Month: May 2011

A Classic Movie Lover’s Weekend at The 2011 TCM Film Festival

Watching "Gaslight" (1944) inside the Chinese Theatre during the TCM Classic Film Festival.

By Jennifer Baldwin. A funny thing happened on the opening night of the TCM Classic Film Festival: I fell in love with an old movie. That shouldn’t be so funny, really, since I fall in love with old movies all the time. It’s just what I do. It’s my thing. I watch a random old movie on TV one night and next thing you know I’m in love. No, what’s funny about that first night of the TCM film fest is that I fell in love with an old movie I already loved.

An American in Paris may not be regarded as the best musical film of all time (most would say Singing in the Rain), but I’ve always had a soft spot for it in my heart. The Gershwin songs, the wild Technicolor, the audaciousness of that twenty-minute dance finale – it may not have the most riveting storyline in the world (few musicals do, really), but it more than makes up for it in terms of musical and visual pizzazz.

A special occasion for classic movie lovers.

I always end up watching the “I Got Rhythm” and “’S Wonderful” sequences with a huge grin on my face – and then there’s the “Our Love is Here to Stay” number, and the “American in Paris” ballet -and suddenly my heart is aching and I’m all swept up in the passion of the love story. It’s funny, and romantic, and colorful (boy, is it colorful!), and what more is there to ask of a musical? I’d seen the movie many times before, so why was the screening at the TCM festival such a revelation?

It’s an obvious answer, but nevertheless, it came as a shock to me: the movie was a revelation because I was watching it in a theater. Gorgeous Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, to be exact. With a packed house. And all the energy and excitement of the night went crackling and sparkling through the theater as I sat there watching, falling in love. We applauded the credits; we applauded Leslie Caron and Gene Kelly; we applauded after the musical numbers. I’ve watched old movies on a big screen before, in an auditorium, for my film classes. Nobody in those classes ever applauded. Nobody ever cheered. There was no energy or magic.

But that opening night premiere of a new 60th anniversary digital print of An American in Paris was magical. It helped having Leslie Caron on hand to talk about the film and her days at MGM, in a lovely conversation with Robert Osborne before the start of the movie. It was like a mutual love fest: Ms. Caron, coming out to an adoring audience, proclaiming, “This is awesome!” (with a beautiful smile on her face, and a spring in her step), while we gave her a standing ovation. It wasn’t just a movie, it was an event, a communal celebration of classic film. Continue reading A Classic Movie Lover’s Weekend at The 2011 TCM Film Festival

Conservatism & The Arts

Writer David Mamet.
Writer David Mamet.

By David Ross. The Obamas have invited some apparently outrageous rapper to the White House to participate in a ‘poetry reading,’ with predictable repercussions. The left-wing radio host Randi Rhodes fumes:

Look, the conservatives, if Shakespeare were alive, and he went to the White House to get, you know, some sort of a reading, they would be outraged about him – talking about killing his brother, and the father had to go, and a mother he slept with – They’d be out of their fricking minds with this. They don’t understand culture! Or literature!

Conservatives – at least the many who ridiculed this comment online – do know the difference between Shakespeare and Sophocles, and know that Oedipus killed his father and not his brother. Or is Rhodes hazily thinking of Hamlet? Who can tell?

From "Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince."

The NPR-ish notion that conservatives are sub-literate is so annoyingly counter-factual, as the central vein of Anglo-American literature for the last two hundred and more years has been essentially conservative: Swift, Burke, Coleridge, Jane Austen, Carlyle, Trollope, Thoreau, Ruskin (a self-described “violent Tory of the old school”), Yeats, Lewis, D.H. Lawrence, Pound, Eliot, Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Nabokov, Waugh, Flannery O’Connor and the Southern agrarian writers in toto, Saul Bellow. Only Dickens and possibly George Eliot, among the greatest writers, can be neatly grafted onto a liberal moral or political scheme. Even self-professed radicals, like William Morris, Virginia Woolf, and George Orwell, are only superficially or problematically so, while the elusive James Joyce is imaginable as a conservative but inconceivable – utterly self-contradictory – as a liberal of any sort. I myself consider Morris the most conservative man who ever lived and attribute his communism to a complete and rather silly misunderstanding: his communist utopia was not progressive but maniacally reactionary, a fantasy of the Middle Ages idealized and restored. Not for nothing did Yeats call Morris his “chief of men.” Some day, I believe, a scholarly fellow with a certain entrepreneurial instinct will write a fascinating book on the conservatism of Harry Potter, which borrows more than plot conventions from Tolkien and Lewis, and harks back, in its fundamentals, to the monasticism of the Middle Ages and to the legend of St. George.

In the coup de grace to the Rhodes stereotype, David Mamet, our most renowned playwright, has announced his conservative conversion with a splashy new book (see here). Continue reading Conservatism & The Arts

Ring-a-Ding-Ding: Pan Am, Playboy Club Trailers Begin the ‘Mad Men’ Cash-in

By Jason Apuzzo. I’m curious as to what people think of the new trailer above for NBC’s forthcoming show The Playboy Club, as well as the clip below from ABC’s forthcoming series Pan Am. Both series are set in the early, swingin’ 60s – and both are looking an awful lot like Mad Men … in fact, almost embarrassingly so. Christina Hendricks and January Jones would seem to be owed some residuals, here.

It seems fairly clear that the major network Mad Men cash-in has begun, except that whatever ironic detachment and/or sophistication with which Mad Men approached the 50s/early 60s seems to be jettisoned here in favor of abject lifestyle propaganda and product placement (even of an obsolete brand, in the case of Pan-Am).

Due to their overall flavor of pandering, my sense is that the networks are going to have a difficult time selling these shows – although I certainly could be wrong. In any case, it’s fascinating to me that this is the turn popular entertainment is taking during the Obama era. Obama has always struck me as a 50s-style, Adlai Stevenson-type person in terms of his tight, disciplined personal demeanor, academic-style liberalism and Illinois background. Perhaps we are, in sense, going back to the late 50s/early 60s these days. Reader feedback is encouraged. Continue reading Ring-a-Ding-Ding: Pan Am, Playboy Club Trailers Begin the ‘Mad Men’ Cash-in

LFM Review: White Button (Bijelo Dugme) @ The 2011 Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. They were much like Yugoslavia’s version of Czechoslovakia’s Plastic People of the Universe, except they had a much easier time of it with the Tito regime. They only faced a few drug busts, which they do not claim to be altogether unwarranted. Indeed, the hard rock band was a unifying force for the youth culture, but attempts by various nationalities to claim them as their own contributed to the band’s eventual break-up. The rise, fall, and multiple reinventions of the Yugoslav hard-rock band Bijelo Dugme is chronicled in Igor Stoimenov’s documentary, White Button, the closing film of the 2011 Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival.

Yugoslav rock heroes.

Musically, White Button (who adopted the “Bijelo Dugme” moniker essentially to prove names don’t matter in rock) is probably best compared to Led Zeppelin. Both bands represented the early cusp of Heavy Metal, but were still very much in touch with the blues and R&B roots of the music. In terms of popularity, they were the Beatles, the Stones, the Bieber kid, and the Grateful Dead, all in one. Their ethnic heritage was mixed, but they all originally came together in Sarajevo.

Evidently, it was good to be a rock-star, even under Tito. Though Stoimenov largely glosses over their relationship with the state, it seems they must have been tolerated as an instrument to keep the Balkan country from Balkanizing. (Also, it would have been the height of hypocrisy for the government to act against Bijelo Dugme at a time when Tito was criticizing the Husek puppet government for cracking down in Czechoslovakia.)

What Bijelo does best is old time rock & roll. The band turned the Yugoslav music scene on its ear in more ways than one. For instance, their graphic designer recalls how they pushed the envelope using sexual imagery to sell records (see exhibit A below).

It is not always a triumphant story, though. Like any legitimate rock band, they lost a drummer to drugs and personal demons along the way. They also took an ill-conceived detour into the New Wave that the film never shies away from examining in humiliating detail. They would have better luck when Goran Bregocić, the Brian Wilson of the group, looked toward traditional Roma and Macedonian music for inspiration.

Bijelo Dugme album cover.

Oddly, the film ends exactly when Bijelo Dugme disbands, declining to cover the band members’ experiences during the war. However, the accompanying short, Damir Pirić’s Rock ‘n’ War, fills that gap, but from the perspective of the working rock bands of Tuzla rather than the White Buttoners.

Rock concerts “for peace” are a tiresome cliché here, but when the Tuzla rockers organized them in hopes that cooler heads would prevail in the weeks leading up to war, one has to give them credit for trying. Indeed, there is a lot of dramatic footage in the short (sixteen minute) doc. Hearing one band shred through and utterly re-contextualize Neil Young’s “Keep Rockin’ in the Free World,” is frankly kind of awe-inspiring.

Bijelo is a droll, cleverly assembled Behind the Music film, while R ‘n’ W is raw and poignant.  They both rock hard, though, closing this year’s festival on a high note. A sold-out screening, the BHFF appears to be growing nicely, bringing films by and of interest to Bosnians to a wider audience beyond the local expat community. Here’s hoping for a third day next year.

Posted on May 17th, 2011 at 2:37pm.

LFM Review: Piran-Pirano @ The 2011 Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. How better to start the 2011 Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival than with a film about the arbitrary nature of geography? Antonio is Italian. Veljko is Bosnian. Yet both have only felt truly at home in a particular apartment in the picturesque Slovenian city of Piran. That is where their paths fatefully crossed during WWII in Slovenian filmmaker Goran Vojnović’s Piran-Pirano (trailer here), the opening film of the 2011 BHFF in New York.

Antonio was not a Fascist, but his father certainly was. A school teacher whose lesson plans were little more than hateful propaganda, he decides discretion is the better part of valor when Tito’s forces arrive. Only concerned with his own neck, he leaves his college-aged son behind in their flat. Through sheer fortune, Antonio eludes the Partisans’ initial sweep of the apartment, but he is caught flat-footed by Anica, a young Slovenian woman traveling with the partisans.

Mourning her entire family, the vengeful Anica is in no mood to show mercy to an Italian, yet they reach an uneasy truce of sorts for the night. It is there in the apartment that Veljko discovers them. Like Anica, he has also lost his family, but he is not inclined towards retribution. In fact, he is not much of a soldier at all.

Told in flashbacks when the two men meet again decades later, Piran’s themes of cruelty and compassion in times of war have obvious resonance for Bosnian audiences. It hardly glorifies Tito’s army either, clearly depicting the summary executions ruthlessly carried out by the Communist forces. The commander matter-of-factly accepts the brutal tactics, as well as the potential death of innocents, as the cost of waging war. However, some of his subordinates are more enthusiastic about the dirty business of war. Continue reading LFM Review: Piran-Pirano @ The 2011 Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival

On Bob Dylan’s 70th Birthday

By David Ross. Rolling Stone has celebrated Bob Dylan’s seventieth birthday with a lavish spread featuring a list of his seventy best songs and a smaller list of the best Dylan covers (see here). There’s no doubt that Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” is the supreme Dylan cover, turning a gnomic ditty into a sweepingly prophetic desert-vision with the tone quality of an LSD-fueled aurora borealis, but otherwise the list has little – in fact almost nothing – to recommend it.

Let me offer a sounder guide to the greatest Dylan covers:

  • Fairport Convention (Sandy Denny, Richard Thompson, et al.) were consistently masterful Dylan interpreters. Here they magnificently elevate two minor chestnuts: “I’ll Keep it With Mine” (from their 1969 album What We Did on Our Holidays) and “Percy’s Song” (from Unhalfbricking, also 1969 – they had a very good year). Dylan wrote and recorded the songs in the early sixties, but they saw the light of day only with the 1985 release of the compilation Biograph. Over and over again, Fairport fulfilled the highest function of the Dylan cover: drawing attention to the obscure wonders of the oeuvre.
  • Hendrix not only swallowed whole and fully metabolized “All Along the Watchtower,” but nearly gave the same treatment to a far bigger fish, “Like a Rolling Stone,” which he ripped through at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, and, as far as I know, never played again.
  • Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishman, a gypsy caravan of top-flight session musicians, lends a soulful huskiness to “Girl from the North Country” (from 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan), while Joni Mitchell and Johnny Cash capture the song’s tender and crystalline essence on the Johnny Cash Show. The Cash-Mitchell duet appears on the surprisingly nugget-filled album The Best of the Johnny Cash TV Show: 1969-1971 (2008).
  • The Band were not merely Dylan idolaters but Dylan collaborators and bandmates, protégés in the fullest sense. Their version of “This Wheel’s on Fire” – which Dylan co-wrote with Band member Rick Danko – appears on their 1968 masterpiece Music from Big Pink and distills the yodeling, yowling, jingle-jangle dustbowl America that Dylan somehow tapped into. Dylan’s own version of the song appears on The Basement Tapes (1975).
  • Gram Parsons of the Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers – and brief solo glory before sister morphine escorted him to the next world – brings his particular wistful yearning to the Burrito’s fragmentary version of “I Shall Be Released,” an anthemic concert-closer of a tune that the Band had debuted on Music from Big Pink.
  • The Byrds were the greatest and most prolific Dylan interpreters and never more so than on their 1968 country-rock classic Sweetheart of the Rodeo, which features two standout, fully countrified Dylan covers: “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” and “Nothing was Delivered.” Dylan himself released versions of the songs on The Basement Tapes.

Posted on May 16th, 2011 at 8:49am.