1.) Regina Carter, “Reverse Thread” (E1) – For years, I’ve been waiting for the best jazz violinist of her generation to make an album as great as she is. Not that she hasn’t been placed in contexts that complement her range and virtuosity before now, but her previous discs (not counting those where she’s been an often-galvanizing guest star) have in varied ways fallen short of conveying the flamboyant charge of her live performances. This assortment of African-inspired jewels, finally, delivers the goods – and then some. The blend of instrumentalists is zesty – two accordions (Will Holshouser, Gary Versace), two basses (Mamadou Ba, Chris Lightcap), guitar (Adam Rogers) and percussion (Alvester Garnett). Add to this mix Yacouba Sissoko on the kora, a 12-string West African harp used by griots, and you have a disc that is, from start to finish, the most thrilling and gorgeous dance music imaginable from an artist steeped in jazz, but now even more “beyond category” than she was before.
2.) Jason Moran, “Ten” (Blue Note) – The MacArthur “genius grant” he received this year only validates a ticket he’s been carrying around for most of this new century, at least as far as serious jazz heads are concerned. Both the foundation’s gift and this disc combine to provide a fitting capstone to Moran’s decade of habitual brilliance. As with all his best recordings, Moran plays here as if he embodied the whole 20th century of jazz piano from old-time striding to post-bop romanticism to polyrhythmic R&B/hip-hop extensions. (Yeah I know, but if you’re so smart, you come up with a better description of “Gangsterism Over 10 Years.”) “Ten” also firmly establishes his trio, with bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Watts, as one of those all-time, all-world combos whose members seem to anticipate each other’s thoughts and intentions in the quicksilver manner of an elite basketball team overpowering hapless opponents on its home court.
3.) Geri Allen, “Flying Toward the Sound” (Motema) – Sooner or later, someone is going to have to declare Professor Allen a national treasure, which is among the precious few honors she hasn’t collected in a lifetime of laudable accomplishments. This “Solo Piano Excursion Inspired by Cecil Taylor, McCoy Tyner and Herbie Hancock” (her words) is by far her most breathtaking dare yet; a suite of nine pieces whose deliberately crafted format frees her to take off on stunning harmonic combinations, some lyrical and ruminative, others surging off the keyboard with speed, power and poise. As a storyteller trafficking in mystical and spiritual themes, she can caress and upend, often in the same narrative passage. You hear not only the lessons she’s absorbed from the three influences cited above, but also those she learned from Mary Lou Williams, Bud Powell, Betty Carter, Ornette Coleman and Charlie Haden. I’d be willing to label this her masterpiece if I wasn’t sure she’s capable of even greater astonishments to come.
4.) Henry Threadgill Zooid, “This Brings Us To: Volume II” (PI) –As with Threadgill’s peers who cultivated their artistry under the aegis of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM), it is best to consider his music analogous to scientific or spiritual inquiry. Putting it another way, whenever Threadgill hears something that even vaguely offers possibilities if it’s blended with something unfamiliar and/or intriguing, he follows his impulse and doesn’t worry too much about what others think. A long time ago, this kind of thinking was labeled “avant-garde” and Zooid, a quintet which meshes his flute and alto sax with Liberty Elfman’s guitar, Jose Davila’s trombone and tuba, Stomu Takeishi’s bass and Elliot Kavee’s drums, offers wary and credulous listeners alike (relatively) easy access to what remains both unsettlingly bold and oddly familiar about such experimentation. Take hold of whatever instrument, rhythmic pattern or riff you want for ballast and you may end up captivated by what Threadgill and his gang are up to. Not everyone wants to hang around these neighborhoods, but there are unexpected rewards for those who do.
5.) Ted Nash & Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, “Portrait in Seven Shades” (J@LC) – Nash, a quality mensch as a reed player and composer, has been one of the glittering ornaments of Wynton Marsalis’ uptown confab for a decade. The eponymous suite, commissioned by Marsalis, written by Nash and premiered three years ago, uses seven great artists as inspirations for some colorful sonic painting on a big-band canvas. “Dali,” for instance, is propelled by an inexorably eccentric 13/8 tempo upon which solos by Nash and trumpeter Marcus Printup distend themselves like timepieces in “The Persistence of Memory.” By contrast, “Chagall” brings in Natalie Bonin’s violin and Bill Schimmel’s accordion to help evoke the painter’s winsome, carnival-esque theatricality. Perhaps appropriately, it’s “Picasso” that dominates the whole enterprise with motifs that unfurl like giant flags and fire-breathing solos by trombonist Vincent Gardner and Marsalis (who, as always, sounds serenely locked in his comfort zone as a role player).
6.) Fred Hersch Trio, “Whirl” (Palmetto) – Hersch has pulled himself through physical travail to play with as much craft, energy and passion as he ever did. What makes this characteristically fine album especially gratifying is the showcase it offers for Hersch as composer. He wrote six of the album’s ten selections and each deserves consideration for anybody’s regular repertoire, especially the enchanting title track, the irresistibly hooky “Skipping” and two Brazilian-inspired pieces, “Mandevilla” and “Sad Poet,” the latter dedicated to Antonio Carlos Jobim’s memory. “Snow is Falling…” would be a fine addition to someone’s holiday anthology while “Still Here,” though written in tribute to Wayne Shorter, could just as easily apply to this trio’s imperturbable, seemingly indefatigable leader.
7.) Cassandra Wilson, “Silver Pony” (Blue Note) – It’s been only three years since Wilson’s previous new release, yet it somehow seems a lot longer. Perhaps it’s because so much has happened with her in the intervening years, notably her resettlement in her native Deep South, spending part of the time caring for her ailing mother in Jackson, Mississippi and the rest of it making a new home for herself in N’awlins. What she brings back from that journey is a kind of scrapbook; some live sets, some studio tracks, some original compositions (“Beneath a Silver Moon”), standards (“Lover Come Back To Me”), delta blues (“Saddle Up My Pony”), retro-pop (“If It’s Magic”) and a collaboration with John Legend (“Watch the Sunrise”). In short, she’s throwing everything at you that sums up where she’s been and who she’s become and, even with the disc’s occasional rough spots, you can’t help sensing that she revels in being in a good place now, in more ways than one. And she makes you share her exuberance in ways she never has before on – so to speak – record.
8.) Anat Fort Trio, “And If” (ECM) – The burgundy glow of a winter sunset pervades one’s imagination throughout most of this disc, though “And If” is, in no way, to be mistaken for one of those New Age-y room-fresheners-for-the-ear. Fort’s thematically inventive approach to the piano is aggressive enough to leap off the walls without pushing too far ahead of her trio mates, bassist Gary Wang and drummer Roland Schneider, who respond with some delicate, ingenious probing of their own. Fort’s spare attack and richly layered harmonies conceal a penchant for subtle traps. Just when she’s got you enraptured with her spacious-skies homage to her home state, “Minnesota,” she lands a wicked combination on your senses with “Nu,” a kind of extraterrestrial beat-box exercise that gives the whole trio room to frolic. This seems sufficient reason to keep your eyes on Fort – or, at least, to never turn your back on her
9.) Charles Lloyd Quartet, “Mirror” (ECM) – It’s by now a conditioned reflex to mention Lloyd in the same breath as John Coltrane But the deeper Lloyd gets into the great late-autumnal phase of his career, one is increasingly tempted to find similarities with the most conspicuous of Trane’s employers, Miles Davis. This resemblance is driven home with the opener, “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” which remained a constant in the Miles-ian repertoire throughout Davis’ stylistic transitions. But the plaintive beauty of Lloyd’s tone belongs to him alone, especially on ballads, where Lloyd’s Coltrane-esque thematic variations are offset by the almost offhand grace of their resolutions. His “singing” through his sax is especially pronounced – and effective – when he lets the melody do most of the heavy-lifting, as in “La Llorona” or Brian Wilson’s “Caroline, No.” Once again, he’s served well by his band-mates, especially his drummer Eric Harland and the aforementioned genius on the piano, Jason Moran.
10.) Anat Cohen, “Clarinetwork: Live at the VillageVangyard” (Anzic) – It’s impossible to record a bad album in the Basement Shrine on Seventh Avenue., which on the night of Benny Goodman’s 100th birthday (June 5 of last year), showed typically astute judgment in hosting one of the leading avatars of the jazz clarinet’s late 20th century resurgence. Backed by an elite rhythm section of pianist Benny Green, bassist Peter Washington and drummer Lewis Nash, Cohen paid the best possible 21st century tribute to Goodman by plucking items from the Swing King’s song book (“After You’ve Gone,” “Body and Soul”, “Lullaby of the Leaves”) and deftly weaving everything she knows about modern and post-modern jazz into the tunes without doing violence to the essential charm of Goodman’s original interpretations. Such solicitous tugging and pulling of classic material is what jazz repertory, at its best, is supposed to do. It’s also supposed to make musicians such as Cohen more famous than they are now. Ah, well, dig we must, as the saying goeth…
HONORABLE MENTION
The Jazz Passengers, “Reunited” (Justin Time)
Kenny Werner, “No Beginning, No End” (Half Note)
Frank Kimbrough, “Rumors” (Palmetto)
Brad Mehldau, “Highway Rider” (Nonesuch)
Keith Jarrett, Charlie Haden, “Jasmine” (ECM)
Bill Charlap, Renee Rosnes, “Double Portrait” (Blue Note)
BEST LATIN ALBUM
Chucho Valdes, “Chucho’s Steps” (4Q)
Honorable Mention: Conrad Herwig, “The Latin Side of Herbie Hancock” (Half Note)
BEST REISSUE
“The Complete Novus & Columbia Recordings of Henry Threadgill & Air” (Mosaic)
BEST VOCAL
Wilson, “Silver Pony” (SEE ABOVE)
Honorable Mention: Hilary Kole, “You Are There” (Justin Time)
BEST BIG-BAND ALBUM
“Portrait in Seven Shades” (SEE ABOVE)
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
WHICH U.S. PRESIDENT SAID THIS?
Apropos the recent leakages about Our War in Afghanistan, it may be time once again to test everyone on the following:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. Is there no other way the world may live?”
a.) Jimmy Carter
b.) Richard M. Nixon
c.) Dwight D. Eisenhower
d.) John F. Kennedy
e.) Gerald R. Ford
f.) None of the above
b.) Richard M. Nixon
c.) Dwight D. Eisenhower
d.) John F. Kennedy
e.) Gerald R. Ford
f.) None of the above
email the answer to seynah@aol.com
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
American Dance Festival-Jerome Robbins West Side Story
July 19-21, Chafin Seymour, will perform on the ADF main stage (Reynolds Theatre @ Duke University). Chafin is part of the company presenting the Jerome Robbins choreography of West Side Story. You can buy tickets online and learn more at http://www.americandancefestival.org/performances/2010/ADFatDuke/PastForward.html
Monday, July 5, 2010
Memory Snapshot: Gene's Lunch With Lena
Appreciation: The Ferociousness of Lena Horne
By Amy Alexander
Published: May 11, 2010
http://www.thewrap.com/deal-central/article/appreciation-ferociousness-lena-horne-17218
Gene Seymour, former film critic at Newsday and an expert on jazz, also found Horne to be few clicks more complex than most of her press clippings -- 70 years’ worth -- indicated. I remembered reading something he’d written about one of Horne’s last public performances, in the early 1990s.
So yesterday, I hit Seymour up on Facebook. He wrote back right away, saying he’d first met with Lena Horne in ‘94, at a restaurant in New York. They sat for 90 minutes and had a wide-ranging conversation-slash-interview. I never met Lena Horne, but Gene Seymour did. I trust his eyes, ears, heart, and his journalism. He will have the last word in this space on Lena Horne, a great performer:
Sitting elbow-to-elbow with a 20th-century myth is intimidating enough to keep you incoherent for weeks afterwards. But five, 10 (at most) minutes into the conversation, she had so completely put me at ease that I felt I was talking not with someone who fueled the steamiest fantasies of several generation of African-American males (including mine), but with one of my brighter, sassier great-aunts.
Today's New York Times obit was about as comprehensive & as unsparing against the people high & low who done her wrong, while remaining attentive to the glories of her youth and to her principled political stances. And yet ... and yet ... there was something missing from the piece, which managed to barely evoke the magic her image could evoke; the terror & wonder of her breakthrough appearance in "Cabin in the Sky," where she & Miss Ethel Waters fought to a fare-thee-well on and off-screen; how she was able, even through the worse times, to cultivate her innate talent for dramatic presentation and siphon a galvanizing array of emotions through her singing; most especially, her brittle, yet playful wit, which I always believed was the most undervalued weapon in her musical quiver.
Overall this masterly juggling of passion & intelligence made her one-woman Broadway shows so theatrically effective and biographically illuminating.
By Amy Alexander
Published: May 11, 2010
http://www.thewrap.com/deal-central/article/appreciation-ferociousness-lena-horne-17218
Gene Seymour, former film critic at Newsday and an expert on jazz, also found Horne to be few clicks more complex than most of her press clippings -- 70 years’ worth -- indicated. I remembered reading something he’d written about one of Horne’s last public performances, in the early 1990s.
So yesterday, I hit Seymour up on Facebook. He wrote back right away, saying he’d first met with Lena Horne in ‘94, at a restaurant in New York. They sat for 90 minutes and had a wide-ranging conversation-slash-interview. I never met Lena Horne, but Gene Seymour did. I trust his eyes, ears, heart, and his journalism. He will have the last word in this space on Lena Horne, a great performer:
Sitting elbow-to-elbow with a 20th-century myth is intimidating enough to keep you incoherent for weeks afterwards. But five, 10 (at most) minutes into the conversation, she had so completely put me at ease that I felt I was talking not with someone who fueled the steamiest fantasies of several generation of African-American males (including mine), but with one of my brighter, sassier great-aunts.
Today's New York Times obit was about as comprehensive & as unsparing against the people high & low who done her wrong, while remaining attentive to the glories of her youth and to her principled political stances. And yet ... and yet ... there was something missing from the piece, which managed to barely evoke the magic her image could evoke; the terror & wonder of her breakthrough appearance in "Cabin in the Sky," where she & Miss Ethel Waters fought to a fare-thee-well on and off-screen; how she was able, even through the worse times, to cultivate her innate talent for dramatic presentation and siphon a galvanizing array of emotions through her singing; most especially, her brittle, yet playful wit, which I always believed was the most undervalued weapon in her musical quiver.
Overall this masterly juggling of passion & intelligence made her one-woman Broadway shows so theatrically effective and biographically illuminating.
Savion Channels His Inner Miles (and Trane)
“SoLE PoWER”
To read Alastair Macaulay’s June 23 New York Times review of Savion Glover’s latest extensions of the tap-dance genre, one would have thought Glover mugged him in a dark alley. See for yourself if it doesn’t read, even a little, like an old-fashioned grievance against modernity (at best): (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/23/arts/dance/23glover.html?scp=2&sq=Savion%20Glover&st=cse)
Glover, in turn, was the one who felt mugged by Macaulay’s review, having opened that night’s performance at the Joyce Theater by invoking Macaulay’s name with saturnine disdain. (Few in the audience seemed to acknowledge his barbs. Don’t people read reviews anymore? Oh, right. They don’t read newspapers either.) He did this, as with everything else in the show’s lengthy first half, with his back to the audience. If this stance was reminiscent of Miles Davis, then the fusillades of syncopated footwork resounding throughout the theater brought to mind the “sheets of sound” attack of Davis’ greatest band mate John Coltrane.
It was enough to make you wonder whether a jazz critic would have been a better choice to review “SoLE PoWER.” Macaulay’s comparisons of Glover’s long-form cadenza to woodpeckers, electric drills and dental equipment were themselves reminiscent of the peevish reactions hurled more than a century ago against modernity in the arts. Glover’s “make it new” impulse to stretch and, if possible, pierce the parameters of tap dance doesn’t seem all that unreasonable; if anything, his sense of adventure seems almost archaic in what we’re supposed to believe is a totally post-modern cultural universe.
This isn’t to say that everything worked. There were times during the first half, (especially when Glover had all the stage lights dimmed except for the starry-sky backdrop), when his efforts to answer his riffing query, “What does sound look like?,” lost their bearings and scattered the energies he was trying to coalesce. But based on this one night’s performance, I’m guessing that “SoLe PoWER” intends to be elastic enough to accommodate whatever dare Glover wishes to take. “We play what the day demands,” Miles Davis was fond of saying and Glover”s program asks (warns?) its audience to make its own adjustments to the imperatives of the moment. As with the modernist innovators of the past, Glover is acknowledging risk and accepting whatever consequences or rewards may come from defying conventions – even those that made him a star. You may not want to go with him. But that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s not onto something.
Gene Seymour
To read Alastair Macaulay’s June 23 New York Times review of Savion Glover’s latest extensions of the tap-dance genre, one would have thought Glover mugged him in a dark alley. See for yourself if it doesn’t read, even a little, like an old-fashioned grievance against modernity (at best): (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/23/arts/dance/23glover.html?scp=2&sq=Savion%20Glover&st=cse)
Glover, in turn, was the one who felt mugged by Macaulay’s review, having opened that night’s performance at the Joyce Theater by invoking Macaulay’s name with saturnine disdain. (Few in the audience seemed to acknowledge his barbs. Don’t people read reviews anymore? Oh, right. They don’t read newspapers either.) He did this, as with everything else in the show’s lengthy first half, with his back to the audience. If this stance was reminiscent of Miles Davis, then the fusillades of syncopated footwork resounding throughout the theater brought to mind the “sheets of sound” attack of Davis’ greatest band mate John Coltrane.
It was enough to make you wonder whether a jazz critic would have been a better choice to review “SoLE PoWER.” Macaulay’s comparisons of Glover’s long-form cadenza to woodpeckers, electric drills and dental equipment were themselves reminiscent of the peevish reactions hurled more than a century ago against modernity in the arts. Glover’s “make it new” impulse to stretch and, if possible, pierce the parameters of tap dance doesn’t seem all that unreasonable; if anything, his sense of adventure seems almost archaic in what we’re supposed to believe is a totally post-modern cultural universe.
This isn’t to say that everything worked. There were times during the first half, (especially when Glover had all the stage lights dimmed except for the starry-sky backdrop), when his efforts to answer his riffing query, “What does sound look like?,” lost their bearings and scattered the energies he was trying to coalesce. But based on this one night’s performance, I’m guessing that “SoLe PoWER” intends to be elastic enough to accommodate whatever dare Glover wishes to take. “We play what the day demands,” Miles Davis was fond of saying and Glover”s program asks (warns?) its audience to make its own adjustments to the imperatives of the moment. As with the modernist innovators of the past, Glover is acknowledging risk and accepting whatever consequences or rewards may come from defying conventions – even those that made him a star. You may not want to go with him. But that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s not onto something.
Gene Seymour
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
TRIBECA 2010-WEEK ONE GAME PLAN
Gene Seymour's Tribeca Film Festival Notebook
By Gene Seymour
The party line on this year’s Tribeca Film Festival has thus far been the same as it’s been every year: The documentaries own most of the buzz and carry all of the weight while the features are…well, pick any guttural sound that adequately expresses your own ambivalence. This has always seemed to me a kind of lazy-hazy shorthand on the part of movie pundits. Over the last decade, it’s struck me that not all Tribeca docs have been five-star hotels and not all of its features have been flea-ridden SROs. And even if the festival’s percentages favor what we now call “nonfiction film” over what we now call “narrative film,” you have to concede that those skewed percentages apply to American movies in general. Good, original stories either are unsubstantiated rumors or exist beyond the reach of most writers and directors at every strata of the movie marketplace – which, by the way, seems to care less than a monkey dropping for anything that isn’t pre-tested, i.e. any comic book franchise you can name.
So, as always, I wonder as I wander from venue to venue; all of which, by the way, seem to be getting further away from the eponymous neighborhood every year. You have your Tribeca game plan. I have mine. These are a few of things I’ve seen – and, mostly, liked:
The Two Escobars -- Compared with all the chatter about this year’s edition of Tribeca being the “Alex Gibney Festival” because of all the stuff he’s showing this year (“My Trip to al-Qaeda,” In-progress print of “Elliot Spitzer,” part of “Freakonomics”) and the stuff he’s shown here before (“Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” “Taxi to the Dark Side”), hardly anyone has mentioned the return of Jeff and Michael Zimbalist, whose award-winning “Favela Rising” from five years ago was one of the festival’s biggest coups. They return with yet another one of their own trips to the dark side: The sad tale of how soccer in Colombia became one of the many casualties of that country’s extravagantly violent and immensely stupid drug war.
The title refers to two legendary, unrelated figures of the country’s late-20th-century folklore: Pablo Escobar, CEO of Medelin’s most notorious drug cartel and Andres Escobar, charismatic heart-and-soul of the Colombian national soccer team. Sifting through miles of archival footage and extracting remarkable interviews with everyone from Andres’ sister and fiancée to Pablo’s incarcerated henchmen, the Zimbalist brothers orchestrate a dual portrait that connects the rise of Pablo’s fortunes with that of the sport itself. Because of Pablo’s geek-like infatuation with soccer, much of his blood money (and you’d swear you see every drop of that blood spilled throughout the movie) went into soccer. Images of dead people in the streets are juxtaposed with those of the national team in its full, lightning-strike glory – and you’re a little startled by how the latter images, almost but not quite overcome the other.
After Pablo’s untimely, inevitable death, gloom and tension permeate the once-mighty national team. Their nerves are so shot by the 1994 World Cup that they lose in the first round (to the U.S. team, no less) on a goal scored by Andres himself in his own net. Two weeks later, he was gunned down in Medelin, allegedly by vengeful drug lords who lost gambling money because of the team’s collapse.
At times, you wish the Zimbalists would have taken their feet of the gas and refrained from piling on as much detail into each development as it can bear. It mucks up their momentum, which otherwise carries the movie with an almost rock-arena fervor. That propulsive, riveting style is reason enough to check this thing out when it surfaces on ESPN sometime later this spring.
Legacy – Thomas Ikimi, a writer-director educated in Nigeria, England and Columbia University, assembled this deep, dark puzzle thriller about a former “black ops” soldier (Idris Elba), who’s holed up in a Brooklyn flophouse sorting through the shattered remains of his psyche. He was captured and tortured for the unit’s slaughter of an arms dealer’s family. It’s not entirely clear how he made it back to the world, but now that he’s there, he intends to take some revenge of his own against his older brother (Eamonn Walker), a right-wing senator who’s campaigning for president on a radical anti-terror platform.
Ikimi shows considerable talent for wooly atmosphere, serrated dialogue and calculated enigmas. Still, “Legacy” mostly comes across as a referendum for Elba’s ability to carry a movie on his own. Anyone (anyone?) who saw the just-released “The Losers” (anyone?) or has followed Elba’s career since his breakout performance in “The Wire” knows that he’s got the brooding magnetism to carry any action movie he gets. “Legacy,” though not quite big enough to raise his status, gives him plenty of room to twitch, roar, smolder and kick ass. He’s got my vote for a star vehicle. Only thing is: I’m not sure commercial American movies as they exist now are going to be able to do much better than this for Elba. And if they can’t do it for him, they’re certainly not going to do it for any other emerging black actor with his range and mobility. I hope I’m wrong – but I doubt it.
Please Give – Nicole Holofcener (“Walking and Talking,” “Lovely and Amazing,” “Friends with Money”) brings forth yet another of her droll, understated comedies-of-(ill) manners with her trademark themes of (quoting the program notes here) “mid-life crises, insecurity, materialism, accumulation of wealth and the liberal guilt and moral paralysis that accompany them.” After two movies set in L.A., she’s back among the New York hip-wah-see. Catherine Keener, who’s been a constant in all Holfcener’s movies, is Kate, an antique dealer who shares both the business and her seemingly blissful life with her husband Alex (Oliver Platt). Yet she’s nagged by the feeling that she’s not doing enough for those in need, hence her habit of handing out $20 bills to every homeless person she can find. (Biggest audience laugh at the screening: When Kate tries to give money to a scruffy-looking, gray-bearded black man standing outside a restaurant and is told, with no inflection or rancor, that he’s waiting for a table.) Meanwhile, her hormonal 15-year-old daughter (Sarah Steele) wonders why Mom can’t be as attentive to her needs (like a $200 pair of jeans).
Adding to Kate’s expanding portfolio of guilt feelings is her sense of watchful waiting over their next-door neighbor, a prickly nonagenarian (Ann Guilbert, best known as Millie Helper from the old “Dick Van Dyke Show”). Even the latter’s two granddaughters, mousey nurse Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) and bitchy spa worker Mary (Amanda Peet) acknowledge that Kate and Alex are waiting for the old lady to die so they can expand their own apartment. Still, the granddaughters’ lives carry psychic baggage of such proportions that they get tied up with Kate and Alex’s own.
Holofcener’s approach has previously seemed seem as sour and as brittle as some of her characters. But “Please Give, for all of its deadpan veneer and gimlet-eyed humor, ends up being as moving as “Lovely and Amazing” without that latter film’s traffic jam of complications. And Keener, Hall and Peet are each luminous, but in different ways than they’ve been before. I’m not seeing the commercial prospects here that are found in, say, “It’s Complicated.” But I’ll take Holofcener’s chamber music over Nancy Meyers’ brass band slapstick any day. And yes, I know that makes me a snob. I feel SO guilty about that….
My Trip to al-Qaeda – The aforementioned – and, as noted, ubiquitous – Alex Gibney directed this not-quite-filmed-theater adaptation of a staged monologue by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Lawrence Wright about his experiences covering the rise of fundamentalist Islam in the Arab world and the ongoing consequences of that upheaval both here and abroad. It’s an adroit blend of travelogue, archival material and memoir; much of it reviewing and rehashing ideas, indignities and misperceptions catalogued by many post-9-11 documentaries, including Gibney’s. Still, Wright carries his hard-won knowledge with charm, ease and, at times, dry humor. Familiar points are made, warnings are repeated and the untenable-ness of the situation we’re in is depressingly reinforced.
Of all the things mentioned by Wright, the most chilling, to me, was his description of how the people of Saudi Arabia, Syria and other Middle East states don’t care about facts; rather they carry alternate visions of reality choked with conspiracy, dogma and hype. When one contemplates what’s happening to the media universe in this country and the nasty polarities that have emerged in what used to be “civil” public discourse, you can’t help but wonder if these United States we live in are headed for the same collective mental state – and what manner of jihads and sectarian chaos could emerge as a result. Just because the movie doesn’t make such connections (at least, not blatantly) doesn’t mean you can’t infer them.
The Arbor
– My first weekend of Tribeca 2010 ended as it began: With an innovative documentary invoking harsh, rueful truths about the failure of collective and individual responsibility. Clio (pronounced “Cly-oh”) Barnard’s movie leaps in, out and around the barriers separating fiction and non-fiction movie convention in chronicling the complicated legacy of British playwright Amanda Dunbar, who became famous for her semi-autobiographical dramas about growing up in the tough Yorkshire housing project (or, as they’re called in England, “estate.”) that gave the name to both her first play and this movie. Dunbar died in 1990 at age 29 of a brain hemorrhage, leaving behind not only her successful dramas but a troubled mixed-race daughter named Lorraine, who remained in The Arbor, grappling with alcohol and drug addiction – and worse.
Barnard re-introduced Lorraine to her mother’s life and work, through news clips and performances of her work. The movie does likewise with readings of the play,”The Arbor”, staged on the project’s terrain. But Lorraine declined to be interviewed on camera, compelling Barnard to make her most audacious move of all: Using actors to lip-synch recorded interviews with Lorraine and other Dunbar family members and friends. These seemingly disparate tactics risk creating an alienation effect from all the heartbreak. Yet at the conclusion Sunday night’s premiere screening, one heard a stunned silence that was even louder than the applause that followed several seconds later. Other storytellers have breached the walls separating fact and fiction, but few have carried it out with as striking a balance of boldness and delicacy. It’s the best thing I’ve seen so far…with less than a week to go.
.
The party line on this year’s Tribeca Film Festival has thus far been the same as it’s been every year: The documentaries own most of the buzz and carry all of the weight while the features are…well, pick any guttural sound that adequately expresses your own ambivalence. This has always seemed to me a kind of lazy-hazy shorthand on the part of movie pundits. Over the last decade, it’s struck me that not all Tribeca docs have been five-star hotels and not all of its features have been flea-ridden SROs. And even if the festival’s percentages favor what we now call “nonfiction film” over what we now call “narrative film,” you have to concede that those skewed percentages apply to American movies in general. Good, original stories either are unsubstantiated rumors or exist beyond the reach of most writers and directors at every strata of the movie marketplace – which, by the way, seems to care less than a monkey dropping for anything that isn’t pre-tested, i.e. any comic book franchise you can name.
So, as always, I wonder as I wander from venue to venue; all of which, by the way, seem to be getting further away from the eponymous neighborhood every year. You have your Tribeca game plan. I have mine. These are a few of things I’ve seen – and, mostly, liked:
The Two Escobars -- Compared with all the chatter about this year’s edition of Tribeca being the “Alex Gibney Festival” because of all the stuff he’s showing this year (“My Trip to al-Qaeda,” In-progress print of “Elliot Spitzer,” part of “Freakonomics”) and the stuff he’s shown here before (“Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” “Taxi to the Dark Side”), hardly anyone has mentioned the return of Jeff and Michael Zimbalist, whose award-winning “Favela Rising” from five years ago was one of the festival’s biggest coups. They return with yet another one of their own trips to the dark side: The sad tale of how soccer in Colombia became one of the many casualties of that country’s extravagantly violent and immensely stupid drug war.
The title refers to two legendary, unrelated figures of the country’s late-20th-century folklore: Pablo Escobar, CEO of Medelin’s most notorious drug cartel and Andres Escobar, charismatic heart-and-soul of the Colombian national soccer team. Sifting through miles of archival footage and extracting remarkable interviews with everyone from Andres’ sister and fiancée to Pablo’s incarcerated henchmen, the Zimbalist brothers orchestrate a dual portrait that connects the rise of Pablo’s fortunes with that of the sport itself. Because of Pablo’s geek-like infatuation with soccer, much of his blood money (and you’d swear you see every drop of that blood spilled throughout the movie) went into soccer. Images of dead people in the streets are juxtaposed with those of the national team in its full, lightning-strike glory – and you’re a little startled by how the latter images, almost but not quite overcome the other.
After Pablo’s untimely, inevitable death, gloom and tension permeate the once-mighty national team. Their nerves are so shot by the 1994 World Cup that they lose in the first round (to the U.S. team, no less) on a goal scored by Andres himself in his own net. Two weeks later, he was gunned down in Medelin, allegedly by vengeful drug lords who lost gambling money because of the team’s collapse.
At times, you wish the Zimbalists would have taken their feet of the gas and refrained from piling on as much detail into each development as it can bear. It mucks up their momentum, which otherwise carries the movie with an almost rock-arena fervor. That propulsive, riveting style is reason enough to check this thing out when it surfaces on ESPN sometime later this spring.
Legacy – Thomas Ikimi, a writer-director educated in Nigeria, England and Columbia University, assembled this deep, dark puzzle thriller about a former “black ops” soldier (Idris Elba), who’s holed up in a Brooklyn flophouse sorting through the shattered remains of his psyche. He was captured and tortured for the unit’s slaughter of an arms dealer’s family. It’s not entirely clear how he made it back to the world, but now that he’s there, he intends to take some revenge of his own against his older brother (Eamonn Walker), a right-wing senator who’s campaigning for president on a radical anti-terror platform.
Ikimi shows considerable talent for wooly atmosphere, serrated dialogue and calculated enigmas. Still, “Legacy” mostly comes across as a referendum for Elba’s ability to carry a movie on his own. Anyone (anyone?) who saw the just-released “The Losers” (anyone?) or has followed Elba’s career since his breakout performance in “The Wire” knows that he’s got the brooding magnetism to carry any action movie he gets. “Legacy,” though not quite big enough to raise his status, gives him plenty of room to twitch, roar, smolder and kick ass. He’s got my vote for a star vehicle. Only thing is: I’m not sure commercial American movies as they exist now are going to be able to do much better than this for Elba. And if they can’t do it for him, they’re certainly not going to do it for any other emerging black actor with his range and mobility. I hope I’m wrong – but I doubt it.
Please Give – Nicole Holofcener (“Walking and Talking,” “Lovely and Amazing,” “Friends with Money”) brings forth yet another of her droll, understated comedies-of-(ill) manners with her trademark themes of (quoting the program notes here) “mid-life crises, insecurity, materialism, accumulation of wealth and the liberal guilt and moral paralysis that accompany them.” After two movies set in L.A., she’s back among the New York hip-wah-see. Catherine Keener, who’s been a constant in all Holfcener’s movies, is Kate, an antique dealer who shares both the business and her seemingly blissful life with her husband Alex (Oliver Platt). Yet she’s nagged by the feeling that she’s not doing enough for those in need, hence her habit of handing out $20 bills to every homeless person she can find. (Biggest audience laugh at the screening: When Kate tries to give money to a scruffy-looking, gray-bearded black man standing outside a restaurant and is told, with no inflection or rancor, that he’s waiting for a table.) Meanwhile, her hormonal 15-year-old daughter (Sarah Steele) wonders why Mom can’t be as attentive to her needs (like a $200 pair of jeans).
Adding to Kate’s expanding portfolio of guilt feelings is her sense of watchful waiting over their next-door neighbor, a prickly nonagenarian (Ann Guilbert, best known as Millie Helper from the old “Dick Van Dyke Show”). Even the latter’s two granddaughters, mousey nurse Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) and bitchy spa worker Mary (Amanda Peet) acknowledge that Kate and Alex are waiting for the old lady to die so they can expand their own apartment. Still, the granddaughters’ lives carry psychic baggage of such proportions that they get tied up with Kate and Alex’s own.
Holofcener’s approach has previously seemed seem as sour and as brittle as some of her characters. But “Please Give, for all of its deadpan veneer and gimlet-eyed humor, ends up being as moving as “Lovely and Amazing” without that latter film’s traffic jam of complications. And Keener, Hall and Peet are each luminous, but in different ways than they’ve been before. I’m not seeing the commercial prospects here that are found in, say, “It’s Complicated.” But I’ll take Holofcener’s chamber music over Nancy Meyers’ brass band slapstick any day. And yes, I know that makes me a snob. I feel SO guilty about that….
My Trip to al-Qaeda – The aforementioned – and, as noted, ubiquitous – Alex Gibney directed this not-quite-filmed-theater adaptation of a staged monologue by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Lawrence Wright about his experiences covering the rise of fundamentalist Islam in the Arab world and the ongoing consequences of that upheaval both here and abroad. It’s an adroit blend of travelogue, archival material and memoir; much of it reviewing and rehashing ideas, indignities and misperceptions catalogued by many post-9-11 documentaries, including Gibney’s. Still, Wright carries his hard-won knowledge with charm, ease and, at times, dry humor. Familiar points are made, warnings are repeated and the untenable-ness of the situation we’re in is depressingly reinforced.
Of all the things mentioned by Wright, the most chilling, to me, was his description of how the people of Saudi Arabia, Syria and other Middle East states don’t care about facts; rather they carry alternate visions of reality choked with conspiracy, dogma and hype. When one contemplates what’s happening to the media universe in this country and the nasty polarities that have emerged in what used to be “civil” public discourse, you can’t help but wonder if these United States we live in are headed for the same collective mental state – and what manner of jihads and sectarian chaos could emerge as a result. Just because the movie doesn’t make such connections (at least, not blatantly) doesn’t mean you can’t infer them.
The Arbor
– My first weekend of Tribeca 2010 ended as it began: With an innovative documentary invoking harsh, rueful truths about the failure of collective and individual responsibility. Clio (pronounced “Cly-oh”) Barnard’s movie leaps in, out and around the barriers separating fiction and non-fiction movie convention in chronicling the complicated legacy of British playwright Amanda Dunbar, who became famous for her semi-autobiographical dramas about growing up in the tough Yorkshire housing project (or, as they’re called in England, “estate.”) that gave the name to both her first play and this movie. Dunbar died in 1990 at age 29 of a brain hemorrhage, leaving behind not only her successful dramas but a troubled mixed-race daughter named Lorraine, who remained in The Arbor, grappling with alcohol and drug addiction – and worse.
Barnard re-introduced Lorraine to her mother’s life and work, through news clips and performances of her work. The movie does likewise with readings of the play,”The Arbor”, staged on the project’s terrain. But Lorraine declined to be interviewed on camera, compelling Barnard to make her most audacious move of all: Using actors to lip-synch recorded interviews with Lorraine and other Dunbar family members and friends. These seemingly disparate tactics risk creating an alienation effect from all the heartbreak. Yet at the conclusion Sunday night’s premiere screening, one heard a stunned silence that was even louder than the applause that followed several seconds later. Other storytellers have breached the walls separating fact and fiction, but few have carried it out with as striking a balance of boldness and delicacy. It’s the best thing I’ve seen so far…with less than a week to go.
.
Monday, April 19, 2010
REMIX: CULTURE _chafin seymour joins DanceDowntown2010
Don't miss it! Video Preview - select
when Friday & SaturdayMay 7-8, 2010, 8pm
where Riffe Center’s Capitol Theater
77 South High Street, Downtown Columbus
$20 general admission$10 seniors, students w/ID, BuckID, (614) 469-0939. OSU Theatre Box Office in Drake Union. (614) 292-2295.
Ticketmaster: (614) 431-3600 or ticketmaster.com
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