Sundance Film Festival – Page 7 – LFM: Libertas Film Magazine

LFM Reviews Netflix’s What Happened, Miss Simone? @ The 2015 Sundance Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. If you ever heard Nina Simone live, you should have been on your best behavior, because she could vibe an inattentive audience member harder than Keith Jarrett. In all honesty, anyone not fully appreciating her classically trained piano chops and deep smoky vocals deserved a bit of shaming. A forceful presence on stage, Simone knew what she wanted and maintained high expectations—facts we should all respect. However, the tumult in her personal life also contributed to her uncompromising and sometimes self-sabotaging public persona. Through extensive archival recordings and interviews with her closest associates, Liz Garbus paints a complex portrait of the jazz and soul diva in What Happened, Miss Simone?, which screens during the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.

You could see Simone’s classical attack in the way she deconstructed and recombined standards into something entirely new and rhapsodic. Her great ambition was to play a classical recital at Carnegie Hall, but that path was not open to an African American child of the Jim Crow Yellow Dog Democrat South. She never really forgave America for that, even though she eventually played the hallowed hall as the folk and soul influenced jazz vocalist we remember so well.

Initially, she indeed had a lot of success with standards like “I Loves You Porgy” and “My Baby Just Cares for Me” and a strong manager in her husband, Andy Stroud. Unfortunately, their union took a sinister turn, with Stroud, the ex-cop, becoming increasingly violent as Simone became more politically radicalized. Although the late Stroud’s abuse is well documented in the film, he has a chance to speak for himself through never before seen footage shot for a prior unrealized documentary project. In fact, the film is remarkably balanced for a music doc, fully exploring Simone’s own abusive behavior to her daughter, executive producer Lisa Simone Kelly. It also suggests some of Simone’s late career scuffling was partly her own fault, as well as a function of her late diagnosed bipolar disorder. To Garbus’s credit, this is definitely not the stuff of hagiography.

WhatHappenedMissSimone2 — From "What Happened, Miss Simone?"

Garbus and her producers tracked down a lot of never before heard interviews conducted for Stephen Cleary, the “co-author” of her memoir and an earlier aborted autobiography. However, the holy cats centerpiece of the film is the 1976 Montreux Concert (wherein Simone pretty much gives everyone what-for), which has been available in full on DVD since 2006. Still, Garbus gives more context to better understand the off-stage dynamics at play.

For music fans, some of the best sequences feature Al Schackman, her longtime guitarist and musical director, who survived a baptism of fire to become her close musical collaborator. That is what the spirit of jazz is all about. After watching Miss Simone, you will also probably find “My Baby Just Cares for Me” is stuck in your head, but that’s not a bad thing. Highly recommended for fans of jazz vocals, What Happened, Miss Simone screens again next Friday (1/30) in Park City and tonight and next Saturday (1/31) in Salt Lake, as part of this year’s Sundance.

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted on January 23rd, 2014 at 4:12pm.

LFM’s Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: For Love of the Game: Talking with Kurt Russell About The Battered Bastards of Baseball

[Editor’s note: the post below appears today at The Huffington Post.]

It’s the kind of thing you probably missed over Thanksgiving dinner, while gnawing on a turkey leg, bickering with your uncle, or falling asleep during a Detroit Lions game: the Miami Marlins just signed an outfielder to a $325 million deal, the largest contract in sports history.

You read that correctly: $325 million. That’s Hunger Games money, Transformers money. It’s the kind of figure you associate with World Bank loans or Rolling Stone comeback tours. Apple needs at least a day to make that kind of cash.

The young outfielder, named Giancarlo Stanton – no, I hadn’t heard of him, either – apparently hit .288 with 37 home runs last season. (Note to Marlins: those were roughly my numbers playing T-ball in 5th grade.) Stanton later celebrated his deal in a Miami nightclub with a $20,000 bottle of champagne coated in 22-carat gold leaf. I don’t know whether he kept the bottle.

It says something about baseball today that a guy you’ve never heard of – again, he plays for the Marlins – can be signed for $25 million per year over 13 years. Frankly, it’s probably a bad deal for the Marlins – especially if the names Albert Pujols, Alex Rodriguez or Josh Hamilton ring a bell. Players paid more than they’re worth – more than some national economies are worth – rarely stay motivated purely by love of the game.

Love of the game. That’s what sports are supposed to be about, isn’t it?

When you think about love of the game, you think of Lou Gehrig – the Iron Horse – playing in 2,130 straight games until his body gave out from ALS. Or Pete Rose, aka Charlie Hustle, barreling over Ray Fosse in the 1970 All Star game to secure a seemingly meaningless win. Or Kirk Gibson, gamely limping around the bases after hitting his clutch home run in the 1988 World Series.

And you should also think of the Portland Mavericks, the subject of a wonderful new documentary called The Battered Bastards of Baseball that premiered this past year at Sundance and is currently showing on Netflix.

My writing partner Govindini Murty and I caught Battered Bastards at Sundance and also at this year’s Los Angeles Film Festival. At the Sundance screening we had the chance to speak to Kurt Russell, who’s interviewed in the film, along with his nephews Chapman Way and Maclain Way, Battered Bastards‘ co-directors.

LFM's Jason Apuzzo & Kurt Russell at Sundance 2014.

The Mavericks – an independent, Class A minor league baseball team between 1973-77 – were the brainchild of Bing Russell, the actor best known for playing deputy sheriff Clem on TV’s Bonanza. A hugely colorful showman with a fast wit (“I played Clem for 13 years on Bonanza and never solved a case”), Russell appeared in countless film and TV westerns, and made a career of getting killed on camera – most notably in Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo and John Ford’s The Horse Soldiers.

Of course, Russell is best known today as the father of Kurt Russell, who himself played for the Mavericks in 1973.

As Battered Bastards relates, Bing served as a bat boy for the mighty New York Yankees between 1936-41, when he got to know legends of the game like Joe DiMaggio, Lefty Gomez and Lou Gehrig (who gave young Bing his bat after hitting the final home run of his storied career). Although Bing later tried his hand at pro baseball, an injury cut short his career – leading him to try an acting career in Hollywood.

His love of baseball never left him, however – so when his acting career stalled in the early 1970s, Russell jumped at the opportunity to bring pro baseball to Portland in 1973 after the prior team left town.

“Baseball was a big part of our family,” Maclain Way told us. “Kurt, our uncle, played professional baseball. Bing, himself, played professional baseball. We had cousins who played major league baseball, so baseball was a huge part of our life growing up. I played baseball in high school because of Bing – he taught me how to play.”

The upstart Mavericks would become a team like no one had seen before – totally unaffiliated with any big league franchise, and filled to the brim with misfits and rejects – a scrappy, real life Bad News Bears squad.

“He had a great eye for ball players,” Kurt Russell told us, speaking warmly of his father. “We knew we could put a competitive team together.”

Kurt Russell & LFM's Govindini Murty at Sundance 2014.

Managed by restaurant owner Frank “The Flake” Peters, the Mavericks’ roster of wild characters would include: a shaggy, 33 year-old high school English teacher named Larry Colton (who’d later be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize); 38 year-old ex-Yankee Jim “Bulldog” Bouton (who’d been blackballed from baseball after writing a wild tell-all memoir); Joe Garza (aka “JoGarza”), a madman utility player who waved flaming brooms when the Mavericks swept opposing teams; Rob Nelson, who invented Big League Chew bubble gum in the Mavericks’ bullpen; star outfielder Reggie Thomas, who took a limo to games even though he lived only a block from the stadium; and fiery batboy Todd Field, who once got tossed from a game, and later became an Academy Award-nominated writer-director.

And, of course, there was Kurt Russell. “I got injured [playing minor league baseball in Texas], so I had the opportunity to go to Portland and help them get the ball club started,” Russell told us.

“It was just a time in my Dad’s life where I was really happy he was involving himself in something completely new,” says Russell. “It was a big part of our lives.” Continue reading LFM’s Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: For Love of the Game: Talking with Kurt Russell About The Battered Bastards of Baseball

LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: Music Made by People, not Algorithms: a DVD Review of Frank

[Editor’s note: the post below appears today at The Huffington Post.]

By Govindini Murty. We’re told that in our digital future music will be created by computer algorithms. But could an algorithm make music anywhere near as weird and wonderful as Frank? Frank is the titular character of Lenny Abrahamson’s touching and funny new black-comedy Frank, an ode to the irreplaceable nature of quirky, individual human creativity.

Coming out on DVD/Blu-ray December 9th, Frank premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year to rave reviews. The movie is inspired by the true story of Chris Sievey, a British musician and comedian who performed wearing a large paper-mâché head under the pseudonym Frank Sidebottom.

If you’re seeking a cinematic antidote to our flattened-out, Big Data, crowd-sourced, mass conformist digital age, then take the time to see Frank. Frank is a paean to true creativity – the kind of creativity that can only come from an individual.

Frank stars Michael Fassbender as the eponymous musician – a mysterious, wildly talented singer-songwriter who wears a large paper-mâché head over his face at all times. Frank is supported in his musical efforts by a medley of eccentric band mates; these include nerdy keyboardist Jon (Domhnall Gleeson), surly theremin player Clara (Maggie Gyllenhaal), and troubled band manager Don (Scoot McNairy).

The story is told from the point of view of Jon (Domhnall Gleeson), a would-be keyboardist and song-writer who spends his days searching for poetic inspiration in his quiet seaside town, while posting random updates on social media about what sandwiches he’s eaten, his humdrum home life, and so forth.

One day while staring blankly out at the ocean, Jon witnesses a man being rescued from an attempted drowning. It turns out the man is the keyboardist for an avant-garde band with the unpronounceable name of “The Soronprfbs.” Jon meets the band’s manager Don (Scoot McNairy) and is invited to play with the band that night.

Jon is enthralled by the chaotic creativity of the band – so different from his own dull existence- and in particular by the manic, oddly compelling performance of Frank, a figure wearing a large, round head with blank, staring eyes and a goofy, painted-on smile. Jon seems to make the right impression on Frank, and so Frank invites Jon to join the band at a remote country house in Ireland to record their next album.

Jon is over the moon with joy, convinced that being in close proximity to musical genius will finally unleash his own creativity. However he soon learns that the other band members are suspicious of him – especially Clara – because they think that he’s a mediocrity only out to exploit Frank’s talent.

Unbeknownst to them, Jon is also secretly videotaping the band’s offbeat practice sessions (in which they find inspiration in things as diverse as bird calls, pouring water, and slamming doors) and uploading them to social media, gaining them an online following. Continue reading LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: Music Made by People, not Algorithms: a DVD Review of Frank

LFM’s Govindini Murty & Jason Apuzzo at The Huffington Post: The Double and the Christmas Holidays

[Editor’s note: the post below appeared this weekend at The Huffington Post.]

By Govindini Murty & Jason Apuzzo. Do you feel like you’re turning into a different person over the holidays? How about your fellow citizens – do they appear to be morphing into unrecognizable automata? The holidays can do that to you – especially in Los Angeles. It’s a time when people get consumed with travel schedules, holiday parties, frenzied “gifting,” and trying to keep up with the Kardashians – and forget to act like real human beings.

Just this past week we saw a grown man bark at a Starbucks barista because his eggnog latte wasn’t hot enough, soccer moms body-check each other grabbing at Target discount wreaths, and senior citizens hydroplane in a Mercedes while trying to grab a parking spot at a rainy mall.

Fellow citizens, enough is enough. Get some perspective – before you become ersatz human beings even your nearest and dearest wouldn’t recognize.

This is where indie cinema can offer some timely lessons on the perils of modern dehumanization. One of our favorite films at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year was The Double, starring Jesse Eisenberg and written and directed by Richard Ayoade. Currently out on DVD and VOD, the film is one of the smartest adaptations yet of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Double, the seminal novella of modern alienation.

Jesse Eisenberg plays Simon James, a meek office drone toiling away in a retro-futuristic dystopia of grimy office buildings and gray apartment flats. The bleak settings owe much to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and George Orwell’s 1984, while Simon’s character recalls Anthony Perkins’ persecuted office worker in Orson Welles’ adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial.

The hapless, ineffectual Simon loves a fellow office worker, Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), but he is completely unable to assert himself with her or with his co-workers – indeed, at times he is barely able to make it out of the office elevator. For this he is treated as if he is of little more consequence than the paint on the dingy office walls.

A wrench is thrown in the works one day when Simon is introduced to a new co-worker: a fellow named James Simon (also played by Eisenberg) who strangely enough, looks exactly like him. In personality, however, James is the opposite of Simon – smooth, assertive, full of charm and slick maneuvering. In short order, James takes credit for Simon’s work, double-crosses him with his boss, and starts putting moves on the lovely Hannah before Simon’s horrified eyes.

Making matters worse, no one seems to notice the striking similarity between Simon and James – something that infuriates poor Simon. James taunts Simon by stealing more and more of his life, eventually driving Simon to take desperate measures before a final, surreal denouement. Continue reading LFM’s Govindini Murty & Jason Apuzzo at The Huffington Post: The Double and the Christmas Holidays

China’s Injustice System on SundanceTV: LFM Reviews One Child

By Joe Bendel. The Chinese Communist Party has no shortage of criminal laws, but you wouldn’t call it a justice system. The guilty can freely buy their way out of prosecution and the wronged often spend decades fruitlessly petitioning the government for redress. Overturning an unjust capital conviction is not merely difficult, it is downright Kafkaesque. Nonetheless, that is the position a British adoptee finds herself in when she agrees to help her birthmother try to save the brother she never knew in the two-night mini-series One Child, which premieres on SundanceTV this Friday and Saturday.

Mei Ashley was put up for adoption as an infant, because she was a girl. Happily raised by her provincial middle class parents, Jim and Katherine Ashley, she is a rather well-adjusted, thoroughly English astrophysics student, until she gets a call out of the blue from China. Having traced her from the orphanage, journalist Qianyi implores her to come to China to help save her brother Li Jun. He happened to be at the wrong club on the wrong night, when the entitled son of a Guangzhou oligarch killed a Nigerian trader while on a drug-fueled rage. Ordinarily, his father would simply pay off the victim’s family, but since the Nigerian government demanded a prosecution, Li Jun was framed in his place.

Inconveniently, Ashley lacks the connections Qiangyi hoped for, but she comes to Guangzhou anyway, neglecting to explain the full circumstances of the trip to her protective parents. The first meeting with her birthmother is highly awkward, but when she visits her brother in prison, they share an instant connection. Much to the abject horror of the local British consular officer, Ashley gets involved with a group of dissident attorneys, hoping they can overturn Li Jun’s death sentence. To do so, they will have to convince eleven Chinese witnesses and four Nigerians to recant their testimony.

Screenwriter Guy Hibbert shows a keen understanding of the ruthlessness and arbitrary application of principle in the Party’s courts. There are scenes that directly echo Zhao Liang’s devastating documentary Petition, while the ticking clock generates just as much suspense as any well-executed (an unfortunate choice of words) death-row thriller. Yet frustratingly, One Child comes to a screeching halt whenever it cuts back to Mr. and Mrs. Ashley for another session of their hand-wringing.

Katie Leung plays Mei Ashley as a reasonably down-to-earth fish-out-of-water, without becoming annoyingly helpless. As Qiangyi, Linh Dan Pham is a smart and intriguing screen presence, while Junix Inocian steals scene after scene as Mr. Lin, a dodgy private investigator. Kunjue Li will also make some viewers wish human rights attorney Cheng hua has more screen time. However, Mardy Ma delivers the real punch to the solar plexus as Ashley’s achingly distraught birthmother, a true proletarian repeatedly victimized by the Party’s policies and corruption.

Frankly, when the Ashleys are not whining, One Child is a tight, tense, and topical international legal drama. Although One Child does not belabor the titular policy, the pain and guilt it causes are reflected with great sensitivity in every one of Ma’s scenes. It is also an opportune reminder of how dangerous it is to practice law in an honest and independent manner under the CCP. Just ask Ai Weiwei’s former lawyer Pu Zhiqiang, currently in prison, awaiting prosecution on highly specious charges. One Child gives viewers a sneak peak at the sort of challenges his defense team will face. Highly recommended as a gripping indictment of corruption and a complicated portrait of a post-“One Child Policy” family, One Child parts one and two air this Friday (12/5) and Saturday (12/6) on SundanceTV.

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted on December 3rd, 2014 at 3:59pm.

LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: Talking With Director Steven Knight About His Innovative and Enthralling Film Locke

[Editor’s Note: the post below appeared this week at The Huffington Post.]

By Govindini Murty. Locke may just be one of the best films of 2014. Superbly written and directed by Steven Knight and featuring a dazzling performance by Tom Hardy, Locke is a must-see for anyone who believes that human character is still the most compelling subject of the cinema. I saw Locke earlier this year when it played to rave reviews at Sundance, and spoke with Knight about his innovative and deeply personal film which is expanding this week to theaters nationwide.

In the film, Tom Hardy plays construction engineer Ivan Locke, a man who takes as much pride in the firm foundations of his buildings as he does in his unshakeable code of personal responsibility. One night, Locke leaves a construction job to drive from Birmingham to London to fulfill a mysterious promise. Along the way, he makes and receives a series of wrenching phone calls that bring his sense of personal duty into conflict with everyone and everything he loves.

I’m a big fan of films that use new digital tools to experiment with the traditional structure of the movies. , Locke succeeds at being both formally inventive and emotionally gripping. The entire movie, with the brief exception of the opening and closing shots, takes place in the interior of a car and features only one actor on-screen, Tom Hardy. At the Sundance premiere of Locke, director Steven Knight told me that he and his talented team used Red digital cameras to shoot the film continuously from beginning to end each night, like a stage play.

Stripped down to the bare essentials as a result, Locke focuses on what matters most: character, emotion, and story. The film proves that even in the contemporary cinema, with its obsession with surface visual effects, movies can still delve below the surface and capture something essential about human nature in much the same way literature can.

In Locke this is largely done through the power of the close-up. In the best movies, the close-up serves to bring emotional transparency to a film, whereby the candor of an actor and the attentiveness of a director work together to draw out the inner life of a character onto the big screen. And it’s there on the big screen that the human face takes on mythic qualities, elevating specific human experiences into universal truths. On the big screen there’s no place to hide as an actor – but if one is as talented as Tom Hardy, one doesn’t need to. Hardy sensitively pulls off Ivan Locke’s volatile and heartbreaking mixture of machismo, passion, humor, anger, and doubt – depicting Locke like a bear trapped in a cage of his own making.

I spoke with Steven Knight (Academy Award nominated screenwriter for Dirty Pretty Things) at the Sundance premiere of Locke and asked him how he pulled off such a technically complicated and emotionally wrenching film. The interview has been edited for length.

GM: I’d like to ask you about the innovative way you made the film. Why did you choose to do such a tight character study and film it in these continuous takes? Tell me about your process.

SK: I just finished making a film with Jason Statham the conventional way [2013’s Redemption]. And two things occurred. One was: anything we shot from the car at night was beautiful, and I thought the thing to do would be to make an installation of that – make it as a piece of art with just the moving traffic patterns.

And then, I also asked the question of myself: the basic task here is to get a lot of people into a room, turn the lights off, and get them to look at a screen for 90 minutes. That’s the basic job you’re doing. [But] are there other ways of doing it? So I thought that maybe that beautiful frame of the moving road could be the theater. And … it would need to be one man, and if you’re going to get one man, it better be Tom Hardy. So I approached him and I said I want you to do a play, effectively. I want to shoot it as a play, but in the environment of a car. He was really keen, read the script and the next weekend we were shooting it. The whole point all the way through was to shoot it in sequence so that it’s an actor’s performance. Don’t split it up, don’t turn it into a conventional way of shooting it. And I think the rewards are immense, because the actors feel like they are in control of their own performances. Continue reading LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: Talking With Director Steven Knight About His Innovative and Enthralling Film Locke