"Boogie Woogie" String Along For Real

It's always fun when you run across a review or mention of a film you've never previously heard of and it sounds so intriguing you end up watching it. Sometimes that approach can put you in for an endurance test, but other times you discover something really entertaining.  I stumbled onto the film Boogie Woogie just browsing through Netflix one day. The cast (Christopher Lee, Heather Graham and a host of others) and premise sounded interesting so I put it in my queue and I finally watched it yesterday. It turned out to be a fun black comedy that slipped through the cracks big time.

It's set in the London art world with a cast of characters who are almost uniformly despicable, art dealers, art collectors and artists who are constantly trying to screw each other both figuratively and literally.  The main thrust of the plot is supposedly an original Piet Mondrian painting, one of his geometric "Boogie Woogie" series, hence the film's title,  owned by an aging collector, played by Lee, who refuses to sell no matter how much his wife, played by Joanna Lumley, and an oily art dealer, played by Danny Huston, beg him to.  That's really just part of the snaky goings-on which also include, Huston's top assistant, played by Graham sleeping with a rich collector (Stellan Skarsgard) to get him to finance her own gallery, the collector's wife (Gillian Anderson) sleeping with an ambitious artist (Jack Huston, Danny's nephew) just because, and a lesbian artist (Jamie Winstone) keeping a video diary of her entire life including her betrayal of her agent and her numerous infidelities against her girlfriend.

90 minutes in the company of this crew could be hard to take but this movie is as light and subversively funny as an updated Evelyn Waugh novel.  The characters play out varying degrees of greed, ambition and callousness so that it's not just shrill, one level humor.  Most of the acting is fine expect for Gillian Anderson who does not do a convincing upper class London accent and whose role could have better been played by the great Joanna Lumley who is wasted in a small part. On the other hand, Huston as the slimy, insincere dealer and Skarsgard as the bluff, happily lecherous collector are great and Alan Cumming and Amanda Seyfried are good as the two innocents among all these sharks. Heather Graham is nicely calculating in her role as well plus she has a topless scene, which is never a bad thing. 

I don't know what if any American release this film had, probably just a week or two in some New York theater if that, but this is a prime example of the kind of solid, smart movie you can still uncover if you keep your eyes open.

"Girl Friend of the Whirling Dervish"

I didn't know it at the time but my appreciation for Jazz and musical arranging started when I was a little kid from watching television.  Back then the soundtracks for many shows were Jazz based and that included the old cartoons from the 30's and 40's I saw, particularly the Warner Brothers ones.  From the beginning the soundtracks of the old Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes cartoons used songs owned by Warners music publishing company, including many that were used in their musicals.  As a result I knew tunes like "42nd Street",  "Deep In A Dream",  "Lullaby Of Broadway" and "Jeepers Creepers" long before I ever heard them in features.

One of my favorite songs from those cartoons was "Girl Friend Of The Whirling Dervish" which was written by Harry Warren, Al Dubin, and Johnny Mercer original for the 1938 musical Garden Of The Moon. That film happened to be the last musical Busby Berkeley made at Warner Brothers and you could guess he was near the end of his run by watching the production number for this song.  It's set bound, taking place entirely on a bandstand, in a way few Berkeley numbers ever were. Still I've always liked this scene for the way he uses camera movement and staging even when confined to a small space. The song itself is a lot of fun as well.

I was very surprised to find the entire number posted on YouTube.  I couldn't embed it here but I have put a link to it below.  The bandleader-singer here is John Payne, who like Alan Ladd and Fred MacMurray, started out as a big band singer before moving on to tough guy roles in the movies and Jerry Colonna is the "girl friend".

http://youtu.be/ZW19AGlRShc


NOTE: Jeffrey Spivaki, the author of a biography, sent me an email correcting me about "Garden" being Berkeley's last Warners film.  It was his last Warners musical. He made the John Garfield drama, They Made Me A Criminal after that, then left and made a couple more films for the studio some time later. I've corrected my original post.

To Jazz Or Not To To Jazz

One of the things that slightly bothers me about the internet is that on some message boards, you find people who take their love of a certain area so seriously that they get very upset when they feel that something else is taking time or attention away from their precious object of affection (and I'm not even talking about Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin fans).

Fro example I was reading the Turner Classic Movies message board today and saw that someone had started a topic "What movies was Dave Brubeck in??".   It so happens that TCM showed a group of jazz documentaries and features last night produced or directed by Clint Eastwood, including documentaries on Dave Brubeck and Thelonious Monk, and Eastwood's Charlie Parker biopic, Bird. 

I missed the Brubeck film last night but I'd seen the Monk one, Straight No Chaser, several years ago in a theatre and it's excellent.  Still these message board folks were all spun up that TCM took a few hours away from what they consider "classic movies"  and made some unholy alliance with Clint Eastwood to show pictures about a couple of weirdo jazz musicians.

I've only been able to get Turner Classic sporadically over the last few years due to all the moving I've done but when I do have it like now, I'm amazed by the variety of their programming.  Yes, there are a few movies like Lawrence Of Arabia and Gigi that somehow manage to get on at least once every month but they also have a big enough range to include silents, foreign films, Tarzan movies and old serials. Any movie channel that has the nerve to program Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles and feature singing cowboy movies for a month, as TCM will do in July, is okay with me.  The last time I checked documentaries could be considered classic films and it would be fine by me if TCM threw in more jazz films once in a while like Sun Ra's Space Is The Place or Shirley Clarke's film about Ornette Coleman, Ornette: Made In America but I know there's fat chance of that happening so I'll take what I can get.

And incidentally the gentleman on that message board might be surprised to know that Dave Brubeck has been in a regular movie,  All Night Long,  a British film that updated the Othello story to the 60's London jazz scene. He was part of a sort of Greek chorus of musicians that also included Charles Mingus, Tubby Hayes and John Dankworth who played throughout the film. See below...

Taking the Quiz, SLIFR Style

Okay, so it was just a couple of days ago that I was bemoaning my lack of posting but here I am doing a long-ass one.  I ran across the Summer Quiz on the blog Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule which is actually a survey of your moviegoing likes and dislikes, not a right and wrong answer quiz.  I wasn't going to do anything with it at first, feeling too spotty in my movie knowledge to give an opinion on most of the questions.  Then I read what some other bloggers had written and I saw that others had no problem skipping questions they had no answers for,  so I decided to stop worrying about the fact that I couldn't tell one Eugene Pallette performance from another and try the thing out.  Here are my answers:

1) Depending on your mood, your favorite or least-loved movie cliché

The policeman or soldier who talks fondly about getting out/retiring in a few days and then is killed by the main villain five minutes later.

2) Regardless of whether or not you eventually caught up with it, which film classic have you lied about seeing in the past?

Jaws, and I still haven't seen it.

3) Roland Young or Edward Everett Horton?

I saw and enjoyedThe Man Who Could Work Miracles recently so I'll say Roland Young.










4) Second favorite Frank Tashlin movie

His cartoons don't seem to be getting much love from people, so I'll say Swooner Crooner, his "Crosby vs. Sinatra in the barnyard" throwdown. The Girl Can't Help It would be Number One.

5) Clockwork Orange-- yes or no?

Since I haven't seen it in a long time, a provisional "yes".

6) Best/favorite use of gender dysphoria in a horror film (Ariel Schudson)

The old standby - Norman Bates and his mother

7) Melanie Laurent or Blake Lively?

I haven't seen either one in anything but I guess Laurent because she was in Inglorious Bastards  and Quentin Tarantino has a knack for hiring good actors.

8) Best movie of 2011 (so far…)

The Illusionist

9) Favorite screen performer with a noticeable facial deformity (Peg Aloi)

The unfortunate "Creeper", Rondo Hatton

10) Lars von Trier: shithead or misunderstood comic savant? (Dean Treadway)

More like socially awkward dweeb.  I'll cut the man a lot of slack for blowing my mind with Breaking The Waves and Dogville.


11) Timothy Carey or Henry Silva?

Silva could act. Carey just seemed to yell.

12) Low-profile writer who deserves more attention from critics and /or audiences

If you mean a writer about movies, Video Watchdog's Tim Lucas. If you're talking about screenwriters, I can't think of one.


13) Movie most recently viewed theatrically, and on DVD, Blu-ray or streaming
Theatrically: Everything Must Go.   On DVD:  Wild Grass

14) Favorite film noir villain

Everett Sloane's Arthur Bannister in The Lady From Shanghai












15) Best thing about streaming movies?
They are right there with no freezing or skipping.


16) Fay Spain or France Nuyen? (Peter Nellhaus)

France Nuyen just because she was married to Robert Culp.

17) Favorite Kirk Douglas movie that isn’t called Spartacus (Peter Nellhaus)

Ace In The Hole

18) Favorite movie about cars

Two Lane Blacktop

19) Audrey Totter or Marie Windsor?

Windsor for being in The Killing and Roger Corman's Swamp Women

20) Existing Stephen King movie adaptation that could use an remake/reboot/overhaul

Aren't they all getting remade eventually?

21) Low-profile director who deserves more attention from critics and/or audiences

Can't think of one.

22) What actor that you previously enjoyed has become distracting or a self-parody? (Adam Ross)

Samuel L. Jackson (easy choice, huh?)

23) Best place in the world to see a movie

No idea.

24) Charles McGraw or Sterling Hayden?

For The Asphalt Jungle and Dr. Strangelove, Hayden

25) Second favorite Yasujiro Ozu film

I Was Born, But..., the silent film about two boys who grow disappointed in their father for kowtowing to his boss.

26) Most memorable horror movie father figure

Terry O'Quinn in The Stepfather


27) Name a non-action-oriented movie that would be fun to see in Sensurround

Can't think of one

28) Chris Evans or Ryan Reynolds?

Ryan Reynolds because he looks a lot more like Hal (Green Lantern) Jordan than Chris Evans does Steve (Captain America) Rogers.


29) Favorite relatively unknown supporting player, from either or both the classic and the modern era

Would Hans Conreid qualify here? 

30) Real-life movie location you most recently visited or saw

The Capitol.  I live in the Washington DC area so I'm surrounded by movie locations.

31) Second favorite Budd Boetticher movie

Ride Lonesome, second only to The Tall T

32) Mara Corday or Julie Adams?

Julie Adams and her white bathing suit in Creature From The Black Lagoon? We have a winner.


33) Favorite Universal-International western

Winchester '73

34) What's the biggest "gimmick" that's drawn you out to see a movie? (Sal Gomez)

Can't think of one.

35) Favorite actress of the silent era

Louise Brooks even if it is really just because of a couple of films.


36) Best Eugene Pallette performance (Larry Aydlette)

Have to pass here.

37) Best/worst remake of the 21st century so far? (Dan Aloi)

I've avoided as many of these mistakes as possible but the worst I've seen has been The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

38) What could multiplex owners do right now to improve the theatrical viewing experience for moviegoers? What could moviegoers do?  Multiplex owners could ban cellphones, pagers and talking during the movie but good luck getting that to happen.

Malaise

Well I was going pretty good for a while, putting an entry onto this blog at least every one or two weeks but since mid-April I've been afflicted with the condition depicted above. The words just haven't come.  It didn't help that for a while every DVD I put into my player was either skipping, freezing or not playing at all.  Finally it dawned on me that my player was ten years old. So I went out and bought a new one and solved that problem.  I've gotten back to seeing movies more regularly the last couple of weeks. I've been returning to my various box sets of Charlie Chase, cartoons, and Thriller and I've seen a couple of feature films that really impressed me, A Marine Story and, just today, The High And The Mighty, but nothing has inspired me to write yet.

Then too I'm probably a little down because I just received my final package of review CDs from Cadence and I know that once I write these up, that will be my last work for the magazine.  They're ending things in style though. They sent me 32 CDs in just about every Jazz-related genre imaginable:  free improv, piano, blues, large ensemble, vocal and God knows what else.  There are a few names I know in the pile like Archie Shepp and Marc Charig but most are by people I never heard of before, which I love.  Discovering new musicians has always been one of the most fun parts of reviewing for me. 

Hopefully I'll pull out of this mental tailspin soon. Something I see or hear will start the creative synapses firing and I'll be back here writing about it. When that will be though, I can't say for sure.

Rage (2009)

Maybe I don't look at enough movie review websites and blogs but despite all the people out there commenting on this or that film, some movies still seem to slip through the cracks, work singular enough to make you ask "Hey, how come nobody else has noticed this movie yet?".

That applies to a title I just discovered, Rage, a 2009 film by British filmmaker Sally Potter.  Potter is not that prolific at making features and her most well-known film, Orlando, came out back in 1992 so that may account for some of the neglect. Also the film actually seems to have premiered on digital platforms, like cellphones, and as far as I can tell, has had limited theatrical distribution.  Still it did make it out onto DVD where I saw it and found it very striking.

The setup for the film is a student interviewing various people at a fashion show over the course of a week for a school project. These people include all the types you would think of, models, the dress designer, a photographer, publicists, the owner of the fashion house, his bodyguard, a newspaper critic and others but their behavior changes drastically when a model dies onstage in the middle of the show.

This movie is put together as minimally as possible. It's just each character answering questions individually in front of a blue screen. None of the actors interact with one another and we only know what else is going on from offscreen noises and their descriptions.  By design then, what you get is a compelling set of performances by various actors that are intercut to tell a somewhat ambiguous but engrossing story. The photographer, played by Steve Buscemi, is a veteran war correspondent who boasts about keeping his cool in the face of death. The original owner of the fashion house, played by Dianne Wiest, comes off initially passive but eventually angry at the way her place is now run.  One model, played by Lily Cole, is a frightened babyfaced British girl. The other, played by Jude Law in drag (!), does the cool supermodel thing but starts to slip her reserve when things go bad. The owner, played by Eddie Izzard, is an oily, "I can buy anything" type and so on. Most of the acting, by a cast that also includes Judi Dench, Bob Balaban and John Leguizamo, is very good and gets beyond the obvious stereotypes.  Only a slick-dressing black police  detective, played by David Oyelowo, really flirts with caricature.

The film is not just a swipe at the fashion industry but a more incisive look at how people cope with crisis, whether it's fear, "what's in it for me" calculation, or denial.  Stripping away everything but the acting really drives this home. There are ambiguities and unanswered questions in the plot but this is one of those films where that really isn't important. Rage is an unusual experiment in film making that stays with you as a deep look into human behaviour.

Hello Martial, Goodbye Billy

The thing I love about the piano as a jazz instrument is that a dozen different players, be they Herbie Hancock, Marilyn Crispell, Fred Hersch, Kenny Barron, Alex Von Schlippenbach, Misha Mengelberg, McCoy Tyner, Jessica Williams or anyone else, can sit down at the same piano and play the same song and no two versions will sound the same. And not a single one of them will sound anything like Martial Solal.

Solal is a French pianist now in his 80's whom I had the privilege of seeing play solo at the Library of Congress last night. He is known internationally as both a player and a composer who has done several movie soundtracks including an insignificant little Jean-Luc Godard picture known as Breathless.  Judging by his piano skills he was well matched by the frisky jump cutting of that film.

When he plays Solal, as he said last night, makes old songs sound new. He twists and deconstructs standards with sudden tempo shifts, repeating phrases and ornate Art Tatum-like filigrees to the point where they are barely recognizable. Everything he played at the concert was a familiar tune but he was halfway through "Here's That Rainy Day" before I recognized part of the melody and I was almost home on the subway before I realized that the last piece he played was "Have You Met Miss Jones".

   Solals' fingers move all over the keyboard with a speed and accuracy a man half his age would envy,  shooting out notes like Chico Marx, breaking melodies into crazily connected fragments like Bugs Bunny beating up Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody in the cartoon Rhapsody Rabbit and tossing out stream of consciousness quotes of everything from "Salt Peanuts" to "Peter And The Wolf". For all of his antics though his playing is not all sugary frosting.  There is substance to it, an ongoing sense of keeping the melody in play and a use of darker chords and dissonances that connects to Thelonious Monk and Ran Blake.  His treatments of "Corcovado" and "All The Things You Are" were downright subdued compared to the other pieces and showed that he can get some feeling out of a song when he has a mind to.

     I had previously heard little of Solal's music but now I'm thoroughly impressed.  Fortunately he has a surprisingly large amount of CDs available on Amazon to check out ranging in settings from solos to trios, both with French musicians and an American dream team of Gary Peacock and Paul Motian, to a larger group playing Ellington arrangements. Here is a taste of what I heard at the Library, Solal (in I think the same suit he wore last night) playing "My Funny Valentine" live in Paris.



On a sadder musical topic, the great violinist Billy Bang passed away April 11 after a long battle with cancer. I heard last summer that he was sick but this is still a blow. Bang was the hardest playing and wildest of modern jazz violinists with a sense of swing and feel for the blues that was unmatched. I was lucky enough to see him twice live, once in New York at the Vision Festival and once down here in Takoma Park, MD. Each time his playing floored me. In recent years Bang was best known for the two CDs he'd recorded commemorating his years fighting in Vietnam. At the Takoma Park show I overheard him say that he was preparing to complete that cycle by going back to Vietnam and recording with local musicians. I hope that project came off. Here he is in Poland bowing and plucking with another master, William Parker.

Rockin' In The Rockies with Moe, Larry and Curly

In flipping through TV channels last night I ran across a movie on Encore Westerns called Rockin' In The Rockies. From the description it seemed to be just a 40's B-Western, something I usually pay little attention to, but the cast list caught my eye. The stars were no less than The Three Stooges (!).
This was a completely new find to me. I knew about the features the boys made in the early 30's like Soup To Nuts, Meet The Baron and Dancing Lady and the B-western they did with George O'Brien in 1951, Gold Raiders, but I'd never heard of this movie before. Naturally I sat down and watched it.

It turned out to be a Western set musical comedy and the Stooges are easily the best things in it.  There isn't much plot. It starts out with Moe conning Larry and Curly and a couple of stranded showgirls into helping him prospect for gold.  That storyline peters out halfway through and is replaced by one of everybody plus some singing cowboys, played by the Hoosier Hotshots, auditioning for a Broadway producer who's come out Wesr for a vacation.

None of the other lead players in this thing make an impression. The male romantic lead, Jay Kirby, is "meh", the songs done by the lead women are forgettable and the Hotshots aren't all that at either music or comedy. However it was nice to see Vernon Dent, one of the Stooges' long time foils, in a supporting role even though he had no scenes with the boys.  There's also a good Western Swing number from Spade Cooley's band with Tex Williams on vocals.

All the other cast members take time away from our beloved knuckleheads (seen on the left of this picture, barely) but they do show up in about half the picture, often repeating familiar routines from their shorts.  Curly doesn't seem as manic as at his best, possibly because this was made during the period where he began to have health problems, but he's still pretty sharp. There are unique features here in that Moe being cast as a ranchhand and Larry and Curly as itinerant show people, the three of them don't always work together. Larry and Curly do a lot of scenes as a duo with Larry taking over Moe's bossy leader role. Also this is the only Stooges movie I've ever seen where Moe spends the entire film with his hair combed back instead of in his familiar bowl haircut.  This isn't some great lost find of Stooge greatness, but just about anything featuring their craziness is worth a watch.