s the intensity of the character and the crisp black-and-white cinematography used by Anton Corbijn that hold your attention. Riley, who’d barely acted before this, turns out to both look and sound a lot like Curtis, judging by the video clip on the DVD, and he and the other actors do an entirely credible job re-creating the band’s performances. Corbijn doesn’t dig into Joy Division’s actual music-making process and only barely portrays the Manchester scene that the band grew out of. (For more on that, see 24 Hour Party People, about the indie-music impresario Tony Wilson, who would give Joy Division its record contract. Craig Parkinson plays Wilson here.) But there are several performance scenes, and my guess is that if you don’t care for the band’s droning brand of post-punk, you’ll like this significantly less. (This is in contrast to Corbijn and screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh’s subsequent collaboration, Nowhere Boy, which has more of a story and can easily be enjoyed whether or not you care for John Lennon’s music.)

The film suggests Curtis’s epilepsy diagnosis, or the medication he took for it, as fuel for his apparent depression. But in the end his descent is of course not entirely rational, and we see it much through the eyes of Morton’s Debbie (whose book was the basis for the film), who is the most sympathetic character. On Curtis’s tombstone, Debbie had the title of Joy Division’s sole (post-suicide) UK smash, “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” The lyrics suggest his state of mind:

You cry out in your sleep,
All my failings exposed.
And there’s a taste in my mouth,
As desperation takes hold.

IMDB link

viewed 1/31/11 and 2/1/11 on DVD [Netflix] abnd reviewed 2/4/11

Vitus (***3/4)

Like Searching for Bobby Fischer, Little Man Tate, and Shine, this is movie about a child prodigy. Fictional Vitus plays the piano, like the real-life subject of Shine, but doesn’t suffer a nervous breakdown. He plays chess, like the subject of Searching, but he’s more of an all-around genius. He has a doting mother, like Fred Tate, but also a doting father, and a loving grandfather who seems to be the only one whose affection transcends Vitus’s gifts. The Swiss import has something in common with all of these movies, but seems different nonetheless. Searching for Bobby Fischer was most concerned with how hard to push a gifted child, and that’s part of the story here. The parents here are good people, but they can’t help but see their son as an extension of themselves, and so they would like to shape his talents. When it seems as though he may not turn out to be as special as they thought, there is a palpable sense of loss. Having a son who is merely intelligent no longer seems like enough.

Little Man Tate focused primarily on the contrast between the intellectual and the emotional. There’s some of that here too. Vitus’s arrogance alienates him from others his own age. At the same time, he’s naive enough at age 12 to hope to woo a college-age girl. Yet even though he makes mistakes like that, he’s also able to have an insight into the adult world that most children lack, leading to a couple of surprising plot turns. Intelligence, like money (which intelligence can be turned into), gives you a kind of power. Already, Vitus has realized that, and the second half of the movie is more about his own desires rather than how his parents feel about him. In this the movie is somewhat distinguished from the others I’ve mentioned (excepting Shine, a full-fledged biography). It’s a warmer movie as well. On the whole, the movie views genius as a more of a gift than a problem, certainly compared to Shine or the forthcoming Joshua. If anything is lacking in the movie, it’s probably a consideration of the moral aspects of this gift.

Teo Gheorghiu, a real-life piano prodigy, plays Vitus. Also of note is Bruno Ganz, who played Adolf Hitler in Downfall, as the much more appealing grandfather. This movie only played one week here in Philadelphia, but it would make an excellent rental. When it ended, I was sorry that I wouldn’t get to see what Vitus would do as an adult.

IMDB link

reviewed 8/5/07

Shut Up & Sing (***1/4)

? Academy Award-winning documentarian Barbara Kopple (partnering with Cecilia Peck) chronicles country-music superstars the Dixie Chicks as they deal with the fallout from lead singer Natalie Maines’s famously controversial remark. During the run-up to the Iraq war, Maines had told a London audience that they were “ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.” The result back home was protests, criticism, lost sales and airplay, and even a death threat. For the group and its publicist and manager, there was confusion about how to handle the negative publicity. Alternating between footage dating from the 2003 tour and from the 2005–2006 period in which the group’s follow-up album was recorded and promoted, the film shows the attempts of the trio, which also includes sisters Marty McGuire and Emily Robison, to move forward in terms of both sound and marketing.

+ The behind-the-scenes footage displays the group’s contradictory impulses toward damage control and anger (combined with wonder) at the firestorm an offhand comment has created. Some of the most revealing scenes only indirectly have to do with the controversy, such as an exchange where their new producer, Rick Rubin, is telling Maines to rewrite the lyrics but keep the melody of a tune she’s not too sure is any good. Using the rock-oriented Rubin, who’d also helped market Johnny Cash to a new audience, is part of a part-forced, part-voluntary attempt to move away from their former core audience. Maines is definitely the most colorful personality and a funny presence.

- I’m not sure I liked the switching back and forth between the 2005 and 2003. I’d have to assume that Kopple didn’t decide to make the documentary the moment the remark was made and had to rely on existing footage for the earlier period. Perhaps the switching helped deemphasize that a documentary ostensibly about a 2003 incident was mostly shot two years later. This isn’t a huge flaw, but I’d have liked to see more about the process by which the band or Maines decided to issue what now seems to be a calculated (and now disavowed) apology for disrespecting the president. There are also very few voices outside of the band. It’s probable that a rock or rap artist would not have generated the same level of rage as a country band, and it would have been useful to delve further into the nature of the country music audience and its definition of patriotism.

= ***1/4 As any documentary about a music group, it helps to be a fan (although there aren’t any complete musical numbers), but this has enough general interest to be worth a look if you were curious about the whole hullabaloo when it occurred. For those looking for a lot of conflict, it’s not here. This is the opposite kind of documentary as Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, which focused on a band at war with itself. If this movie is accurate, whatever effect the anti-Bush remark had on the Chicks’ fan base caused no real dissension in the band’s camp.

IMDb link