Day: September 10, 2012

Shola Lynch‘s Free Angela and All Political Prisoners, an absorbing and well-crafted doc about the intense life of ’60s and ’70s political revolutionary Angela Davis and her 1972 conspiracy-kidnapping-murder trial, had its first press screening today at 2 pm. I attended and was quite taken. But Lynch declines to clearly explain the facts behind the prosecution’s central accusation against Davis, and that’s a huge thing to omit in a film of this sort.

Free Angela is a riveting history lesson and a fascinating time-travel look at the political lunacy of the late ’60s to early ’70s, when thousands of impassioned leftists gradually turned radical and became sincerely convinced that revolutionãry social change was imminent, leading to some of them jumping off a cliff (some rhetorical, some criminal) in order to push things along or throw wood into the fire. And the right did everything in its power to turn this country into a police state in order to repress and suppress the left, especially with the emergence of super-radical street fighters and bank robbers and bomb-makers like the Weathermen.

Much of Free Angela is about that collective madness, but more particularly about Davis’s underground fugitive phase in the wake of being charged with aggravated kidnapping and first-degree murder, and then her capture by the FBI, and then her 1972 trial in San Jose. Davis was prosecuted because four guns bought by Davis were used in an 8.7.70 attempt by Jonathan Jackson, the 17 year-old brother of imprisoned Black Panther George Jackson, to break out three “Soledad brother” defendants out of a Marin County courthouse. Jackson handed guns to three black defendants and took Judge Harold Haley, the prosecutor, and three jurors as hostages. A shoot-out resulted and the judge, one of the jurors, the prosecutor and two of the three black guys (I think) wound up dead.

Jonathan Jackson was Davis’ bodyguard so perhaps he just took the firearms without her knowledge and pulled the whole thing off solo. Okay, maybe. I love Angela Davis and support the various metaphors that she came (and has come) to represent, and I’m totally glad she’s free and speaking and teaching at age 68, but does anyone believe today that Davis was totally unaware of young Jackson’s plan? Especially given the fact that she bought a shotgun three days before the courtoom assault? Read this account by Lawrence V. Cott and tell me she had no clue and was totally blame-free.

Davis was found not guilty of all charges related to the courtroom shoot-out by an all-white San Jose jury in 1972.

The problem with Free Angela is that Lynch doesn’t dig into what actually happened with between Davis, Jackson and the guns. She doesn’t grim up and ask the tough questions. That’s because this is a friendly documentary that was funded by Will Smith and Jay Z, and the agenda and the limits were clear, or so it seems tonight. (I tried to speak to Lynch tonight, but her pubicist put off her chat until tomorrow.)

(l. to r.): Willow Smith, Jaden Smith, producer Sidra Smith, director Shola Lynch, Will Smith, Angela Davis and Jada Pinkett Smith at yesterday’s TIFF premiere screening.

This looks and sounds half-decent. TIFF logline: “A powerhouse cast — Christopher Walken, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener and Mark Ivanir — brings vivid life to Yaron Zilberman‘s engrossing drama about an illustrious string quartet, whose 25th anniversary precipitates a tempestuous release of repressed feelings, long-held resentments and painful betrayals.” It screened today at 6 pm; the next TIFF showing is Wednesday, 9.12, at 5 pm.

Is this supposed to be Daniel Day Lewis Abraham Lincoln voice? Please, God…no! After the rich booming voices of Daniel Plainview and Bill the Butcher this is nothing — it sounds like a twangy Matthew Modine. No snap, no intrigue, not at all like Raymond Massey‘s (which Lincoln’s son Robert Todd Lincoln allegedly said was very much like his father’s). None of that piping high-pitched quality, no log-cabin Illinois flavor.

If this is how Lewis is going to sound, I’m appalled. I’m almost ready to say “forget it.” Update: It’s been asserted that the voice belong to some black actor named David Oyelowo. If so, relief!

I never wrote in my Place Beyond The Pines review that people who live in Schenedtady are flat-out “unattractive,” as the Times Union‘s Kristi Barlette wrote this morning. I said costars Eva Mendes and Rose Byrne are “too hot to live in Schenectady” — a key difference..

Boiled down, I said what any cab driver or club owner in any city will tell you — i.e., pick-of-the-litter types of either gender rarely choose to live in towns like Schenectady.

“Beauty almost always migrates to the big cities where power and the security lie, and in my experience the women who reside in blue-collar hell holes like Schenectady are far less attractive as a rule,” I wrote. Not unattractive per se, but not double grade-A either. “There’s a certain genetic look to the men and women of Upper New York State,” I wrote, “and they aren’t the kind of people who pose for magazine covers or star in reality shows.” And this is pretty much true — face it, rurals.

I brought two Macbook Pros with me to Toronto, and one of them has recently developed a charming habit of completely freezing at random — no keystrokes, no remedies, no saving your work…nothing. You have to power off with the button and then start all over again. Wonderful…I love it when this happens! What an emotion, what a feeling!

About a half hour ago I was in the middle of writing a riff on The Impossible (I always compose on Movable Type, which only auto-saves when it’s in the mood) and then… KLONNNG! YOU’RE DEAD! I couldn’t save anything so I did a visual capture with my iPhone camera — here it is. I have to start the day so this is the best I can do…eff it. I’ll transcribe and/or rewrite and format it properly later. What a grind, what stress, what frenzy!

Note: At the end of the first paragraoh I meant to say “…not only unmoving but uninvolving.”

I’ve always kind of vaguely hated the way Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan refuse to hit the same notes or at least try to adhere to a common melody in their Nashville Skyline duet of “Girl From The North Country.” The arrogance of these guys thinking, “Aaah, we’re good…whatever notes we hit and however we wind up phrasin’ is fine…it’s all good because we’re feelin’ it and sittin’ here together, all cool and settled and strummin’ on our guitars all humble-like.”

And they couldn’t occasionally hit the same note or share the same phrasing?

Despite all this I bought this song today because it’s become the new ear bug and I need to get rid of it. David O. Russell uses it in a quiet one-on-one scene in The Silver Linings Playbook, and I haven’t been able to shake this tune since the night before last.

Today is about Stuart Blumberg‘s Thanks For Sharing at 11 am, Billy Bob Thornton‘s Jayne Mansfield’s Car at 2 pm or thereabouts, and then, may the saints protect & God help us all, Terrence Malick‘s To The Wonder at 7 pm at the Princess of Wales.

I could see The Iceman at an 11:15 press & industry screening but I don’t wanna see it, see? Or as Humphrey Bogart used to say during his 1930s bad-guy phase, “See, mug?”

I’ve been trying to write stuff since 7:30 this morning but I had to walk four blocks this morning to a 24-hour market to buy garbage bags, and before the first screening I have to hit a nearby print and copy shop and print, sign and fax an insert order that can’t effing wait.

I feel like that Claude Rains line in Lawrence of Arabia: “On the whole I wish I’d stayed in Tunbridge Wells.” The reason I feel this way is mainly because of the Malick. The Malick plus having to file all the damn time on top of the movies I want to see always being scheduled in conflict with each other. Eff me. On top of which the place I’m staying in is starting to feel like a real pig sty, which is why I needed to to buy the garbage bags.

Life is a vale of troubles, and then you die.