Category: Tribeca Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. This almost goes without saying, but good golly, did the American cycling establishment ever pick the wrong athlete to put all their PR chips on. It is especially frustrating considering what a great champion they had in Greg LeMond. LeMond has indeed had his issues with Sheryl Crow’s ex, but his greatest rivalry was with a member of his own team. John Dower chronicles the pitched battle between LeMond and Bernard “The Badger” Hinault in Slaying the Badger, which screens during this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

LeMond was the great American hope of cycling at a time when the sport was totally off the American radar. At least the French noticed when he started dominating international competitions. Soon the American was recruited for the prestigious La Vie Claire team, headed by Hinault, the four time Tour de France winner. There was a general understanding that if LeMond would help Hinault win a coveted fifth Tour in 1985, Hinault would ride in support of LeMond in 1986. It was not just unspoken agreement, it was evidently quite well verbalized.

LeMond held up his end of the bargain in 1985, albeit under controversial circumstances. Frankly, he probably could have won, but deliberately held back on coach Paul Köchli’s instructions. After the fact, he learned Hinault’s momentary setback involved far more lost time than the coach let on. As a result, he felt rather betrayed when Köchli introduced a new policy for 1986: every man for himself.

It might sound like hyperbole, but Slaying could arguably be considered the sports documentary equivalent of Rashomon. Few docs on any subject feature such widely divergent interpretations of the same events. For what its worth, the archival interview and press conference footage consistently support LeMond’s side of the story.

Even when wearing an uncomfortable looking back brace necessitated by an auto accident, LeMond is a lively, but well spoken interview subject—and he has much to say. Scenes with his wife Kathy further humanize him, clearly suggesting they still have that old magic going on. Appropriately, Dower also scores a sit down with The Badger, who somehow comes through the film relatively unsullied. Köchli is a different matter. His dissembling and hair-splitting degenerates into a downright risible spectacle. If backpedalling were a sport in its own right, he would be its Michael Jordan.

Even if you know every stage of the 1986 Tour by heart, Dower still builds the suspense quite adroitly. By the same token, viewers who only know the sport for its unfortunate recent developments will find themselves completely caught up in the film. This is just first class documentary storytelling all the way around. Highly recommended, Slaying the Badger screens again this Saturday (4/26) as part of the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival.

LFM GRADE: A

Posted on April 25th, 2014 at 11:26pm.

By Joe Bendel. Honestly, Bushwick hipsters are horrifying enough. Adding a few vampires is almost redundant. They are all just life-sucking parasites. At least that is the impression one gets from Onur Tukel’s desperately unfunny comedy, Summer of Blood, which inflicts its pain on the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival.

Erik Sparrow is a nauseatingly self-absorbed slacker who thinks the world owes him a living. After rejecting his career-oriented girlfriend’s marriage proposal out of commitment phobia, he discovers most single women are put off by his schlubby underachiever shtick. This so wounds his entitled ego, he willingly submits to a vampire, who turns him rather than killing him. Suddenly, Sparrow is doing better with the ladies, but he also has that undead need to feed.

Apparently out of a misguided sense of BKLN solidarity, some critics have likened Blood to the vastly superior work of Woody Allen and Larry David, but those comparisons are way off the mark. At their best, Allen, David, and Seinfeld knowingly undercut their neurotic pretensions, but Tukel celebrates Sparrow’s narcissism, elevating it to heroic levels. That would be fine, if the comedy clicked to any extent. Take for instance his favorite punchline—“is this because I’m Turkish”—and imagine how well it works with multiple repetitions.

Similarly, about the second or third time Blood shows us Sparrow flying solo in a men’s room stall we start to realize just how much the film hates its potential audience. In fact, the smarmy vibe is well matched by the film’s dingy look, giving the impression it was shot with split pea soup smeared on the digital lens. The stilted performances do not help either, unless you dig the in-joke of indie directors such as Johnathan Coauette popping up in small cameos.

The last press screening I attended that was as stony silent as the Blood p&i was for Claude Lanzmann’s The Last of the Unjust. Obviously, the two films bear no comparison. The point is nobody could even generate a chuckle for the Brooklyn vampires. A thoroughly unpleasant failure by any rational aesthetic standard, Summer of Blood is absolutely not recommended when it screens again tomorrow (4/26) during this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. If you already have a ticket, scalp it in front of the theater. Instead, try to catch Slaying the Badger, Battered Bastards of Baseball, or Black Coal, Thin Ice, three great Tribeca selections also showing on Saturday.

LFM GRADE: F

Posted on April 25th, 2014 at 11:20pm.

By Joe Bendel. Clark Terry’s distinctive personal sound has been justly hailed as the “happiest” in all jazzdom. Nobody could lift your spirits in live performance like he could, so it will be especially difficult for his fans to see Terry’s suffering the ravages of age and ill health. Yet, he doggedly continues to mentor his latest student, forging an unusually close relationship with blind Justin Kauflin. Alan Hicks follows four eventful years of their jazz lives in Keep On Keepin’ On, which screens during this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

Terry is the only musician to play in the Ellington, Basie, and Tonight Show bands. Thelonius Monk’s last real studio sideman gig was for Terry, one of the trumpeter and flugelhornist’s 905 documented recording sessions. If you didn’t know already, he is the real deal, but he has always been willing to take young musicians under his wing. However, Kauflin is more than just his latest pupil.

Born with degenerative vision that failed completely during his grade school years, Kauflin replaced his enthusiasm for sports with music. Despite his obvious talent, he suffers from confidence issues. Frustratingly, he just cannot seem to find sideman gigs, for conspicuously obvious reasons. Surely, Terry must know someone who can help, right? As a matter of fact, he once gave lessons to a young cat named Quincy Jones, who happens to be one of the producers of Keep On.

At times, Hicks’ intimate access to the two musicians feels like more of a curse than a blessing. He captures moments of pain and indignity that are uncomfortable to watch, but they accurately present the messiness of reality. For jazz fans, it is also bittersweet to see the late great Mulgrew Miller briefly appearing in an interview segment. On the flip side, it should be noted Quincy Jones looks eternally fab.

Frankly, it is important to accentuate the positive in Keep On. Perhaps providentially, one of Terry’s greatest hits was “Mumbles,” featuring his sly nonsensical blues vocalizing, considering his lessons now largely depend on his scatting chops. As bad as things get, Terry keeps plugging away with and on behalf of Kauflin, because you cannot keep a great man down.

Indeed, great is the right term. Jazz fans respect Bird and Dizzy, revere Duke and Armstrong, but its Clark Terry that we love. For years he would regularly headline one of the major New York clubs every other month or so, giving us a chance to recharge our spiritual batteries. It is hard to accept we probably will not be seeing him lead that familiar quintet again (featuring David Glasser on alto, Don Friedman on piano, Marcus McLaurine on bass, and Sylvia Cuenca on drums), but that appears to be the case. If you missed them, you missed out.

Clearly, Hicks understands Terry’s musical significance and appreciates the dedication of his wife Gwen. Keep On is definitely a happy-sad kind of film, instilling optimism in the next generation, while paying tribute to those who came before them. You will probably need to listen to a good dose of Terry after viewing Keep On Keepin’ On to cheer yourself up, but it is still highly recommended for jazz fans when it screens again this Friday (4/25) during the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival.

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted on April 24th,2014 at 10:53pm.

By Joe Bendel. We do not read short story writer Richard Connell very much anymore, except for his constantly anthologized “The Most Dangerous Game.” Years after the Joel McCrea-Irving Pichel adaptation, exploitation filmmakers keep “paying homage.” The latest is not the greatest, but midnight movie fans have certainly seen worse than Christopher Denham’s Preservation, which screens during the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival.

For reasons that escape us, Mike Neary has organized a nostalgic hunting trip with his neglected (and secretly pregnant) wife Wit and his surly brother Sean, who has just been discharged from the military under mysterious circumstances. He seems a little tense. His disposition will not improve when their gear is stolen. Wisely, brother Mike chose an abandoned state park for sentimental reasons, so with their cell phones gone, the three will be totally on their own.

Frankly, the first two acts rather try a viewers’ patience. Here is a survival tip: if a gang of psycho hunters are stalking you, give them that extra whack if you ever get the drop on one of them. Instead, the Nearys are constantly letting them pop back up, with dire consequences.

However, when the hunted finally becomes the proper hunter, Preservation starts to deliver the sort of sleazy vicarious payback we went in looking for. For a good portion of the film, the hunters have no villainous personality because of the admittedly creepy masks they wear. Yet, when we finally come to understand who they are, it is rather unsettling, offering an unexpected commentary on our increasingly desensitized nature.

Wrenn Schmidt is pretty convincing as the reluctant action heroine, while Pablo Schreiber (Liev’s half-brother) nicely skirts the line between intense and kind of crazy as Sean Neary. In contrast, Aaron Staton seems rather pale vanilla in comparison.

Preservation is mostly just standard issue survivalist fare, but it looks like Hitchcock’s Vertigo compared to the thematically similar Black Rock. Scattering a few laughs amid the bloodshed, Preservation only occasionally raises the exploitation bar above the genre minimum. If that’s good enough for you, it screens again this Friday (4/25) during the Tribeca Film Festival.

LFM GRADE: C+

Posted on April 24th, 2014 at 10:48pm.