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 and will premiere on Netflix on 6.26. Here’s the just-popped trailer:

From my 1.22.15 Sundance review: “No one who sees Garbus’s film will leave feeling under-nourished. It delivers expertise, feeling, spirit…all of it. 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.) And I 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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This is two or three days old so excuse the slowness, but until last night I hadn’t heard about Robert Downey, Jr.‘s to-the-manor-born putdown of Alejandro G. Inarritu and particularly AGI’s remark, offered in a 10.15.14 Deadline interview as well as in Birdman, about superhero movies exuding a form of cultural genocide. “The way they apply violence to it, it’s absolutely right-wing,” Alejandro said. “If you observe the mentality of most of those films, it’s really about people who are rich, who have power, who will do the good [and] who will kill the bad. Philosophically, I just don’t like them. They have been poison…because the audience is so overexposed to plot and explosions and shit that doesn’t mean nothing about the experience of being human.” Asked about this by the Guardian during the Avengers junket, Downey said “Look, I respect the heck out of him [and] for a man whose native tongue is Spanish to be able to put together a phrase like ‘cultural genocide’ just speaks to how bright he is.”

This wasn’t a “quasi”-racist remark, as a director friend has suggested, but flat-out racist — an expression of an obviously patronizing, dismissive attitude on Downey’s part toward Mexican Americans and Alejandro in particular. What’s the difference between this remark and Sean Penn‘s “who gave this sonavubitch his green card?” quip at the Oscars? Context. Penn is an AGI friend using a dismissive remark “in quotes” to deliver a form of guy humor while Downey was clearly miffed about AGI and Birdman having “talked smack” about him, and was looking to score a putdown. Downey defenders will no doubt say he was talking “in quotes” also but it doesn’t seem that way to me in the above clip.

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“Returning to the director’s chair for the first time in more than a decade, Robert Duvall would appear to be playing to his strengths in Wild Horses. Casting himself as a Texas rancher who ran off his son (James Franco) years ago when he learned he was gay, he sets a scene allowing for both poignant reconciliations and the dredging up of family secrets. Unfortunately, his attempt to create a multigenerational Lone Star-like mystery doesn’t gel as John Sayles‘s film did, leaving so many dramatic moments unresolved that one wonders how many scenes must have been left on the cutting-room floor. A top-flight cast will attract attention on video, but the theatrical performances don’t come close to matching Duvall’s 1997 directing breakthrough The Apostle.” — from John DeFore‘s Hollywood Reporter review, filed from SXSW on 3.20.15.

Hollywood Elsewhere will give what it can afford to Sen. Bernie Sanders‘ campaign for the presidency, which will be announced Thursday. Bernie can’t win, of course, but he can at least hold Hillary Clinton‘s feet to the fire about her laissez-faire corporate allegiances and right-center thinking on foreign policy. Bernie is doing her a favor, in a way. His campaign will toughen her up for the general election, which will be fairly brutal and perhaps without the “fairly.”

Not long after Joni Mitchell was rushed to a hospital on 3.31, I felt moved to write a fan letter. Just a few thoughts, recollections…nothing profound. A friend knows and visits her from time to time, but he told me last weekend (a) he’s been denied access since her fainting episode and (b) her daughter had just flown in from Toronto. That indicated Mitchell might be less well than usual and perhaps…who knew? So I wrote the letter and emailed it to the friend and asked him to give a printed version to her. But he declined because I’d included a portion in which I urged her to quit tobacco and smoke vapor instead. “She really won’t like that part and she’ll blame me on some level if I give it to her,” he explained. “But it’s obviously my opinion and not yours,” I answered. “It won’t matter,” he said.

So last Thursday I drove over to Mitchell’s 85 year-old Spanish home in Bel Air in order to pop it into the mailbox. But I couldn’t find the damn mailbox so I threw the letter through the iron gates. It was late at night and quiet like a forest. The hedges outside her place are towering and somewhat overgrown. As you approach I noticed that a portion of her curving street is cluttered with little mounds and potholes, which is odd for a ritzy area.

“Joni — I’ve never gotten to know or work the music realm like the movie business. Not professionally or politically, I mean, so I’ve never tried to interview you or anything. I’ve nonetheless been a rapt admirer of your music for eons. And I want you to know I felt serious pangs of fear when you were suddenly rushed to the hospital, and it made me want to finally say something.

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I might be down with re-purchasing a remastered Sticky Fingers (complete with added, never-heard versions of some of the songs) but forget the Rolling Stones’ baseball park concerts, the first of which will happen in San Diego’s Petco Park on 5.24. The shittiest upper-bleacher seat you can buy (section 327 or 328) will run you $184 or $189, respectively. If you bring a girlfriend plus parking and afterdrinks you’re talking $500 and change, but what will your girlfriend think of you if you sit in the section with the worst possible vantage point? If you want a decent seat (on the field, centered, not far from the stage) it’ll set you back $2500 and obviously $5K if you bring a date.

Robert Altman‘s O.C. and Stiggs (shot in ’83, released in ’87) was his all-time lowest, slummiest gig. Not that he made a habit of slumming, but almost every director runs aground sooner or later and is sometimes forced to direct a film that he/she feels no connection with and would never touch if financial pressure didn’t require it. The trick, of course, is to do the very best job you can (at the very least technically) even if your heart isn’t in it. In his own mind Oliver Stone may not have been slumming when he made World Trade Center and Savages, but these films always struck me as comedowns — they were certainly well beneath his usual level. The reprehensible Honky Tonk Freeway (’81) was easily John Schlesinger‘s slummiest gig. Looking for other legendary misfortunes along these lines…any director, any film.

Whatever the role, Ben Mendelsohn needs to (a) suck on filtered cigarettes and (b) have his face glisten with sweat. Without these elements he runs into trouble. His sweat-free, sans-cigarette performance in Ridley Scott‘s Exodus: Gods and Kings was a clear indication of that. Mendelsohn must have therefore thought twice when he was offered the villain role in John Mclean‘s Slow West (A24, 5.15) as men didn’t smoke cigarettes in the late 1800s. He almost certain talked it over with his wife and agent. “I need my smokes,” Mendelsohn probably said in a moment of vulnerability, “and they need me.” They no doubt assured him that he could win through, and that if he felt uncertain he could always double up on the sweat.

Belated regrets over the passing of Australian dp Andrew Lesnie, 59, and all due respect, of course. In all candor I didn’t post about his passing last night due to somewhat conflicted feelings. On one hand Lesnie was a master craftsman with a sublime eye, but on the other he collaborated quite often with HE nemesis Peter Jackson. He made the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films look pretty but to what end? Ditto Jackson’s overbearing King Kong. Lesnie also captured M. Night Shyamalan‘s The Last Airbender…awful! The Lesnie-shot films I either didn’t like or hated would make for a very long column. The only Lesnie-shot film I truly enjoyed and admired was Martin Scorsese‘s Shine A Light, on which Lesnie served as a camera operator.

During last January’s Sundance Film Festival I went to some trouble to see Stevan Riley‘s Listen to Me, Marlon. I posted some captures of 16mm color footage from the filming of On The Waterfront but then forgot to review it. The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy called it “moving, poignant, troubling and sad. Due superficially to nothing more than the tremendous girths they both achieved in their later years, it’s easy to draw a certain comparison between Brando and another great artist of the approximate period and same geographic origins about whom there similarly lingers the feeling that he achieved less than he might have — Orson Welles. To an armchair psychologist, it seems that what perhaps held back both men the most was a lack of discipline quite likely fostered by untidy, vagabond childhoods.”

Ted 2 is going to clean up, fella. ESPN watchers, wage-earners, flatbed truck drivers, Croc footwear owners and wearers of low-thread-count T-shirts will love it. Made in America, made with American coin, made for Americans…proud of that, homey.