Movie Review: The Velvet Underground (2021)

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Dig the scene. In the middle of the 1960s, a former New York Polish wedding and social hall nicknamed The Dom could for weeks at a time be the musical residency of The Velvet Underground as they played night after night with the experimental films of Andy Warhol and company projected larger-than-life on the wall behind them. Colorful, spinning psychedelic lights that bounced off surfaces in all directions were usually operated by the first person who volunteered when Warhol asked if anyone knew how to work the equipment. Occasionally this led to mishaps where bulbs broke and spotlights fell from the balcony when they were operated by someone with more confidence and amphetamines than any real technical know-how. 

Ignoring this, on the ballroom floor below, patrons danced – not just people, but a wide cross-section of East Coasters. Filling The Dom, you could find bikers, drag queens, juvenile delinquents, Harvard professors, art collectors, poets, leftover Beats who hadn't gone west to San Francisco, the kind of arty junkies who flooded in and out of The Factory throughout the decade, future “Chelsea Girls,” as well as Warhol's influential friends like Jackie Kennedy and Walter Cronkite. On a given evening, they'd be there side-by-side, milling and dancing next to some broken lights, next to someone with broken dreams, listening to some intentionally broken chords as they struggled not to break amid the overwhelm of polka dots, spirals, mazes, and avant-garde imagery going on around them.

It was a scene of too much too-muchness. But strip away the visual spectacle and "anti-elite elite" hobnobbing, just focus on the sound, and the same can be said for the music of the Underground. A sort of dissonant bubble-gum rockabilly filled with viola strings that sounded like saws, drums straight out of Bo Diddley,  the droning, deliberate delivery of guest vocalist Nico, a searing guitar, and stream-of-consciousness lyrics about drugs, sex, and the New York streets outside, the sound alone was brutal, beautiful, bold, brilliant, and played on all the senses at once. 

With so much to take in, is it any wonder it didn't last? Is it any wonder it was chaos? And is it any wonder that it still sounds so fresh – so much like the act of creativity in process – that it still inspires us fifty-five years later?

Seeking to not only encapsulate and explore the roots and history of both the band and the scene from the people who lived to tell the tale but also do so in a way that brings a night at The Dom or The Factory to viewers watching it today, with “The Velvet Underground,” director Todd Haynes has released his first full-length musical documentary. And fittingly, especially from a man who once told the Karen Carpenter story with Barbie dolls and made the nonlinear, arty film “I'm Not There” about Bob Dylan, it's much more avant-garde than it is VH1 Behind the Music.

It opens with dueling yet complementary narratives of The Velvet Underground's own version of Wilson and Love, Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, and Page and Plant. In Haynes' film, portraits of the band's eventual founders Lou Reed and John Cale as emotionally and creatively frustrated young artists emerge, which foreshadow both their future promise as well as the way that their two titanic personalities will only temporarily harmonize in mutual dissonance before they can hold that note no longer.

Paying the most attention to those two figures, with the scales tipping more in favor of the man who was with the band the longest in Reed, the documentary chronicles the way they came with ample baggage from vastly different backgrounds before impossibly finding one another in New York. Reed, then working as a fast songwriter and musician for hire, first collaborated with the Welsh-born multi-instrumentalist on an insanely catchy forgotten dance single called “The Ostrich,” but rather than a one-off thing, their passion for improvisational composition bonded the two right from the start.

While Reed, who sought inspiration in poets like Ginsberg and Rimbaud, longed to translate his raw, gritty, profane poetry into rock hits in a way similar to The Rolling Stones, Cale loved experimenting with new modes of expression using tones, drones, and dissonance, and spent his time studying with the avant-garde musicians of the day. Bonded by their otherness, their loathing of the mainstream, and determination to go against the status quo, once they got together with guitarist Sterling Morrison, and drummer Maureen “Mo” Tucker (replacing Angus MacLise), they sought to bring high art to the gutter, and still make it something people wanted to hear, whether they could dance to it or not.

From the in-name-only Warhol produced “Banana Album” with Nico to Reed eventually firing Warhol (without the band's input) so they could go on to push the limits even further with “White Light/White Heat” and more, this lineup was as revelatory as it was combustible.

Ego, attitudes, communication breakdown, and infighting – all accelerated by drugs, insecurity, posturing, jealousy, uncertainty, and the era – in the film, we're given an engrossing “he said," "she heard," "I think," "you recall,” overview of the band. And along the way, Haynes worries less about fact-checking, follow-ups, or sourcing certain claims than he does in making his “Velvet Underground” vibrate on a darkly intoxicating, dissonant frequency that we might've expected to come from Cale's viola or Morrison's guitar.

Like something straight out of The Dom, it's filled with art, imagery, and colorful flashing lights to the point that it should come with a warning for those with epilepsy or migraine light sensitivity. While admittedly, there are times I longed for more details about certain songs (“Heroin” gets the lion's share of the screen-time) as well as the post-Nico and Cale albums or more analysis of the personnel changes, it's all told with so much affection, color, and vigor that it immediately draws you in with its too much too-muchness. An exhaustively covered period in music and pop culture journalism, Haynes' version of the events adds more humanity, humor, and warmth to the proceedings than one might expect when contrasted by the coolly detached handling of the Velvets in past docs.

Feeling like we're with the band rather than just dryly reverential of Warhol, Cale, or Reed, there are no villains in “The Velvet Underground.” To this end, I applaud the decision here to invite Reed's sister to weigh in about the often biased chronicling of the shock treatment era in her brother's adolescence. Similarly, the film gives Nico more respect as a poet and professional than she normally receives, and treats Warhol as more of a friend, facilitator, and minor figure rather than the driving force behind the band, in a way that feels right and overdue. Also welcome is the way Haynes refuses to gloss over the drugs or the misogyny of The Factory that treated women as currency where their value came only in their physical appearance. Even if the latter gets a brief mention, it's reassuring that he's unwilling to simply romanticize all things Warhol as other filmmakers have done in the past and instead allow some of the degradation and darkness – incidentally the two things Reed liked in sex – to rightfully permeate this chronicling of events.

A labor of love by a filmmaker who's so enamored of the band and era that one of his earliest big studio movies for Miramax was the unfairly maligned glam rock opus “Velvet Goldmine,” “The Velvet Underground” is a documentary that, in tribute to its subject, is as artful as a film as it is experimental. Neither as dryly objective as a more academically minded PBS doc nor as full of insider-only information that those unfamiliar with the band won't still be able to appreciate, it's a seductive mix of both approaches plus something wholly its own. And to Haynes' great credit, “The Velvet Underground” plays halfway between a night of excess and broken glass at The Dom and the after-party where you leave the lights and the dance floor behind you to just hang – somewhere in NY, somewhere underground, somewhere dangerous – with the band.

 

Text ©2021, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Movie Review: Billie (2019)

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The way that one interviewee in writer-director James Erskine's new documentary “Billie” tells it, when Ella Fitzgerald sings “My Man's Gone Now,” you think he's on a trip and is due back shortly, but when Billie Holiday does it, you know that man has packed his bags, he's already down the street, and he is never coming back.

Using her voice like a brass instrument to – with Holiday's singular, unorthodox lyrical phrasing, tell vivid, visceral, lived-in stories that cast a spell on her listeners – her friend and fellow jazz vocalist Sylvia Syms sums it up best. “Billie Holiday sang only truth, she knew nothing else.”

As both a word and an idea, “truth” is the quality that comes up most frequently in the film when people describe not just Holiday's voice but her life. And it's only fitting since just one spin of one Billie Holiday record leaves you with the impression that they are inexorably linked. Feeling the same way, in the late 1960s, feminist high school teacher turned freelance journalist Linda Lipnack Kuehl embarked on a quest to write the definitive biography on her favorite singer. From Holiday's cousin John Fagan, who recalled her feisty early years to the jazz greats who became her friends, colleagues, and lovers before her untimely death at the age of forty-four in 1959, Kuehl recorded hundreds of hours of interviews with the people who knew the singer born Eleanora Fagan the best. 

In Erskine's documentary, these frequently jaw-dropping, often cited, but previously unheard original audio tapes bring Kuehl and her vital first-person sources back to life. They also give us the briefest of glimpses into what her biography of the artist might have looked like if she'd gotten the chance to finish it. Sadly, much like Holiday, whose career trajectory fascinated her just as much as her self-destructive streak, Kuehl's life was also cut short. Nearly a decade after she began working on the book, the young journalist was found dead on a Washington D.C. street in a mysterious event that her family believes was perhaps linked to this quest.

Wanting to accurately represent Billie Holiday as she was and not just pay tribute to her as a legend, while on the surface, a white, Jewish teacher from New York who wrote about women's issues for publications like “The Paris Review” seems like she would have little in common with Holiday, Kuehl's sister dispels this belief early on in the film. Telling viewers that Linda identified with the singer's pain and didn't like the way she'd been portrayed as a victim, Kuehl herself backs up this thesis later on in her manuscript, saying that although the sexually voracious Holiday was often in relationships with abusive men, in the end, it was she who chose these partners for one reason or another.

Keeping an objective approach, even when she interviews a pimp that Holiday tricked for when she was a young girl, much like Kuehl, Erskine's film and Holiday's friends paint a portrait of a woman who loved to live fast for all of its ups and downs. It seems perhaps that Holiday knew her time on Earth was short. Exploring all facets of her personality from her two favorite expletives to her bisexuality, even when friends tell horrific stories about the men who graduated her from pot to hard drugs or beat her senseless (and some openly question whether or not she was, in fact, a masochist), Erskine strives to follow in Kuehl's nonjudgmental footsteps. 

Despite this, of course, some of these testimonies are absolutely devastating. Chronicling the way that Holiday and other Black artists were subjected to the shocking racism of America during the Jim Crow laws, interviewees describe Holiday's experiences ranging from club owners making her “darken” up her face to an actual brawl that broke out with a racist, white sheriff in the south. Using the truth of her voice and her ability to tell a story in song, Holiday's response to these injustices was with the powerful anthem “Strange Fruit,” which sadly remains just as timely and moving as ever, more than eighty years after it was recorded.

An eye-opening and engrossing overview of Holiday's life that will hopefully make you seek out, as I did, more information about the events and figures referenced in the film, while it's largely very successful from a narrative standpoint, occasionally, "Billie" struggles with its chronological presentation of facts. Hopscotching around to add new details about pivotal moments in Holiday's life that we wish we would've known earlier, this rings a particularly false note when, late into the movie, we jump awkwardly from one interviewee's analysis of her abusive relationships to the sudden revelation that she might've been raped as a child. While reflective of the way that Kuehl would've heard these confessions at various times throughout her decade-long research, I question the decision to save something so major for near the end of "Billie," particularly when it would've added a crucial counterpoint to the predominantly male recollections of her youth turning tricks, including an ex-pimp's testimony that his girls loved getting a black eye. 

Still, knowing that Billie Holiday was Kuehl's raison d'être, particularly in her final years, Erskine’s film pays fine tribute to her beloved subject and Kuehl's journalistic legacy overall. Working in a few facts about Holiday's biographer here and there, Erskine is smart to keep Kuehl's private life off the table until very late into the documentary, when we hear that she had been divorced twice, was perhaps romantically linked to one legendary interviewee, and had started to receive threats regarding that relationship and her book.

Although we would like to know more about her life and work, in her relative anonymity, Erskine taps into the link that not only Kuehl and Holiday share but many women and men do with the singer as well. Instead of openly philosophizing, he lets Kuehl's interviewees try to articulate it aloud when they discuss what they respond to most in Holiday's life and music. And while obviously, their words add vivid color to the black and white photographs utilized throughout, the most unforgettable hue of all comes not from them but Billie Holiday herself. We hear it in the heartbreaking lyrics she sings, the words she means, and the way she uses her instrument inimitably, unreservedly, and unmistakably to tell the truth, even when it hurts. 

Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Film Movement Movie Review: White Riot (2019)

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Once upon a time, Eric Clapton lost his mind. Stopping a show in Birmingham to ask any "foreigners" in the audience to raise their hands, he told them he wanted them gone, not just from the concert but his country altogether. "I don't want you here," he shouted. "I think we should send them all back...We need to make clear to them they are not welcome. England is for white people, man … This is Great Britain, a white country!"

The year was 1976. As shocking as these words were back then and remain to this day, when it came to views like these, Eric Clapton was far from alone. Joined in supporting the new rise of fascism in the UK, David Bowie argued that Britain was ready for a fascist leader and called Adolf Hitler the first rock star in an interview with "Playboy." Following Clapton's lead, Rod Stewart went even further, giving a full-throated endorsement for racist National Front political party member Enoch Powell, saying that he too thought it was time for foreigners to leave. But this position wasn't just coming from those in rock. With punk taking over the music scene in Britain, The Sex Pistols, Adam Ant, and Siouxsie and the Banshees were just three punk groups who openly embraced Nazi symbolism and swastikas in their costumes and performances.

What the hell was going on, you might ask? The short answer is that in the mid to late '70s, England was rampant with anger and hate. Inundated with job loss and scapegoating the problems of the country on immigrant "invaders" with "black, brown, and yellow faces," as the National Front ranted in their rallies, Britain's tide was turning in a horrific direction. Watching this happen in real-time, rock photographer Red Saunders vowed to do whatever he could to stop the impending flood of xenophobia before it was too late.

Writing an open letter to Clapton, whose music, he rightfully charged, was cribbed directly from Black blues artists, Saunders sounded the alarm and offered a solution. "We want to organise a rank-and-file movement against the racist poison in rock music," he wrote. Leaving his contact information in the letter for interested parties, after his missive was printed in music publications across the UK, Saunders was overwhelmed by the response.

Joining forces with gifted graphic designers, writers, photographers, musicians, and artists, they formed the group Rock Against Racism to reach the youths of England in an attempt to educate the younger generation against propagandist hate. Hosting events where they purposely had Black and white bands playing back-to-back, the organization put on more than two hundred shows in its first year and created a fanzine called "Temporary Hoarding," which addressed the real-world problems of racist policing, the Catholic side of the North Ireland conflict, sexual violence, immigration, LGBT issues, and other topics which were ignored by the mainstream press.

Chronicling the legacy of the group while bringing issues of "Temporary Hoarding" bursting to life through vibrant animation (which filmmaker Rubika Shah acknowledges was inspired by the films of Brett Morgan, including "Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck"), "White Riot" is a lively time capsule of a fraught period in England made eerily prescient due to recent events.

Watching the arguments made by the National Front in the wake of MAGA, Trump, the murderous Nazi march on Charlottesville, police brutality and the Black Lives Matter protests, as well as the advent of increasing fascism around the globe, "White Riot" plays like one of the scariest horror films you'll see ahead of Halloween. From bullets in the mailbox to assaults against musicians and concertgoers to the open police support for the National Front and their policies, it's a harrowing document of a fraught era in British history and the brave artists, organizations, and youths who dared to join forces to put hate in its place.

Interviewing not only Red Saunders and his colleagues but also some of the musicians who played Rock Against Racism (or RAR) gigs, including The Tom Robinson Band and Alien Kulture, while Shah's film admittedly suffers from a lack of focus as it seems to adjust and expand its thesis every time a vital new issue is introduced, it's an urgent eye-opener, nonetheless. Releasing to virtual cinemas from Film Movement ahead of the U.S. election, it's sure to inspire viewers to get involved, stay involved, and – here in the states, at least – vote.

Featuring amazing archival interviews, photos, and concert footage with bands including The Clash, Sham 69, Matumbi, Steel Pulse, X-Ray Spex, and more, "White Riot," which gets its name from a widely misunderstood Clash song off their first album, is of particular interest to UK music fans. Celebrating the grassroots movement that started in an east London print shop and exploded into a legendary carnival so important that The Clash swallowed their egos and played second to last before event headliner Tom Robinson (who'd been with RAR from the very beginning), the debut feature from Shah promises great filmmaking from the documentarian to come.

Clocking in at a mere eighty minutes, "White Riot," is the film equivalent of a punk song. Frenetically edited, it hits its thematic chords hard to drive home the message, ensuring that, unlike Clapton's "I Shot the Sheriff," this is one refrain you'll be glad to get stuck in your head long after it’s done.

Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Movie Review: Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles

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The modern-day equivalent of turning water into wine, a great chef can walk into a kitchen, survey the ingredients, and turn a bunch of disparate nothings into something divine. But when they're forced to use both new ingredients and technology in foreign lands, even veteran chefs get stuck sometimes, as we learn in Laura Gabbert's eggshell light documentary, “Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles.” 

Watching an all-star lineup of international chefs work together to bring the desserts of Versailles to life for an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, we experience a few moments of culinary peril in the seventy-five-minute trifle as batters keep separating or machines don't play well with American outlets. Still, with these masters in the kitchen, perfection, we're assured, is just one scene or flick of the whisk away.

A laudatory survey of the talented minds and creative techniques brought together by Jerusalem born, London based chef and influential cookbook author Yotam Ottolenghi to dazzle American palates, Gabbert's film is missing a true sense of focus. Beginning with Ottolenghi's call to action as he's invited to the Met to head up the launch of their newest exhibit, Ottolenghi casts the net out wide across the many chefs of Instagram to hire innovators from Ukraine to Singapore and beyond with the most specialized of skill sets.

Meeting innovative experts in their field, including “cronut” innovator Dominique Ansel and Dinara Kasko and more, Ottolenghi's crew delights the senses with ornately textured chocolate walls, complex Crayola bright jello molds, 3D architectural cakes, edible sculptures, and other confections sure to make your mouth water. Yet rather than endear us to each wizard one by one (including Ottolenghi), Gabbert serves them all up to us in a rush buffet style, all but ensuring that her film will play best to true foodies with more than just a cursory idea of who one or more of these figures are.

At its most intriguing when it spends time one-on-one with the chefs we're getting to know through their work, including the brilliant Janice Wong who found herself turning away from entrepreneurial endeavors and toward more artistic pursuits after a car crash left her with a completely different personality, I wish Gabbert would've stayed with the human story longer.

The film does layer in some background information about the palace of Versailles, which was the home to the French monarchy from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century and best personified by Marie Antoinette. However, unsure of the documentary's tone, when Gabbert suddenly starts to question the regal era that she and the chefs had been both celebrating and attempting to make modern once again for museum-goers late into "Ottolenghi," it feels like an ill-fitting afterthought.

Although it's perfectly pleasant, and places quite the emphasis on perfection in its richest and most sugary decadent form, there's just not enough holding this film together to make it a must-see. Culling together the freshest of ingredients, no matter how much Gabbert tries to mix it all up into an appealing pastry, in the end there's nothing to keep the batter from separating once more.


Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Movie Review: The Painter and the Thief (2020)

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Trading an abusive ex who threatened to kill her in Berlin for a supportive husband in Norway, painter Barbora Kysilkova was eager to start fresh in a new country. Crafting two incredible pieces of art that were featured at the Gallery Nobel in Oslo in 2015, just as her career began to rise, the unthinkable happened as her two "most important" paintings were carefully removed from frames which had secured them with roughly two hundred nails and stolen in a brazen heist in broad daylight.

Both shocked and intrigued, after the two thieves were identified from the video footage and sentenced to seventy-five days in jail, Barbora went to the courthouse to meet the only robber who showed up for the trial in the form of an addict named Karl-Bertil Nordland, the so-called mastermind. Confessing that he'd been on a sleepless four day amphetamine charged drug binge and had no idea what he'd done with the paintings after he made the impulsive decision to steal them, when Barbora asks him what it was about the two works that made him want to take them, an apologetic Karl-Bertil tells her simply, "they were beautiful."

Fascinated by one another, when she invites him to sit for a portrait she's suddenly inspired to paint, he cautiously agrees. Slightly suspicious of her motives, as the two begin to spend more time together, they form an unlikely bond that's as powerful as it is sudden, after Barbora breaks down the walls the private man — an intelligent, former special needs teacher with a traumatic past — has erected to protect himself when he breaks down in front of the portrait she's painted of him.

A contemplative, tender, and moving documentary that won the Special Jury Prize for Creative Storytelling at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, when Magnus documentarian Benjamin Ree set out to craft a film about art theft, he had no idea that it would evolve into an intimate, affecting study of friendship between two lonely souls who've been through so much.

Originally drawn to the topic because he felt that it could be a study of contrasts where “the socially elevated art industry with a lot of cultural capital meets 'lower-class' criminals with rough backgrounds,” once he read that Barbora had requested to paint her thief, he knew deep down that this was the right subject to pursue.

Initially capturing the two during what he estimates to be the fourth time they met, as he chronicled their relationship over the course of three years, Ree's thesis appears to have changed many times over. And to his credit, as captivated as the filmmaker is by the duo, we find that we are right there with him for each surprising twist in this study which proves yet again that fiction is no match for the unpredictability of facts.

From jaw-dropping pronouncements that catch up with our subjects later on, and are played back to us only after we find out what has happened to them, while sometimes we're slightly confused by the jumps forwards and backwards in time, we remain thoroughly engrossed from start to finish. Wanting to know more about key facts that were slid into the humanistic tapestry weaved by Ree, I found myself wishing that the film had been even longer, in order to better understand the two subjects.

Optimistic that the documentary will encourage people to take a good long look at their own stigmas and preconceptions and remind everyone that you can still be a good, kind person despite your troubles, Karl-Bertil's hope is well-executed in Ree's finished product, which makes you think long and hard about the duality of man and nature vs. nurture. And while I think that the dialogue would've been even more impactful if the film's subtitles were yellow since the small white type threatens to melt into the background of the scenes, the emotional work easily holds us in its thrall.

A soaring ode to the power of human connection, kindness, and empathy, as well as the ways in which art can heal us and bring us together by reaching inside to touch us on a level that can't be accessed with words alone, despite some of its narrative stumbles, this film is truly a balm. Making us wonder about the pasts of those whom we walk by on a daily basis, The Painter and the Thief is the type of movie we need right now to bring us together, making Ree's unpredictable documentary one of the most surprising, quietly arresting works I've seen so far in 2020.


Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Blu-ray Review: Shooting the Mafia (2019)

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"The mafia kills. So does silence." The words appear on a sign at an anti-mafia rally early on Kim Longinotto's eye-opening documentary Shooting the Mafia and also serve as a great tribute to the photographer at the center of the filmmaker's biographical portrait, Letizia Battaglia, who — as the translation of her surname suggests — battles the mob by refusing to adhere to the code of silence that has kept them in power in Sicily for so long.

If a person goes missing in Corleone, Sicily, Longinotto's film informs us, no one says a word for fear of retribution. Ruling not only the meat, fish, fruit, and vegetable markets but also the funeral industry, we learn that if a person can no longer pay the mob to keep their loved one buried, they'll simply dig up their bones from the cemetery to make room for a family that can line their pockets.

Turning her lens on the economic devastation and political corruption caused by La Cosa Nostra, as the country's first female photographer hired by a daily newspaper in the form of the liberal L'Ora in the 1970s, Battaglia used her camera to prove that when it comes to the mob, fear is a luxury that Sicily can simply not afford.

An ambitious, sprawling but too often vague and disjointed chronicle of both Battaglia and the mafia's impact on Sicily over the past fifty years, it's a nonetheless fascinating introduction to a courageous iconoclast who picked up a camera at forty and was changed by it to the point that — looking back — feels she wasn't a real person before she had it in her hands.

Sharing her recollections of growing up in a world dominated by men, you feel her frustration when she discusses being locked up by her father as a beautiful teen to the point that she couldn't go out onto the balcony in case she would tempt male passersby. Later contrasting this with a spicier memory of meeting one of her many lovers on the balcony after her mercurial husband had fallen asleep, you get the sense of how being controlled and yearning to break free from men who wanted to silence her prepared her for the next forty years of her life.

Missing huge gaps of biographical information and bafflingly light on specific details including the years certain events happened, although she uses moving clips from classic Italian films to help bring Battaglia's memories to life, Longinotto struggles to tell a cohesive story throughout and seems uncertain how much of Battaglia's life to go into as opposed to her work.

Opening on Battaglia's stark, artful, hellish portraits of the aftermath of brutal mob slayings and simple yet stunning images of Corleone residents striving to live their lives under mafia rule, the film presents us with half intriguing, half murky information about our subject as well as Sicily. At its most gripping in the second half of the film when it charts how judges Falcone and Borsellino put their lives on the line to bring the mafia to justice in a historic trial with hundreds of defendants, Shooting the Mafia works extraordinarily well when it zeroes in on one specific timeline.

Unsure what story she truly wants to tell, when Longinotto focuses on the downfall of two of Corleone's most notorious mob bosses, we're left with the startling revelation that this piece of the puzzle is actually far more interesting than anything that had come before it. An intriguing if narratively unsuccessful documentary about a heroic photographer who breaks Sicily's years of silence to shout at the mafia as loud as she can with each click of her camera, I only wish the film had been as clear cut, laser focused, and determined as the woman at its center who refuses to be contained.

Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Movie Review - Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band (2019)

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"Whatever happens," Bob Dylan told The Hawks when the folk singer went electric in 1965, "don't stop playing." A maxim that helped the guys hired to back him up keep playing through scores of boos, jeers, and occasionally projectiles launched onstage, when Bob Dylan thinks back on his bandmates in Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band, he says, "they were gallant knights for sticking behind me."

As we learn in Daniel Roher's documentary, however, it turns out that one knight in particular — Robbie Robertson — had been living that adage since he joined his first band at thirteen, just weeks after he discovered rock 'n roll music in a vivid experience he calls "his own personal big bang." Quickly evolving beyond the few chords he'd learned from his maternal ancestors at the Six Nations Indian Reserve, the guitar prodigy went from playing in a Toronto based band to writing songs for Ronnie Hawkins at fifteen to joining his backing band The Hawks one year later. When he auditioned for Hawkins, he promised the "Bo Diddley" singer "you'll never have to tell me to work harder," and Hawkins knew from experience that this was true.

Learning the ropes of the band and the road from drummer Levon Helm  —  who Robertson calls so gifted that "he just seemed to glow in the dark"  — shortly into his tenure with The Hawks, he and Helm took on the responsibility of hiring new musicians to join the group including Richard Manuel, Rick Danko, and Garth Hudson. Soon surpassing their leader, the five Hawks eventually went off on their own. And after a detour serving as knights of Bob Dylan's electrical round table, they reunited once more, moving into an ugly big pink house in Woodstock, New York (chosen by Dylan's manager Albert Grossman) where they recorded their legendary 1968 debut Music from Big Pink, not as The Hawks this time, but The Band.

Chosen both for its lack of pretension and the fact that they were getting known around town by the same description, the story of this band of five brothers is given the premium documentary treatment in Canadian filmmaker Roher's first feature length work (beyond one sixty-three minute doc he made a few years earlier). Lovingly crafted, it's a wonderful stepbrother to one of the all-time greatest rock docs in the form of Martin Scorsese's 1978 release The Last Waltz, which chronicled the final concert The Band ever performed on Thanksgiving night at San Francisco's Winterland Ballroom in 1976.

Sharing one particularly memorable Hawkins related anecdote with Waltz, in Once Were Brothers, Scorsese talks about the reason he made his doc the way that he did. Choosing to shoot the band from the stage and largely ignore the the audience, Brothers executive producer Scorsese notes that he wanted to tell the story of The Band through the way that they related to one another as men and musicians.

Once Were Brothers is missing Waltz's communal feel, unintentionally, yes, as sadly there are only two remaining members of The Band still alive (Robertson and Hudson) but also, largely by design. In a way, perhaps it's best appreciated as not only a companion to Waltz but also a continuation of Robertson's critically acclaimed bestselling memoir Testimony (which I found myself requesting from the library as soon as I pressed stop on the film). Although it doesn't take away from the beautiful craftsmanship of the movie, which features thoughtful interviews with subjects ranging from Hawkins and Dylan to Scorsese and Springsteen, rare performance videos, and gorgeous, candid, often unreleased archival photos (mostly shot by their first and most vital photographer Elliott Landy), its scope is largely limited to Robertson as well as his contemplative wife Dominique.

With the revelation that Garth Hudson was interviewed for the doc but "for reasons that are difficult to discuss," Roher explains he couldn't use the footage in the final cut, the film's production notes offer more questions than answers about its overall construct. An exciting discovery as a Band fan nonetheless, I'm really hoping that Hudson's scenes will be included as Blu-ray bonus material, along with a tie-in book featuring all seven hundred pages of interview transcripts Roher compiled, since only sixty were used in the one hundred and two minute film. (I mean, talk about a testimony right there!)

Wisely subtitling the documentary Robbie Robertson and The Band to acknowledge its Robertson-centric perspective, at the start of the movie produced not only by Scorsese but also Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, Robertson seems as wistful as he is resigned. Playing in The Band was "a beautiful thing," Robertson acknowledges, before following it up with "so beautiful it went up in flames," as he ponders their inevitable, tragic end.

And while it would've benefited from additional points-of-view, especially as their relationships grew more tempestuous due to alcohol and substance abuse — resulting in car wrecks, tour drama, and loss of creativity — Robertson is such a charismatic and articulate interviewee that Roher should consider making a follow-up film devoted to his post-Band career as a solo artist, film composer, and music producer. Including a fascinating anecdote by Springsteen about the first time he heard Music from Big Pink (and had what sounds like his own big bang experience with the record) as well as a thrilling oral history from Robertson on the origins of their beloved hit "The Weight," this substantive film delivers the goods.

Instantly reminding me of Ernesto Guevara's Motorcycle Diaries description that, rather than "a story of heroic feats, or merely the narrative of a cynic," it tells the tale of "lives running parallel for a time with similar hopes and convergent dreams," the moral of Roher's film is one of perseverance, passion, as well as loyalty, and brotherhood indeed.

Having played together over a sixteen year period where, even at the toughest of times, music was the glue holding them together, Once Were Brothers puts us right there — not only onstage with The Band but offstage through Robertson's eyes  — where, no matter what happened, they kept right on playing, until they finally had to stop.

Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Movie Review: Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound (2019)

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Looking for the right words to describe the late Alan Splet, David Lynch's innovative, Academy Award winning sound editor who collaborated with the filmmaker on some of his most iconic works including Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, Lynch barely hesitated. Dubbing Splet "a born soundman," he elaborated further, describing his friend, with a twinkle in his eye, as a "joyous experimenter."

And joyous experimentation seems to be at the heart of veteran sound editor turned USC professor turned director Midge Costin's newly released documentary feature debut Making Waves, which celebrates the adventurous spirit of professionals eager to contribute to what Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas agree is fifty percent of a feature film.

Chronicling the history of motion picture sound from the beginning, in Waves, we learn about the artists who performed music and sound effects live to accompany screenings of the Oscar winning 1927 silent film Wings to the advent of the talkie with The Jazz Singer that same year. From King Kong setting the bar for future sound design in 1933, we move from Orson Welles bringing the methods he pioneered on radio to his influential Citizen Kane and beyond, until later on when we circle back to Jack Foley working his magic on 1960's Spartacus in order to save Stanley Kubrick a fortune in reshoots.

With three decades of experience working in the industry on films such as Days of Thunder and Crimson Tide at her disposal, Costin's passion for and knowledge of her subject shines through in this ambitious, eye-opening documentary, which is sure to be of particular interest to both budding and established cinephiles.

Occasionally too ambitious for its 94 minute format, while rushing from one thrilling anecdote about recording the sound of animal roars in order to beef up the otherwise "wimpy" sound of jets for Top Gun to recounting what it was like to re-record "there's no crying in baseball," with the actors live for A League of Their Own, Waves struggles to cover too much ground.

At its most engrossing when it slows down enough to really sink its teeth into a topic, Costin's segments on Splet-like "born soundmen," Walter Murch and Ben Burtt — both of whom fell in love with the medium playing with tape recorders as children before ultimately making their own groundbreaking contributions to the field on Apocalypse Now and Star Wars respectively — stand out.

An MVP in any documentary (and richly deserving of his own), from his philosophical analysis about sound's importance going back to the womb when it was the first sense we could experience up through his revolutionary decision to treat each facet of sound design like a different instrument family in a symphony, the sophisticated Murch easily holds us in his thrall. And with Burtt revealing his painstaking process of eagerly cataloging a wide variety of sounds for George Lucas a year before a single frame of Star Wars was even shot in order to give life to Chewbacca and R2-D2, Waves illustrates how well sound can translate emotion to audiences around the world.

Not just a boys club despite its reputation — as a female sound professional herself now heading up a largely female production and post-production crew — Costin makes an effort to champion the vital contributions made by the industry's unheralded soundwomen in Waves. While many of the contemporary examples fly by the screen far too quickly, one of the most interesting sequences in the film is devoted to the little known role that Barbra Streisand played in bridging the divide between concerts and film.

Longing to bring to the screen the same interplay between the artist and the audience that could be experienced at one of her shows, Streisand not only rejected the use of tape playback in Funny Girl in order to sing live but also insisted upon using what was then a relatively new, two-speaker, Dolby sound format for A Star is Born. Offering to pay for the expensive, untested technology out of her own pocket — which would have amounted to a million dollars — when Warner Brothers studio heads saw the film played back in Dolby, they heard the difference immediately and reassured her that there was no need for her to foot the bill.

Featuring interview footage with filmmakers ranging from Ang Lee and Robert Redford to Sofia Coppola and Ryan Coogler as well as the expertise of a wide variety of sound designers and editors, once we reach the film's blink-and-you-missed-it section on composers, it feels as though most of the contemporary segments in Making Waves have gone by in a blur.

With so much to cover in all of the various subcategories of sound, Costin could have easily turned the documentary feature into a Ken Burns style documentary miniseries (which she could have also shown to her students at USC!). Though it's filled with amazing moments that play like an epic awards show montage, at times, the film flies by so quickly and with so much force that it feels like a Top Gun jet, complete with an animal roar added in by Oscar nominee — and Costin's Days of Thunder colleague — Cece Hall.

Although I would surely fail if I were to be tested on how much information presented to us in the rapid fire last third of the film I was able to retain, honestly the lovingly made Waves is filled with so many wondrous ideas that it makes Costin's film an undeniable success.

"Our ears lead our eyes to where the story lives," Steven Spielberg explains early into the documentary and even though it's meant to highlight the importance of the art form, it also stands out as a perfect descriptor of Waves, which makes us appreciate the role that sound plays on a number of levels evidenced therein.

Celebrating the link between what we hear and what we feel, Making Waves is as informative as it is indefatigable, despite its structural flaws. A passionate ode to creativity, Midge Costin's documentary might just inspire the next generation of would-be sound artists to do some joyous experimentation — the kind we'll have to hear to believe — of their own.

Text ©2019, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Film Movement DVD Review: Between Land and Sea (2016)

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For Ollie O'Flaherty, who is just one of a handful of Irish surfers at the heart of Ross Whitaker's fascinating documentary Between Land and Sea, the patience you need to find, charge at, and ride just the right wave, "is what makes it so addicting."

In the Atlantic surf town of Lahinch on Liscannor Bay on the northwest corner of County Clare, Ireland, which is like as O'Flaherty muses "having a playground on [his]...doorstep, only my playground is the ocean," Whitaker and his crew took his advice on patience literally while chronicling a year in the life of a core group of surfers and their loved ones.

Similar to the way O'Flaherty says the ocean "can offer the wave of a lifetime in the best amphitheater in the world but everywhere you look there's danger," each year the community virtually closes down for winter until Easter when the locals hope to make enough money from tourists to get by until the following year.

Although it might not have the same impact as a couple hundred feet of water hitting a fifteen foot shelf, given not only the ever-dwindling amount of travelers as well as the number of different pop-up shops selling beautifully handcrafted boards and gear as well as surf schools, it can hit residents supporting themselves as well as their loved ones on that income just as hard.

Introducing us to a couple of men who run surf related businesses such as Lahinch Surf Experience and Lahinch Surf School where a few current and former pro surfers (including O'Flaherty) moonlight as instructors, Whitaker gives us a good reason why some places close down in winter as one year earlier in a bad storm, the waves did twenty-three million pounds of damage to local businesses.

Having either aged out of the sport or embarked on a different endeavor, we're first introduced to Tom Doidge-Harrison, who, despite acknowledging that "some things in life have slipped by" him, has settled into a cozy life with his beautiful pregnant wife and daughter.

Trained as a mining engineer which he does for money and to enable him to make surfboards for enjoyment, Tom's wife Raquel has also had to think outside the box since leaving her home in Bristol by using her scientific background to make handmade soaps as she was unable to find something in her field in Lahinch.

While we don't exactly know if Raquel's soap-making is for money and/or enjoyment, by including her story alongside her husband's, it's a subtle study of contrasts and similarities and part of what makes the observational documentary so compelling on a human level.

One of many people looking for new purpose, having walked away from the life of a professional surfer where he spent too much time chasing sponsors, Australian Fergal Smith has returned to his roots growing up on an organic farm.

And over the course of the year captured in Whitaker's observational documentary, Fergal embarks on perhaps the biggest risk captured either on or off the ocean as he and his wife and child put everything into the soil and live in a yurt while waiting for both their venture and crops to grow.

Of course, you don't check out a surfing documentary if you aren't interested in surfing. Yet while Whitaker is far more focused on a fly-on-the-wall approach in making the viewer feel like an honorary Lahinch resident for its ninety-four minute running time, the film's surf's scenes (directed by Kev I Smith and featuring a cameo by Hawaiian big wave legend Shane Dorian and crew) are quite thrilling to watch.

With the breathtaking backdrop of Ireland's cliffs by the sea, whenever the lens zeroes in on a color deeper than the shades we mostly see of mossy green, brown soil, and saltwater blue, we're immediately taken in and Land and Sea delivers on this front repeatedly – alternating from orange red skies to later on, a rainbow streaking across the sky.

Released by Film Movement, admittedly, this highly recommended slice-of-life documentary might bore viewers reared on traditional stunt filled sports documentaries geared toward those with the shortest of attention spans.

Less like a feature length music video, Land is more reminiscent in spirit of director Michael Apted's Up series, which was an obvious influence on Hoop Dreams director Steve James, whose work seems to have in turn inspired Whitaker.

The end result makes this one wave you'll definitely want to take, as long as that you have the patience to learn not only what makes it so stimulating for the surfers but also what's at stake.

Text ©2018, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.