Day: January 22, 2015

Liz Garbus‘ What Happened, Miss Simone? is a sad, absorbing, expertly assembled doc about the legendary Nina Simone (1933-2003), one of the greatest genius-level jazz-soul singers of the 20th Century as well as a classically trained pianist extraordinaire. Garbus is obviously a huge Simone fan, and she makes her case for — draws you into — this flawed, impassioned artist with skill and flair. Pic opened the 2015 Sundance Film Festival on Thursday night at the Eccles.

So Garbus’ film has the expertise and the feeling and the spirit. No one who sees it will leave feeling under-nourished. But I also found What Happened, Miss Simone? irksome because of several biographical facts that Garbus inexplicably leaves out. (Her birth year, the cause of her death, her first marriage, a shooting incident, etc.) I also found Simone herself a bit of a hurdle. Her lack of respect and reverence for her extraordinary singing gifts as well as a general indifference to the basics of maintaining a healthy career is perplexing and even alienating. Maybe it’s me but it’s hard to warm up to, much less feel a kinship with, haughty aloofness, a hair-trigger temperament and self-destructive behavior.

But oh, those pipes, that phrasing, that style…that magnificent, touched-by-God aura.

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I just happened upon this beautiful photo this morning on Twitter. I had an emotional reaction that’s stayed with me all day. I had to a chance to watch a digitally remastered Apocalypse Now inside the beautiful Werner Herzog Cinema at last September’s Telluride Film Festival, but I went to see Wild instead because that was the hotter film at the moment. I’m really sorry I did that.

“My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It’s what it was really like. It was crazy. We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.” — Francis Ford Coppola speaking at a press conference during the 1979 Cannes Film Festival.

The 2015 Sundance Film Festival opening-day press conference was the exercise it’s always been — an attempt to define what the climate is and what’s changing, and an attempt by journalist to goad Robert Redford into giving them a tasty quote or two. The aging Sundance Kid was asked virtually all of the questions and obliged with his usual honesty. Festival director John Cooper and executive director Keri Putnam added their two cents from time to time. It was an okay discussion and frank as far as it went, but the answers at these conferences are always influenced by diplomatic sidestepping or at least a tendency to sand off the edges. Incidentally: I was struck by a bland, vaguely grotesque mini-mall across the street from the Egyptian theatre, where the conference took place. Bit by little bit Park City, which had a vaguely historic aura 20 years ago, is losing those remnants of the old mining town that it used to have. A kind of cultural blight is spreading. Shallow entrepreneurs catering to the rich and the tasteless are coming in and rebuilding it to fit their bullshit sensibilities.

(l. to .r) Salt Lake Tribune‘s Sean Means (moderator), Sundance Film Festival director John Cooper, exec director Keri Putnam, founder and costar Captain America costar Robert Redford during this afternoon’s press conference.

The ugliest addition to Main Street in many years — big and sprawling and exuding not a hint of personality or charm — a form of nouveau riche arrogance by way of architectural blight.

The Riverhorse Cafe used to be a pleasant gray — now it’s been repainted a dark gray with a touch of forest green. It almost feels funereal. No accounting for taste.

In a 1.22 Daily Beast article, Michael Musto chats with a (presumably New York-based) Academy voter, and he…sorry, she has a lot of refreshingly candid views to share. One of them is that Alejandro G. Inarritu is not a day at the beach to work with…big deal. Occasional creative tempest will manifest — it goes with the movie business, which has never been a bowl of cherries. Sometimes making a special film takes more effort, and then more on top of that.

Musto: What do you think will emerge triumphant, Boyhood or Birdman?

Oscar Lady: In my book, Birdman. I don’t get Boyhood as a movie. I don’t understand how it was nominated for screenplay. That was one of the weakest things about it, in my opinion.

Musto: [What about] Supporting Actress?

Oscar Lady: With Keira Knightley [in The Imitation Game], you can throw that one away. Like, “Why? Really?”

Musto: The wife of the gay guy!

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On top of my previously posted Sundance Hot 25, I’m adding four newbies. Will I manage to catch them all? Well, I can sure give it hell. Addition #1: Adam Salky‘s I Smile Back, about a libertine mom (Sarah Silverman) whose bacchanalian ways threaten to detonate her life. Addition #2: Stevan Riley‘s Listen To Me Marlon, a doc portrait of the late Marlon Brando constructed with previously unreleased audio and visual materials. Addition #3: Leslie Headland‘s Sleeping with Other People, a sex-addict romance with Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie…I can smell the broadness but I’ll give it a shot. Addition #4: 4. Josh Mond‘s James White, in which Christopher Abbott (hunky guy on Girls, beefy truck hijacker in A Most Violent Year) plays “a hedonistic, raw-nerved son of a woman (Cynthia Nixon) who’s dying of cancer,” etc.

Christopher Abbott in Josh Mond’s James White.

David Koepp‘s Mortdecai is looking like a contender for the Worst of 2015 roster, to go by early reviews. The arch, ultra-mannered Johnny Depp farce has an 11% Rotten Tomatoes rating as we speak. But I had a great time with Robbie Collin‘s Telegraph review. Excerpt #1: “It’s hard to think of a way in which the experience of watching the new Johnny Depp film could be any worse, unless you returned home afterwards to discover that Depp himself had popped round while you were out and set fire to your house. Excerpt #2: “What’s fascinating about the film, other than its early and near-impregnable status as the worst of 2015, are its superficial but nagging similarities to Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, a project to which Depp was once attached. Both films center on fey but sexually rapacious men who belong to bygone eras, and both involve a missing art treasure. Perhaps in a parallel universe, Ralph Fiennes missed a train by a fraction of a second, and Depp is now the star of a tragicomic Academy Award nominated masterpiece, while Fiennes gropes co-stars half his age and jokes about statutory rape.”

During a segment on last night’s The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, screenwriter and former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett described the one-eyed-jacks milieu in Washington, D.C. Politicians, he said, “put one face out to the public and, behind the scenes, they’re devious lunatics. They’re headcases…broken, garbage people. They are. They’re terrible, short-sighted, venal, cowardly douchebags. Some of them.”

Which is vaguely analogous to the difference between this or that person’s online rantings and the mild-mannered, comme ci comma ca personality they wear when you see them on the street. Very few, it seems, are the same person in both realms. The usual online tempest vs. a semblance of mature behavior when they’re standing two to three feet away, and the tempestuous stuff is usually closer to the nub of things. I’m mentioning this because a guy some of us know recently blocked me from reading his Twitter posts because…getting into it will only exacerbate but it was next to nothing in the general scheme. I’ll be running into him during Sundance and we’ll probably sort it out, but online temperaments are strange.

And yet, oddly, it’s more comfortable to live in our digital pods. Almost all interaction these days happens digitally while the face-to-face stuff…well, you can’t get away from it entirely. And I would’t want to. But oh, the irony of it.