John Prine in YOU GOT GOLD: A CELEBRATION OF JOHN PRINE. Courtesy of Abramarama.
The experience of watching You Got Gold is better than the movie itself. After all, it’s just a paint-by-the-numbers concert film – documenting a Nashville tribute concert with musical artists performing John Prine songs and telling stories about him. But the film, aptly subtitled A Celebration of John Prine, is elevated by Prine himself, his relentless playfulness and his concise, searing lyrics, so venerated by his peers, beloved by fans and acquaintances.
Prine’s song lyrics were poetry of the highest order, as in the unsurpassed fundamental truths and ultra-real humanity of Sam Stone, Souvenirs and Hello in There, Lyle Lovett recalls being stunned by the Prine lyric “naked as the eyes of a clown”. I remember being frozen by “There’s a hole in Daddy’s arm where the money goes.”
A great song can be performed in many genres. The deeply soulful War and Treaty bring a new dimension to Prine’s Knockin’ on your Screen Door. Rocker Bob Weir shreds on Great Rain.
Jason Isbell, Brandi Carlile and Dwight Yoakum all perform. Prine’s longtime friend and collaborator Bonnie Raitt tells of how she thought of them as Tom Sawyer and Becky-style playmates and performs the iconic Angel from Montgomery.
Lucinda Williams performs her own song about working with Prine, the hilarious but wistful Working On a Song (what could go wrong?).
John Prine was a great American humorist. Think Mark Twain and Will Rogers. One of his funniest songs, In Spite of Ourselves, is featured, and another, Illegal Smile, is referenced. (His funniest, Let’s Talk Dirty in Hawaiian, isn’t in the movie.)
This is ultimate Feel Good movie. If you know John Prine, You Got Gold is a Must See. If you don’t, you won’t regret watching it, either. Here’s a link to the trailer.
Photo caption: Stellan Skarsgard and Renate Reinsve in SENTIMENTAL VALUE. Courtesy of NEON.
Sentimental Value opens with Norway’s top stage actress, Nora Borg (Renate Reinsve) on the verge of an epic stage fright meltdown on opening night. Afterwards, she and her historian sister Agnes (Inga Ibdotter Lilleaas) try to get through the funeral of their mother. Unexpectedly, their estranged father Gustave (Stellan Skarsgaard) appears at the family gathering to pay his expects…and perhaps more. Having seen little of their father since they were young girls, Nora and Agnes find his surprising visit to be less of a comfort and perhaps even a provocation. Nevertheless, Gustave plods forth, trying to make nice.
Gustave is a famous European art film director at the end of his career. He’s now ready to make his final film, and he’s written a screenplay for Nora to star in. Still, raging at his decades of emotional neglect, Nora refuses.
Gustave persists hanging around, and lucks into casting the major Hollywood star Rachel (Elle Fanning) as his lead. Awkwardly, Gustave still owns the family home, which never got transferred during the divorce. Now he plans to use it as the shooting location for the film.
Both Nora and Agnes were traumatized by their parents’ breakup. Nora’s anxiety and attachment issues are more obvious, but Agnes’ life has been affected too.
Gustave is self-absorbed, stubborn and often emotionally tone-deaf. But what made him that way? Writer-director Joachim Trier reveals the history of the Borg family home, through flashbacks and through Agnes’ research. What happened in the house to Gustave’s mother molded her. And what Gustave saw of his mother molded him, too. Now, the family dominoes have continued to fall on Nora and Agnes.
Joachim Trier is one of contemporary cinema’s greatest story-tellers, as he has demonstrated in his breakthrough film Reprise, the grievously overlooked Louder Than Bombs and his Oscar-nominated The Worst Person in the World, which also starred Reinsve. Here, we think we’re watching a conventional family drama about a long-absent father, until Trier pulls us into a study of inter-generational emotional damage.
Reinsve and Skarsgard have justly received loads of recognition for their superbly nuanced performances. I was just as impressed by the work of Inga Ibdotter Lilleaas as Agnes, who becomes more and more central as the story evolves.
Trier, Skarsgard and Reinsve will be in the hunt for Oscar nominations for their work here. Sentimental Value is in theaters.
Photo caption: Zoey Deutch and Guillaume Marbeck in NOUVELLE VAGUE. Photo credit. Jean-Louis Fernandez; courtesy of Netflix
With Nouvelle Vague, one of America’s greatest filmmakers, Richard Linklater, pays tribute to the French New Wave, which invigorated global cinema and inspired generations of American indie filmmakers. Nouvelle Vague, Linklater’s first film in French, tells the story of Jean-Luc Godard making his first film, the groundbreaking and influential Breathless. And it’s a hoot.
The French New Wave was a period when the young film writers at a cinema magazine got to direct their own movies. Basically, this was a time in the late 1950s when a bunch of movie nerds got to create their own cinema, resulting in a burst of freshness and originality. Godard’s peers Francois Truffaut and Claude Chabrol had already transitioned from film critic to movie director, but Godard still hadn’t directed his first film, and he was itching to get started.
With all the arrogance of a 29-year-old novice who is certain of his abilities, Godard famously proclaimed that all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun. This is that film.
In Nouvelle Vague, Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) gets the casting gift of a famous Hollywood starlet, Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), to team with his boxer buddy Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin, who is an acting novice. Godard leads his cast and crew on an anarchic 20-day shoot that Godard makes up as he goes along, with no script and no shooting schedule, which challenges the mental health of his producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfurst). No one can tell if the film, if it gets finished, will be any good.
The key here is the character of Godard himself (brilliantly played by Marbeck in his feature debut), who is posing as an important artist even as he tries to become one, wearing sunglasses day and night. A subversive trickster, he is strong-willed and self-confident for sure, but is he just a narcissistic dilettante? Is his artistic vision just a delusion? So, the making of Breathless is a wild ride, one turns out to be interesting because we know that Breathless will turn out to be an artistic success and an important, influential film.
Linklater fills the Nouvelle Vague with a Who’s Who of French New Wave figures and plenty of jokey references to that style of filmmaking. LInklater even shows the last scene of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, with its indelible freeze-frame, reflected in Godard’s sunglasses.
So, can you enjoy Nouvelle Vague even if you’re unfamiliar with the French New Wave, and haven’t seen any Godard films? Yes. The madcap nature of the shoot, and the other characters all reacting with amusement, frustration and disbelief to Godard’s outsized personality are plenty entertaining.
But, if you a cinephile, then Nouvelle Vague is a Must See. Linklater’s references are delightful. The actors physically look just like the real people they are playing, and Zoey Deutsch looks phenomenal in Seberg’s iconic blonde pixie cut and Breton stripes. Not many faces resemble Belmondo’s but Aubrey Dullin’s does; Dullin perfectly captures Belmondo’s rogueish charm and working class lack of pretension.
This is the Jean-Luc Godard of his early masterpieces (Breathless, Contempt, Band of Outsiders), before his arrogance made him into a tiresome polemicist. That later insufferable Godard is satirized in Godard, Mon Amour by Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist), which would make a fine second feature on the double bill. (I have found all of the Godard films since 1967’s Weekend to range from disappointing to completely unwatchable.)
Photo caption: Jeremy Allen White in DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE. Courtesy of 20th Century Studios.
As the Bruce Springsteen docudrama Deliver Me from Nowhere opens, Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) is belting out the massive hit Hungry Heart to cap off his The River tour in 1981. Afterwards, his manager/producer/confidante Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) finds him sitting alone in the bowels of the arena, exhausted and depleted. Too nice a guy to blow off chatting with local radio personalities, Springsteen rallies, but Landau can see that he’s fried.
Landau sets up Springsteen at a rented house in the countryside of Colts Neck, New Jersey. It’s an obscure enough location, so he can rest in privacy, but still only a 25-minute drive to Bruce’s old stomping grounds in Asbury Park. Bruce sits around, decompressing in the darkened house, pondering something other than his future. While their record company is eager for another exuberant, rockin’ Springsteen album and tour, Landau does his best to insulate Springsteen from the pressure.
Bruce experiences a few lighthearted moments, sitting in with the house band at The Stone Pony and having a dalliance with a single mom (a fictional character played by the Australian actress Odessa Young). The Terence Malick movie Badlands sparks his interest and he starts researching the teen killing spree that the film was based on. But mostly, he’s brooding.
Jeremy Allen White in DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE. Courtesy of 20th Century Studios.
In flashback, Deliver Me from Evil depicts the childhood that Bruce is reflecting on, dominated by his haunted and sometimes brutish father Doug (Stephen Graham). Doug had his demons, and now Bruce’s own demons are blocking his creative work. Bruce Springsteen is depressed, and that’s what Deliver Me from Evil is really about. In publicity for the film, Springsteen is oft crediting Landau for steering him to professional help and advocating for the destigmatization of mental health treatment.
The scenes with Doug Springsteen both with the young Bruce and the adult Bruce – are the core of Deliver Me from Evil.
The plot centers on Springsteen’s dark contemplations leading to his writing his darkest material yet, the songs that make up his Nebraska album. He records the material by himself, at home and on a cassette recorder, intending to record them in a studio with the E Street Band. The unconventional artistic choices that followed and the battle with his own record company, with Landau’s unwavering support, make up the rest of the story.
(In the same period, Springsteen also wrote Born in the U.S.A., Glory Days and I’m on Fire, which were later successful in arrangements with the full E Street Band on the Born in the U.S.A. album which followed Nebraska.)
Deliver Me from Evil depends on an actor’s success in a ballsy challenge – playing a person that all of us have watched closely for decades. Fortunately, Jeremy Allen White can match Bruce Springsteen in charisma and intensity, and that allows White to inhabit the character of Springsteen without resorting to impersonation.
Stephen Graham in DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE. Courtesy of 20th Century Studios.
Stephen Graham delivers another indelible performance as Doug, capturing the core disappointment and bitterness that leak out in rage and confusion. After early-career roles in Gangs of New York and Band of Brothers, the stocky Englishman has emerged as one of our great character actors, perhaps best in British crime mini-series like Little Boy Blue, Line of Duty, and Adolescence. He also appears in Hollywood movies like Rocketman and the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise (he plays Scrum), and the 2012 refresh of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Along the way, he has become a one-man cottage industry playing fabled American gangsters – Baby Face Nelson in Public Enemies, Al Capone in Boardwalk Empire, and Tony Provenzano in The Irishman. I just love this guy’s work.
Gaby Hoffman is excellent as Springsteen’s mom.
Deliver Me from Nowhere’s director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart) and Warren Zanes wrote the screenplay, adapting Zanes’ book about the writing and recording of Nebraska. Deliver Me from Nowhere was made with the participation and support of Springsteen and Landau; that provides lots insight to the screenplay, although Landau’s character is a bit saintly, for my taste. However, the portrayal of Springsteen is unsparing.
The E Street Band isn’t on screen much, but I didn’t completely swallow the depiction of certain band members. But that’s just a quibble about a film otherwise brimming with authenticity.
Deliver Me from Nowhere, as smart and genuine as it is, is irresistiblyentertaining.
Photo caption: Ethan Hawke in BLUE MOON. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
The protagonist of Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon is lyricist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke), who Linklater immediately shows us dying of alcoholism, before taking us to a night eight months earlier. Hart, having left the opening night production of Oklahoma!, has entered a familiar haven, the bar at Sardi’s, where he is ready, as always, to hold forth. His longtime partner Richard Rodgers has dumped him for a new collaborator, Oscar Hammerstein, and Hart has immediately recognized that the new duo’s debut musical would dwarf the success of the Rodgers and Hart work. It’s hard to feel good about yourself when you are dumped by your partner of 24 years, who then soars to new heights with a different collaborator.
Beginning in 1919 (when Hart was 24 and Rodgers only 17), the two created 28 stage musicals (including Babes in Arms and Pal Joey and more than 500 songs for Broadway and Hollywood, many of which have become American standards, like Manhattan, The Lady Is a Tramp, My Funny Valentine, and, of course, Blue Moon.
Seeing that body of work eclipsed in one night has Hart reeling. But, now, in 1943, Hart was 48 and Rodgers 41. Hart’s alcoholism has made him unreliable, so Rodger has moved on. Hart’s gift at wordplay is as brilliant as ever, but his confidence is crushed – and he is desperate to work again, and, in his wildest dreams, with Rodgers.
Hart’s career desperation is matched by his romantic desperation – from a doomed fixation with the comely Yale coed, Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley). Elizabeth is self-confident and ambitious, towers over the shrimpish Hart and can match wits with him . Hart is a successful celebrity, but not rich or conventionally attractive, and being an over-the-hill drunken gay man, neither the audience or other characters in Blue Moon see Hart’s pursuit of Elizabeth as anything but a pathetic fantasy.
Margaret Qualley and Ethan Hawke in BLUE MOON. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
Hart presides over all conversation in the bar, and proves himself a most witty raconteur. Hart, usually unintentionally, reveals himself in banter with Sardi’s affable bartender (an excellent Bobby Cannavale).
Finally, Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) leads in his entourage from Oklahoma! for the opening night party, and Hart explodes into the full wheedle. Moment by moment, we learn more about Rodger’s complicated experience with Hart. It’s clear that Rodgers is genuinely grateful for Hart’s contribution to his life and is also relieved not to no longer be a secondary victim of Hart’s drinking. Rodgers still is affectionate and nostalgic with Hart, but wary about reliving Hart’s worst behavior. When Hart offers a celebratory glass of champagne, Rodgers recoils and barks, “I won’t drink with you!”, registering the pain that Hart’s drinking has inflicted on him over many years.
Why isn’t Blue Moon, a portrait of a man’s crash-and-burn, unwatchably sad?
Foremost, even when Hart is being sad, he’s very, very funny.
Hawke’s performance is deliciously vivid.
We stay engaged in sussing out the complicated relationship between Hart and Rodgers.
We delight in the stellar cast and in Richard Linklater’s storytelling genius.
Hawke is one of our very most interesting actors, and his turn as Hart is exceptional, plumbing all of Hart’s desperation, self-loathing and vulnerability. Of course, Hawke, who is 5′ 10″, can play a dreamy romantic lead, so there’s some movie magic – and a bad comb over – employed to help us see him as a 5 foot gnome. Others have described Hawke’s performance here as career-topping, but it’s hard for me to see this performance, as good as it is, as even better than those in Before Sunrise, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, and First Reformed, for example.
Andrew Scott and Ethan Hawke in BLUE MOON. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
Lorenz Hart is a flashy role, but Andrew Scott (Tom Ripley in the recent television episodic Ripley) is quietly mesmerizing as Rodgers, who struggles to contain the embarrassment, wariness, revulsion, pity and love that Hart triggers. Scott won the supporting actor Silver Bear at the Berlinale for this performance.
Qualley just seems to brighten every movie that she’s in – shall we call it the Joan Blondell quality?
One of the most interesting encounters in Blue Moon is between Hart and another bar patron, the writer E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy). The two know and admire each other’s work, although they are conversing for the first time. White can keep up with Hart intellectually, and also has the emotional intelligence to see, without comment, what’s going on with Hart. It’s a remarkably subtle performance by Kennedy.
The entire movie takes place in Sardi’s, except for two or three minutes at and near the beginning. Over 80% of the story takes place in Sardi’s bar. But Blue Moon never looks as inexpensive as it must be. No filmmaker has delivered more fine movies on low budgets than Linklater; I couldn’t find a Linklater movie budgeted at more than a frugal $35 million (School of Rock). Nevertheless, Linklater has created the three most thoughtful romances in cinema (the Before Sunrise series) and the milennium’s best film (Boyhood), along with launching an entire generation of actors in Dazed and Confused.
Here, Linklater turns one night into a vivid portrait of a man’s life and times, and Blue Moon is both funny and profound.
The Last Movie is Dennis Hopper’s notoriously “lost film”, buried by a hostile movie studio in 1971 and still generally unavailable. Given Hopper’s drug addled, out-of-control state during this decade, I was expecting a mess. But what is on the screen is an excellent 1970s art film, beautifully shot by László Kovács. There is a surreal thread that not everyone will buy into, but I think the movie works as a whole.
Hopper plays a Hollywood horse wrangler who is in Peru for a location shoot. He has gone native. setting up local girlfriend Maria (Stella Garcia) in a modern house. He’s already alienated, but a fatal accident on the movie set triggers him into rejecting Western modernity in favor of indigenous Peru. His paradise in the Andes becomes elusive as he meets Ugly American visitors. And then things get really weird, as the local indigenous people begin acting out the movie shoot – only without film. It is a parable of colonialism.
That weirdness, Hopper’s experimentation with the non-chronological construction of the film and some disjointedness/incoherence in the story will be off-putting for many viewers and keeps The Last Movie from being a Great Film. Roger Ebert called it “a wasteland of cinematic wreckage” and condemned it to one star. That said, the setting and Kovács’ cinematography make for a visually stunning film.
Julie Adams in THE LAST MOVIE
Hopper is always interesting as an actor, but The Last Movie features excellent, perhaps career-topping, performances by Stella Garcia, Julie Adams and Don Gordon.
Stella Garcia in THE LAST MOVIE
Garcia projects the inner strength and ambition of a Maria who sees herself as far more than the gringo’s plaything. On the face of it, Maria seems exploited. but she has a strong sense of her value and she insists on getting her due. Anyone who sees her as only arm candy is underestimating her at their own risk. Garcia had already amassed 23 of her 30 screen credits before The Last Movie, then played the top female character in Joe Kidd, and didn’t do much screen acting afterwards.
Julie Adams plays the sexually voracious wife of a visiting American businessman, capable of cruelly inflicting humiliation. With a career that started in the Studio Era (she co-starred with James Stewart and Rock Hudson in 1952’s Bend of the River), I can’t imagine that she got many scripts like this, and her performance is incendiary.
Prolific character actor Don Gordon plays Neville, another American expat. Neville is the guy who thinks up a get-rich-quick idea but doesn’t take into account that someone richer, more powerful and with more business sense can take the whole thing away from him. Gordon’s drunk scene is just perfect, especially in capturing how really drunk people don’t notice things about themselves or others. Gordon had the fourth lead in Bullitt and Papillon, and guest-starred in scores of television shows, but his very best work was in The Last Movie and in Hopper’s searing Out of the Blue (aka No Looking Back).
Don Gordon (right) in THE LAST MOVIE
And here’s some fun for movie fans. Fabled outlaw director Sam Fuller plays the director of the movie-within-the-movie. Various cinema notables show up as part of the film crew and at the cast party: Toni Basil, Rod Cameron, Peter Fonda, Henry Jaglom, Kris Kristofferson, Dean Stockwell, Sylvia Miles, John Philip Law, James Mitchum, Michelle Phillips (Dennis Hopper’s wife for eight DAYS), Dean Stockwell and Russ Tamblyn.
What happened to The Last Movie and why did it become a Lost Film? First, Dennis Hopper’s self-indulgence and drug abuse caused him to discard his script, co-written by Stewart Stern, and wing it on the principal photography by cobbling together improvisations that appealed to him at the time. Then Hopper hung on to the film, constantly re-editing it, blowing past his deadline by six months. Universal Pictures mogul Lew Wasserman had given Hopper $i million and creative control; finally getting a movie that was late and grievously over budget – and a movie he found incoherent – Wasserman was outraged and buried The Last Movie’s distribution and publicity. The fiasco ruined Hopper’s reputation in the industry, and he wasn’t able to direct another movie until Out of the Blue in 1980.
I got to see The Last Movie at a 2017 special event curated by the now defunct Cinema Club Silicon Valley. The screening of The Last Movie was preceded by Along for the Ride, the 2016 Dennis Hopper documentary from the perspective of Satya De La Manitou, Hopper’s personal assistant and wing man for forty years. (Along for the Ride is streamable from The Criterion Channel, Amazon, Vudu and YouTube.) The double feature was accompanied by a panel discussion with Along for the Ride director Nick Ebeling, filmmaker Alejandro Adams, film professor Sara Vizcarrondo and critic Fernando Croce.
Hopper regained the rights to The Last Movie in 2006, but was unable to release it on DVD before his death in 2010. Still close to a Lost Film, The Last Movie is only streamable on kanopy, and it occasional screens at repertory arthouses. I’m choosing not to embed the trailer because it unforgivably gives away the last shot.
Bix Biederbecke in BIX BIEDERBECKE: AIN’T NONE OF THEM PLAY LIKE HIM YET
The thorough documentary Bix Biederbecke: Ain’t None of Them Play Like Him Yet rediscovers a lost jazz legend. Bix Biederbecke was a cornet prodigy and an age peer of Louis Armstrong. His love for and obsession with music was undermined by alcoholism, and he drank himself to death at age 28 in 1931.
Biederbecke was an innovator and soulful performer. One of his bandmates compares the thrill of listening to Bix to hearing a woman say, Yes.
This superbly-sourced documentary was released in 1981 release, and includes interviews filmed in 1978-1980 with fellow musicians and band-mates, including his friend, Hoagy Carmichael. Bix’s sister also appears. There are also recordings of Bix’s performances.
Bix Biederbecke: Ain’t None of Them Play Like Him Yet has made my list of Longest Movie Titles.
This is a bit of a Lost Film, having been very, very hard to find on streaming platforms over the last few years. Bix Biederbecke: Ain’t None of Them Play Like Him Yet can now be streamed on Amazon.
Photo caption: Paul Reubens in PEE-WEE AS HIMSELF. Courtesy of HBP Max.
The delightfully wacky character Pee-Wee Herman sprang on the scene, seemingly from nowhere, sweetly celebrating his own weirdness. Pee-Wee was the creation of actor Paul Reubens. Reubens, of course, had a life before Pee-Wee, and he had a very private personal life distinct from his invented persona. Sadly, Reubens lost his privacy in, not one, but two career-killing tabloid scandals.
HBO Max is airing the bio-doc Pee-Wee as Himself, from the acclaimed Silicon Valley native, New York-based documentarian Matt Wolf. Wolf has an uncanny gift for finding compelling stories that everyone else has overlooked: Teenage, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, Spaceship Earth and Rustin. Here, Wolf reveals three stories, each in itself worthy of a documentary.
The first is Paul Reubens’ origin story – his childhood, his self-confidence as an avant garde art student and his comfort in an out gay lifestyle. Reubens was failing as an actor, and his overweening drive to be successful as an actor led him to leave his partner and go back in the closet.
The second is Pee-Wee’s creation story – how Reubens joined the famed The Groundlings improv group, working with the likes of Laraine Newman, Phil Hartman and Elvira, and originated several characters, one of which was Pee-Wee. Amazingly, Reubens, as Pee-Wee, was a winning contestant on The Gong Show and even The Dating Game. When Reubens failed to be selected for Saturday Night Live, he determined to produce his own TV show – and the sui generis Pee-Wee’s Playhouse was born. Another helluva story.
Finally, we come to the tabloid scandal, an unexpected comeback and then a second scandal. As Reubens himself ruefully notes, by the time he realized the privacy tradeoffs that come with fame, “the ink had dried on my pact with the devil”.
Wolf had elicited permission from Reubens to make a film about Reubens’ life, and secured 40 hours of on-camera interview footage. But the mercurial Reubens, highly ambivalent to sharing his personal story, kept pulling the plug on the project. In the interviews, Reubens often brings up that ambivalence and repeatedly jerks Wolf’s chain. When Reubens fell ill, Wolf was in a race against mortality to get Reubens back on board. Fortunately, Wolf succeeded.
We also hear from Reubens’ sister and his longtime personal assistant, along with old pals like Laraine Newman, Elvira and Natasha Lyonne. We see an archival interview of Phil Hartman, reflecting on what he saw as a betrayal by Reubens.
I’m not sure that I’ve seen another biodoc where the subject himself, so wounded and humbled, stiffens his dignity to reflect on his own brilliance and his suffering from both injustices and his own mistakes. Pee-Wee as Himself runs three hours and twenty-five minutes and is airing on two parts on HBO Max.
Photo caption: Paul Reubens in PEE-WEE AS HIMSELF. Courtesy of HBP Max.
Tomorrow, HBO Max begins airing the bio-doc Pee-Wee as Himself, from the acclaimed Silicon Valley native, New York-based documentarian Matt Wolf. Wolf has an uncanny gift for finding compelling stories that everyone else has overlooked: Teenage, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, Spaceship Earth and Rustin.
The delightfully wacky character Pee-Wee Herman sprang on the scene, seemingly from nowhere, sweetly celebrating his own weirdness. Pee-Wee was the creation of actor Paul Reubens. Reubens, of course, had a life before Pee-Wee, and he had a very private personal life distinct from his invented persona. Sadly, Reubens lost his privacy in a career-killing tabloid scandal.
Wolf had elicited permission from Reubens to make a film about Reubens’ life, and secured hours of on-camera interview footage. But the mercurial Reubens, highly ambivalent to sharing his personal story, kept pulling the plug on the project. When Reubens fell ill, Wolf was in a race against mortality to get Reubens back on board. Fortunately, Wolf succeeded.
Pee-Wee as Himself runs three hours and twenty-five minutes and will be aired in two parts on HBO Max, beginning tomorrow.
Photo caption: Andy Kaufman in THANK YOU VERY MUCH. Courtesy of Drafthouse Films.
Andy Kaufman was an original, whose art always confounded the expectations of others. The fine biodoc Thank You Very Much both reminds us of Kaufman’s gifts and explains the roots of his offbeat, often bizarre humor..
Director Alex Braverman takes us to Kaufman’s formative childhood and the parental lie that shaped much of his psyche. We hear from Kaufman’s dad, his creative partner Bob Zmuda and Andy’s girlfriend Lynne Margulies. Friends Danny Devito, Marilu Henner and Steve Martin pop in, too.
Kaufman was a prankster and a provocateur, so much so that, when a woman suffered a fatal heart attack on stage, the audience suspected that it might be a part of Kaufman’s act; (it wasn’t).
And what about his notorious wrestling wrestling against women? It’s the most controversial element of Kaufman’s work and the most inexplicable. Thank You Very Much sheds important light on this obnoxious performance art.
And here’s a delightful nugget – we even get to learn the origin of Latka’s accent on Taxi.
Thank You Very Much is in theaters, with filmmaker appearances at several LA theaters this week. You can also stream it on Amazon and AppleTV.
