David Crosby: Remember My Name

David Crosby: Remember My Name

seen @ Cinema Village, New York, NY

I saw the trailer for this when I saw the Toni Morrison doc earlier this summer and knew I wanted to see it—and so did Virginia. We both dug this portrait of legendary folk singer David Crosby, now in his lion-in-winter years after a lifetime spent taking way too many drugs and pissing off way too many friends and lovers, to the point where his music is what keeps him sane. Fortunately, his voice is still in excellent shape, even if the rest of him isn’t.

Producer Cameron Crowe needs little prompting to get Crosby to be absolutely candid about the many mistakes he made: turning on a lover to drugs, being a dick to his band mates—primarily The Byrds and CSN(Y); doing jail time. Still, he had a hand in creating some of the best, most powerful and relevant music of his generation. He is equally candid about the politics of the 60s and how his music gave him a platform to speak his mind during a tumultuous era. He may even feel survivor’s guilt for being alive while so many of his peers are gone, including a young woman he loved who died long before her time. He lays everything bare, and now, he continues touring and recording, worrying his wife sick but unable to tear himself away from the music, which has been his constant companion.

It’s a familiar story, no doubt, and to anyone who has followed Crosby’s career, little of it can truly be considered shocking, but to someone who was born after the Summer of Love, after Kent State, after Woodstock, I found it riveting.

A Star is Born (2018)

A Star is Born (2018)
seen @ Cinema Village, New York, NY

Once upon a time, George Cukor directed a movie called What Price Hollywood? It was about the dream of fame and fortune: specifically, the kind that comes with being a movie star — and who among us hasn't had that fantasy at some point in our lives? The screenplay was nominated for an Oscar.

Five years later, this story was tweaked a bit and became A Star is Born, the universally familiar love story in which the principals traverse the ladder of success in both directions at once.

It's such a universal story that it's been told again and again, in various forms, over the years. It was never done better than in 1954, when in her version, Judy Garland gave one of the greatest performances by a woman in American film history.

It's been a tough act to follow.

Kirikou and the Sorceress

The Fairy Tale Blogathon is an event devoted to films inspired by fairy tales, folk stories and various tall tales from around the world, hosted by Movies Silently. For a complete list of participating bloggers, visit the link at the site.

Kirikou and the Sorceress
seen online via YouTube

Once upon a time... in a small but culturally-diverse village called Queens...

...there lived a young(ish) blogger named Antonello. He loved to write about all manner of things, from the books he read to the places he went to. He wrote about the quality of fruit sold at the market he shopped at. He wrote about the jousting tournaments held every month at the village green. He wrote about the duke and duchess, especially when the local paparazzi took pictures of them drunk and bickering outside Astor's Tavern late at night and posted them all over Instagram the next day.

But none of it paid very well.

Pearl Jam 20/The Swell Season

Pearl Jam 20
seen on TV @ PBS
10.21.11


The Swell Season
seen @ Cinema Village, New York NY
10.22.11

To be honest, I was more of a Soundgarden fan in the 90s. It was my old high school buddy John who got me into them. I was going through my brief metalhead phase in the late 80s-early 90s when John told me about this band from Seattle that sounded kinda like metal, only different. He let me listen to his copy of Badmotorfinger and that was what did it. Pretty soon I started hearing more and more about the new sound represented by Soundgarden and other Seattle bands called "grunge" and that was my new thing. (Before I first heard it, I remember thinking "Smells Like Teen Spirit" must be a Weird Al-like parody song with a title like that - and in a way, it kind of was.)

Pearl Jam was part of that wave, of course, and I loved them too. There are a small handful of songs that, to this day, still make me feel like I did the first time I heard them, and one of those is "Alive." The solo at the end always gives me chills.

John was always three steps ahead of me music-wise, but I think we both had an awareness, on some level, that "grunge" was a fabrication. Still, we didn't care. To us, it was just about the music - and we were certainly under no delusions that Kurt Cobain "spoke" to us. We were two black kids from the inner city (well, John's half black). Our experiences were fundamentally different from most of the MTV Generation. Sure, we identified more with rock than with rap (I've talked about growing up with rap before), and we dug grunge as much as everyone else did, but we also listened to Living Colour and Fishbone (and Tracy Chapman) and they were as important to us, if not more so. That's another story though.

Cameron Crowe's documentary Pearl Jam 20 (a censored version, since this aired on PBS) brought me back to this time in my life, not just when I listened to grunge, but "alternative rock" in general. I was never much of a huge concert goer, but I made it to Lollapalooza (with John) and I saw quite a few bands live during the early-to-mid 90s. Remind me to tell you about the time I saw The Cure at Nassau Colosseum - there's a decent story to go with that. (BTW, if you wanna know more about this period in rock, I highly recommend the book Life on Planet Rock by Lonn Friend.)

Pearl Jam was on the radio all the time, so I knew all their songs. Not that I'm any kind of singer, but Eddie Vedder's voice was right within my vocal range, which made PJ songs easier to sing along to than Soundgarden songs. Chris Cornell did a lot more wailing and screeching, which is cool and all, because he's great at it, but I think Vedder has a slightly better overall voice. Slightly. And of course both of them are better singers than Cobain, who just mumbled everything.

So I got older, my musical tastes evolved again, and like Devo, I decided I was through being cool. Whatever music I liked was whatever I liked, regardless of whether it was "in" or not. I drifted back into pop and rap a little, and I rediscovered oldies - music from my parents' generation. When I was in Columbus, my roommate Max told me about Pandora and I discovered a bunch of new bands (and old bands that were new to me) through that website. And then one day I went to see a small Irish film called Once...

Much has been written of the fairy tale-like romance between Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, the stars of Once, who would win an Oscar for their song "Falling Slowly." I was quite impressed with the movie's unassuming, character-driven narrative, which flew in the face of 99% of Hollywood romance movies. I saw them with their band, The Swell Season, live last year, and again, let me reiterate - they're no genteel folkie band, at least not all of the time. Hansard is one of the most intense live performers I've ever seen.

Their subsequent post-Oscar success is chronicled in the documentary The Swell Season, which could be considered the sequel to Once ("Twice"?). I kept thinking about how young Irglova is (about 20 or 21) and how fame has been thrust upon her so suddenly. It's not like she's worked half her life for it, as Hansard has - and even he doesn't seem completely at peace with his newfound fame. In her case, it seems as if she just needs some space every once in awhile to be a normal girl again, which is completely understandable. The whole world has this image of the two of them together, almost like pop music royalty in a way, and it's easy to imagine how stifling that can be. It's perhaps no great surprise, then, that they did break up romantically, though not professionally.

For all that, though, their relationship as seen in the documentary seems rather chaste (the skinny dipping scene notwithstanding). Hansard met Irglova when she was something like fifteen, I think, and while she makes it clear that she fell for him as much as he did for her over the course of time, it's hard not to squirm a bit at the wide age difference. (Though in fairness, Europeans have a different attitude about that sort of thing than we Americans.)

So what, if anything, do these two films have in common besides the obvious? For one thing, they both go deeply into how both bands cope with the consequences of fame. Also, Vedder and Hansard both have father issues. "Alive" was written after Vedder discovered the man he thought was his father actually wasn't, and that his real father had died. A number of subsequent PJ songs deal with the relationships between parents and children, to varying degrees. Hansard talks about how his father kept secrets from his family right up until his death, secrets which he drank heavily to keep from them.

In addition, both films indicate, to me, how difficult finding the right chemistry for a band truly is. Pearl Jam 20 discusses original lead singer Andrew Wood (when they were still called Mother Love Bone) and how devastating his death was. Finding Vedder when they did was a godsend - and, as they admit later on, it changed the dynamic of the group significantly. Hansard, by contrast, played in bands for years prior to hooking up with Irglova, but when he did it was clear that something had changed. He jokes about how "Falling Slowly" was a less macho song than what he was used to while playing with guys for so long.

After watching Season on Saturday, I went to see an actual live band. My pal Dave and his wife Martha are part of a folk/country band called Home Cookin' (she sings, he plays the saxophone) that were playing in a Queens cafe. Apparently they don't get to rehearse too often, as some of them were reading off of sheet music. Dave has played in several different bands in the past, including his own, so maybe that's part of the reason why. Not sure. They sounded good, if a bit ragged in places (Martha was playing with a cold), and for a cozy basement room in a cafe, they got a fair amount of people (the last time I saw them at this venue, the crowd was a little bigger).

Once again, I thought of how important chemistry is in a band. For a band that doesn't rehearse often, they still sounded fairly cohesive. They didn't appear to feel any pressure, as was evident by their playful banter between songs, but then, it's not like they were playing the Beacon Theater. I'm not certain how the two of them would deal with sudden fame, though I have my suspicions. From what Dave has told me in the past, I get the impression being a musician is less of a career aspiration for Martha than it is for him, though she has been in a band before. Unlike Hansard and Irglova, they're much closer in age, and they have goals of their own outside of the band. They still enjoy doing what they do, though, which is good to see.

Hello Lonesome

Hello Lonesome
seen @ Cinema Village, New York NY
5.29.11

Hello Lonesome was an unexpected last-minute change to my schedule. Before I get into it, though, let me briefly tell you about my weekend, because I had a good one. I spent Saturday morning biking on Governor's Island, a tourist attraction island located in the East River, southeast of Manhattan. It was the first time I had been there with my bike. I left early, riding to the subway. Normally it would only take two trains to get there, but this being the weekend, construction schedules messed that up completely, so I had to carry my bike up and down more stairs than I had anticipated.

Eventually, I made it to the ferry and from the ferry to the island. It's small, but I got to see parts of it I hadn't seen before. It was really hot, though. I had originally planned to go back home and then come back out, but by the time I got home, which was sometime between four and five, I was far too wiped out to consider going back out. I just plopped on my bed for the rest of the day. It was a good tired, though.

Then yesterday I was with Andrea! She called me on Saturday inviting me to see Hello Lonesome for a specific reason: one of the actors in the film is a friend of hers. I was gonna call her to see if she wanted to hang out on Sunday, but she beat me to it, so that worked out fine. Sunday was another hot one. After so many long weeks of 50 degree weather and rain, this past week has been a pleasant surprise. It finally feels like summer. I wore shorts on Saturday, but not yesterday, and I should have.

There's not a whole lot to say about Cinema Village as a theater: it's tiny, with only three auditoriums and a lobby that can just barely be considered one. It's one of the seminal art house theaters in the city, however, and has been around for many years, and yesterday it had a decent-sized crowd for an early-afternoon show. Writer-director Adam Reid was in attendance all that weekend for after-show Q-and-A's, and I think many of the people at our show were friends and acquaintances of his.


Lonesome is a triptych of stories about people coping with loneliness in different forms: a father estranged from his daughter after his wife leaves him; an old widow who takes up with a much younger man, and a young couple whose relationship is tested when the girl gets cancer. Andrea's friend is Kamel Boutros, who plays a delivery guy who befriends the father. (That's him on the poster, holding the rifle.) He only has a few scenes, but they're good ones. He even gets to show off his singing ability in one. The acting is superb practically across the board in this movie, although the cinematography is not very strong. There are some odd editing choices and poor camera angles that bring the film down in places. It's a decent movie overall; nothing spectacular, but made watchable by the strong acting.

Reid appeared afterwards and he talked about his movie. It was shot in fifteen days for $50,000 and took over a year to complete. It was originally going to star Craig T. Nelson as the father, who works as a voice-over announcer. Reid, a commercials director, ultimately chose to take a chance on an actual VO man, Harry Chase, in what would be his first on-screen role. In 2010 Lonesome hit the festival circuit and won a few awards, and Reid said the film is now available online (I forget whether he said iTunes or not).


Afterwards Andrea and I wandered around the Village. She told me she saw Tree of Life already and was less than impressed with it, and now I'm no longer sure if I wanna see it. (I guess you'll find out in the coming weeks if I change my mind.) There was a street art fair we looked at, but we spent most of the afternoon in Washington Square Park listening to a group of musicians singing oldies songs. At one point, when we were on our own, we tried singing some oldies ourselves, even though neither of us are exactly candidates for American Idol, but we kept forgetting or misremembering the lyrics. (I think we had this problem the last time we tried this too!) Slightly embarrassing, perhaps, but still fun.

I'm just so glad summer-type weather is finally here. It felt like it would never arrive.

So how was your weekend?

Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon

It's Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting Week! All this week we'll look at some notable martial arts films, from the ridiculous to the sublime.

Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon
from my DVD collection
4.20.11

The first time I saw Michelle Yeoh was actually at a kung fu festival. This would've been sometime around 1996-97, I think. Cinema Village, a tiny little theater in the heart of Greenwich Village, was showing a bunch of martial arts films around the Christmas season. I've been to Cinema Village a few times; they show lots of foreign films. Anyway, "A Kung Fu Christmas" was still going on when Jenny and me, along with our mutual friend Abby, went there on New Year's Eve to catch a doubleheader of Asian films featuring this female action star I'd never heard of. It was Abby's idea; she was a fan. It was an unusual way to spend New Year's Eve, but I was game.

I'm not sure what the two films were - looking over Yeoh's IMDB page, I'm pretty sure one of them was Wing Chun, and the other may have been Supercop. I thought the movies were alright, although to be honest, I was beginning to doze off a bit later in the evening and I was kinda looking ahead to midnight, so I was distracted towards the end and ended up not paying as much attention.

So Yeoh eventually came over to America and became a Bond girl, appearing in Tomorrow Never Dies. I saw it on video. I was impressed with her stunts, and I thought it was really cool to see a woman be an action hero, but I still didn't get a full appreciation of her. If I had seen her films to that point under better circumstances - especially if I had seen them on a big screen (the Cinema Village screens aren't exactly wide) - I might've gotten more excited by her, but I wasn't.

Then I saw Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. I believe I saw it at the Regal Cinemas E-Walk in Times Square, so it was definitely a wide screen. It was opening weekend, and not late at night, so the circumstances were perfect. From the first time I saw her on the screen, my entire perception of Yeoh changed. For one thing, seeing her face larger than life and close-up, I noticed for the first time how utterly beautiful she was (and is!). I couldn't take my eyes off of her, and she hadn't even done anything yet other than talk with Chow Yun-Fat. There have been plenty of female movie stars, past and present, that I've been hot for, but there are few who have left me as smitten as Yeoh. Certainly part of it was her character, but it was something about her beauty that left me gobsmacked. Still does too.

Oh, and then she starts to fight. And boy, can she fight! Re-watching Tiger on DVD last night, her fights still left me breathless, both hand-to-hand and with swords. Seeing it for the first time, it was like nothing I'd ever seen before - and not just because of the wire work that had everybody floating and leaping great bounds. Tiger was the movie that finally made me sit up and take notice of Yeoh as an all-around movie star.

Last night I watched Tiger with the audio commentary from director Ang Lee and executive producer/co-writer James Schamus for the first time. Among the many things they talked about was Lee's approach to making a kung fu movie for the first time, as well as his ideas about the sub-genre in general. They noted that because Tiger is a period piece set in an Eastern culture, there was a huge challenge in trying to make this movie appeal to modern, Western audiences. As a result, the screenplay had to take some liberties with the time period. There's a lot of talking about feelings, for example, something one would not see in an Asian movie like this and certainly not something that the Chinese of this time period (the 19th century) would do.

Lee compared kung fu movies to musicals, where "anything goes in broad strokes." He acknowledges that he took risks, storytelling-wise, such as the long flashback sequence with Jen and Lo in the desert, or even the simple fact of devoting as much time to drama as to fights, something, he said, that's unusual in most kung fu movies. He said a good fight scene can take months to film.

Lee also talked about the master and student relationship in kung fu movies, which is an important recurring element in Tiger. Jen is Jade Fox's protege, but she learns stuff outside of Jade Fox's realm of expertise, and a big deal is made of how Jen is capable of surpassing her mentor. According to Lee, normally a student is not supposed to surpass their master. There's always a little bit of knowledge that the master keeps to him- or herself.

I admit, even with all of this new information, there are aspects of Tiger that I still don't fully grok, but the more I watch it, the more I'm able to gleam tiny bits of understanding from it. Lee also said that for all of the kung fu conventions that it subverts, there are plenty that it retains as well. Indeed, Tiger is eminently re-watchable in part because Lee approached the fight scenes as an extension of character. Add the love-story element and an outstanding score and you've got one hell of a movie.

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Previously in Kung-Fu Week:
Drunken Master
The Last Dragon