Movies

LINDA RONSTADT: THE SOUND OF MY VOICE: the icon who never played it safe

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LINDA RONSTADT: THE SOUND OF MY VOICE

Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice is the insightful biodoc, based on Ronstadt’s own memoir, and narrated by Ronstadt herself. Ronstadt was the first female mega-rock star, and her story touches on feminism, the Counterculture and pivotal changes in the music industry. The film is comprehensive, tracing her upbringing and her romances with songwriter JD Souther and Governor/Presidential candidate Jerry Brown. The story is also poignant – her Parkinson’s disease has kept her from singing since 2007.

Ronstadt has been the auteur who is able to take someone else’s song and make it into her own art. She’s not a mere cover singer. I recommend listening to the Everly Brothers’ When Will I Be Loved, the Eagles’ Desperado, Dee Dee Warwick’s You’re No Good, Buddy Holly’s It’s So Easy and Little Feat’s Willin’ – and then matching them with Ronstadt’s versions.

Ronstadt is also unusual in that her interests and talent span the genres of pop and rock and country, various subgenres of Mexican music (earning Grammies across musical types) and even Gilbert and Sullivan (Tony nomination).

Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt in LINDA RONSTADT: THE SOUND OF MY VOICE

Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice brings us a deep reservoir of witnesses: Ronstadt family members, Souther, former bandmates Don Henley and Waddy Wachtel, friends and collaborators Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton. Both Emmylou and Dolly credit Ronstadt with helping them in critical career moments, Emmylou when she was paralyzed by grief and shock from the death of Gram Parsons.

Here’s a wonderful nugget from the film: Ronstadt had grown up in a family that sang Mexican music together, but her interest was rekindled by listening to the late night canciones of Harry Dean Stanton who was living in the garage behind Ronstadt and Souther.

It’s hard to imagine someone who wouldn’t enjoy Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice. And about that final scene of Linda with her nephew and cousin in the living room – just try to hold back the tears.

Stream of the Week: AUGGIE – Who do you see when you put on the glasses?

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Eichard Kind in AUGGIE

In the superb indie Auggie, Felix (Richard Kind) is pushed into retirement before he wants.  He’s given a goodbye gift that he never would have thought to wish for, augmented reality glasses. Suddenly plunged into inactivity just as his wife Anne’s career is thriving, Felix finally gets around to putting on the glasses.  The glasses give him a virtual companion, Auggie, equipped with the artificial intelligence to give the wearer his craved-for experiences.  Most insidiously, Auggie even delivers individually customized emotional support. Everyone’s digital companion takes the form of what they desire, and Felix’s Auggie is a smoking hot and adorable young woman.

The more Felix wears the glasses, the more Auggie is able to fulfill his every need, even triggering more inner desires that he was aware of.  This isn’t quite a Doctor Faust who knowingly opts into his fantasy; Auggie’s artificial intelligence is able to see Felix’s fantasies even before he can imagine them.  All things in moderation, of course, but Auggie’s infinite availability becomes additive.  This is no longer healthy for Felix or his family.

When a character asks, “Who do you see when you put on the glasses?”, it’s a devastating moment.

Auggie is the first feature for director and co-writer Matt Kane.  Kane has avoided writing Felix as a stereotypical clumsy old grouch.   As written by Kane and co-writer Marc Underhill and played by Richard Kind, he’s very smart and perceptive.  He just isn’t ready for unimaginable temptation.

You’ll recognize Richard Kind, a reliable character actor and voice artist with 221 screen credits. My favorite Kind performance was the moving portrayal of a man seeking closure after the death of his wife in Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter.

Susan Blackwell is perfect at Felix’s wife Anne.  Blackwell has had small parts in some very fine films and hosts her own Broadway interview show on YouTube, Side By Side with Susan Blackwell.  Cristen Harper is suitably seductive as Auggie.

I saw Auggie at its world premiere at Cinequest. It can be streamed from Amazon, iTunes and Vudu.

THE SOUND OF SILENCE: novel and engrossing

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Peter Sarsgaard in Michael Tyburski’s THE SOUND OF SILENCE. Courtesy of SFFILM

In the engrossing character study The Sound of Silence, Peter Lucian (Peter Sarsgaard) is obsessed with the musical tonality of the built environment.   Having assigned each area of Manhattan its own distinct musical key, Lucian prowls the city, tuning forks in hand, to map its sounds.

Lucian pays the bills as a house tuner, bringing well-heeled apartment-owners a kind of auditory feng shui.  Lucian is sought after to isolate the hum of a problem refrigerator or toaster that can make a living space depression-inducing.  He’s even been profiled in The New Yorker.

But we sense that Peter Lucian is a little too confident in his expertise.  He is disdainful of the corporate suits trying to monetize his discoveries.  “This is about universal constance, not commerce.”  In a mistake of hubris,  Lucian takes on a research assistant (Tony Revolori – Zero the bell boy in The Grand Budapest Hotel).   Lucian is jarred by corporate espionage, and starts to unravel when a respected scientist views him as a crank.  Can he recover?

Peter Sarsgaard is a marvelous choice to play a cool obsessive who seems, at time,  both blissfully above validation and desperate for it.  In spite of his handsome, regular features, Sargaard’s gift for uncanny stillness helps him play creepy.   Sarsgaard’s Lucian has the unintended capacity of reassuring other characters, but making then even more uncomfortable.

Rashida Jones plays Ellen, a Lucian client who is not just garden-variety neurotic, but has been  so rocked by a tragedy that she remains profoundly unsettled.   Jones is so talented as a comic actress, a voice artist, a documentarian and the writer of that rarest of things, a smart romantic comedy (Celeste and Jesse Forever).  Here, she shows her dramatic chops with a character who starts the movie adrift, but grows able to offer emotional safe harbor.

There’s even a welcome appearance by Austin Pendleton as a Lucian mentor of uncertain reliability.  I’ve loved Pendleton since his turn in 1972’s What’s Up, Doc?. (Come to think of it, that movie had a musicologist obsessed with the inherent tonal qualities of igneous rocks.)

The Sound of Silence is the first feature for director and co-writer Michael Tyburski, and it’s a promising debut.  Despite using an understated color palette, Tyburski delivers some stirring cinema with his use of sound.  As Lucian looks over the city early in the morning, we hear a few musical notes, and then a full orchestra tuning up as the city awakens into its workday.  When Lucian takes Ellen for a drink, it is to the quietest possible venue – a club with a decibel level somewhere between a library and a morgue; afterwards, Lucian emerges into urban  cacophony.  When an academic treats him like a crackpot, we all hear ringing, not just Lucian.

As one would hope, the sound design of The Sound of Silence is remarkable, and the score works very well.  I saw it earlier this year at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM) and it’s playing at San Francisco’s Presidio and San Jose’s 3Below; you can stream it on Amazon, iTunes and Vudu.

Stream of the Week: GRIZZLY MAN – a fool’s misadventure

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GRIZZLY MAN

Werner Herzog’s mesmerizing and darkly funny documentary Grizzly Man is about Timothy Treadwell, who had spent summers observing the brown bears (grizzlies) in Alaska’s Katmai National Park, and believed that he had “gained their trust”. Driven by his ill-advised dream to befriend the grizzlies, Treadwell and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard essentially moved in with the grizzlies, camping by their fishing spot and personally interacting with them at close quarters. It did not end well.

Basically, grizzlies are hard-wired to hunt and eat humans. They are so fast that a human can’t escape one without a vehicle (or, possibly – but not for sure – tree climbing); They are so strong and fierce that a human can’t fend one off without a firearm (or, possibly, bear spray). This makes Treadwell’s’s quest remarkably foolhardy, This also makes Grizzly Man hilarious in a Darwin Awards way.

GRIZZLY MAN

As ridiculous as is Treadwell’s plan, this story had its life-and-death drama. Herzog’s presentation of a wristwatch and an audio recording is a moment that makes the hair on your neck stand up.

Werner Herzog, known for his German New Cinema art house hits of the 70s and 80s (Aguirre:The Wrath of God, Strozek Nosferatu the Vampyre, Fitzcarraldo), switched gears in 1997 with the underrated documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly and followed it with Grizzly Man. Since, Herzog has become a prolific and masterful documentarian.

In Grizzly Man, Herzog makes use of 100 hours of Treadwell’s own video footage of his misadventure. As we’ve come to expect, Herzog’s research is impressively resourceful, and he assembles his finds to construct a masterpiece of story-telling Most remarkably, Herzog has also become one of the greatest narrators of English language documentaries; somehow, his German-accented narrations are hypnotic.

Grizzly Man is a superb film, which made my own list of Best Movies of the 21st Century (and Sophia Coppola’s, too) and my Best Movies of 2005. It can be streamed from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play, and it’s available on DVD from Netflix.

MAKING WAVES: THE ART OF CINEMATIC SOUND – a movie fan’s primer

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Steven Spielberg and Saving Private Ryan in AKING WAVES: THE ART OF CINEMATIC SOUND

We usually say that we SEE a movie, but what we hear (or don’t hear) is just as essential to the movie’s impact. The impact of movie sound is SUPPOSED to be subliminal, so we often enjoy a film without appreciating the sound. The documentary Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound is a comprehensive primer on the art and science of movie sound.

Making Waves begins with the first decades of cinema, when movies aspired to include sound with images, but could only be accompanied by live music and live sound effects at their exhibition. Technology caught up in 1926 with synchronization of recorded sound and images.

The end of the studio period in the late 1960s coincided with the arrival of Walter Murch, the genius who invented modern movie sound design. Thankfully, Making Waves serves up plenty of Murch (The Godfather, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now!), before introducing us to Ben Burtt, who won an Oscar in his first gig (Star Wars) and Pixar’s Gary Rydstrom, who pioneered digital sound design. We also see the impact on movie sound of George Martin and the Beatles (multi-track recording), Barbra Streisand (movie exhibition in stereo) and Robert Altman (shooting with multiple mics).

Making Waves is best described as thorough and systematic, and I wouldn’t call it thrilling. But it’s a great choice for anyone who wants to understand and appreciate filmmaking.

There are plenty of cool tidbits, like how Burtt came up with Chewbacca’s vocalizations with the help of a bread-loving bear. And we see Foley artists at work, rolling a pine cone across dry lasagna to create just the right effect.

Making Waves is the feature debut for director Midge Costin and will be released theatrically later this fall. I saw Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound at Cinema Club Silicon Valley, with a Q&A with Costin.

DOWNTON ABBEY: wrapping up a beloved series

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Carson (Jim Carter) returns in DOWNTON ABBEY

Downton Abby is writer Julian Fellowes’ satisfying wrap-up of the beloved series. So how good is it? It’s well-crafted and brings a hopeful, romantic and sentimental conclusion to virtually every character in the series.

It’s now 1927, and the aristocratic Crawley family and the Downton Abbey staff must host a visit from the King and Queen on short notice. There are two sources of conflict. Upstairs, there is a question of inheritance, which is where the series began, and which introduces a new character (played by the great Imelda Staunton) to do social combat with Violet (Maggie Smith). Downstairs, the royal family has a traveling squad of servants who try to humiliatingly push aside the Downton staff for the visit.

Fellowes gets credit for creating the marvelous character of Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham. The delightfully unfiltered Violet has allowed Maggie Smith to scene-steal for a decade, and she returns with her cutting bon mots and appalled reaction to modernity.

There is one shark-jumping scene, an action thriller sequence that isn’t really necessary for the story. It serves to make a point about the character of Tom, but that point could have ben made without the Jack Ryan moment.

Downton Abbey is not really a stand-alone movie. If you haven’t watched the series, it won’t mean as much. This is a series finale – it’s just in theaters instead of on TV

This is not The Sopranos, Throne of Blood or Tales of the City. Pretty much all Downtown Abbey fans will feel good about where the story concludes.

DAVID CROSBY: REMEMBER MY NAME: all the bridges I have burned

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David Crosby in DAVID CROSBY: REMEMBER MY NAME
Photo by Edd Lukas and Ian Coad. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

The notoriously irascible Robert Altman and a drinking buddy once amused themselves by inventing titles of fake country-western songs; Altman came up with I’m Swimming Through the Ashes of All the Bridges I Have Burned. That’s the experience of watching the biodoc David Crosby: Remember My Name.

Most of the doc is a series of interviews with Crosby as he goes on yet another concert tour at age 76; before leaving, he cruises around his old haunts on Sunset Boulevard and Laurel Canyon. Remember My Name’s producer, the director Cameron Crowe, replays an interview with Crosby from 1974, when Crowe was the wunderkind rock writer portrayed in Crowe’s film Almost Famous. Crosby reacts with a telling observation about his friendships.

With the perspective of age, Crosby reflects on his musical achievements, his addiction and recovery and his trail of relationship carnage. He notes that “all” of his intimate collaborators – Roger McGuinn, Graham Nash, Steven Stills and Neil Young – “hate me”, and ruefully observes, “if it were just one, it could be an accident”. The film includes clips of McGuinn, Nash and Young (plus Stills’ emphatic silence) to corroborate.

Crosby’s well-known battle with cocaine and heroin came into play with his estrangements. I would reflect that recovery from addiction will generally IMPROVE behavior, but is no guarantee of ACCEPTABLE behavior. The drugs certainly didn’t help Crosby avoid his “two or three heart attacks” eight cardiac stints, his liver transplant and his diabetes.

Contemplations aside, David Crosby: Remember My Name does an excellent job of tracing Crosby’s musical career and personal life. We get his side of his romance with Joni Mitchell, and the story of getting dumped by Mitchell in front of all their friends – with a song Mitchell composed for the occasion. There’s an wonderful telling of the writing and recording of Neil Young’s great song Ohio.

And here’s an odd note for movie fans: Crosby’s father was Floyd Crosby, a prolific but usually pedestrian cinematographer whose career topper was his Golden Globe-winning work in High Noon. I compared the father-son career paths and found that in 1964-65, when David was starting with the Byrds and hanging out with the Beatles and Miles Davis, Floyd was cranking out Bikini Beach, Pajama Game, Beach Blanket Bingo, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini and Beach Ball. While David was in the vanguard of the 1960s Counterculture, Floyd was winding up the Annette Funicello/Frankie Avalon teen culture that had been hanging on from the 1950s.

ROJO: bobbing in a sea of moral relativism

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ROJO. Courtesy of SFFILM.

Rojo is Argentine writer-director Benjamín Naishtat’s slow burn drama.  Rojo is set just before the 1970s coup that some characters expect – but no one is anticipating how long and bloody the coup will be.  Several vignettes are woven together into a tapestry of pre-coup moral malaise.

A prominent provincial lawyer Claudio (Darío Grandinetti) is invited to participate in a scam. There’s a scary encounter of lethal restaurant rage. It looks like Claudio, bobbing on a sea of moral relativism, may well remained unscathed, but the arrival of crack detective becomes a grave threat.

As Claudio weaves through his life, his society shows signs of crumbling. There’s a failed teen seduction, an emotional breakdown at a formal reception and a natural metaphor – a solar eclipse.

It’s funny when the audience finally connects the dots and understands who the character nicknamed “the Hippie” is. And Naishtat and Grandinetti get the most out of the scene where Claudio finally dons a toupee.

We know something that the characters don’t know – or at least fully grasp – how bloody the coup will be. Watch for the several references to desaparecido, a foreboding of the coup. Argentina’s coup was known for the desaparecidos – the disappeared – thousands of the regime’s political opponents went missing without a trace, having been executed by death squads. In Rojo, a very inconvenient madman dies and his body is hidden, there’s a disappearing act in a magic show, and a would-be boyfriend vanishes.

This is a moody, atmospheric film that works as a slow-burn thriller. I saw Rojo earlier this year at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM) and it opens this weekend in Bay Area theaters.

GASLIGHT, GASLIGHT and gaslighting in domestic violence

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Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer in GASLIGHT

On September 10, Turner Classic Movies will air Gaslight (1944), a classic suspense thriller that still has a lot to say about domestic violence and abusive power in relationships.

In Gaslight, an evil husband (Charles Boyer) isolates his wife (Ingrid Bergman) and uses manipulation to convince her that she’s going crazy. He’s seeking to conceal his crimes and gain unfettered control of her house and fortune. He’s also dallying with the maid (a nubile 18-year-old Angela Lansbury). Fortunately, the wife’s longtime admirer (Joseph Cotton) works for Scotland Yard and starts to investigate…

Domestic Violence is abuse of a partner, generally characterized by asserting power and control over the partner. Not all domestic violence is physical, and this phenomenon of abuse by manipulation takes it name – gaslighting – from this movie.

The Film Noir Foundation recently screened Gaslight to an audience of domestic violence survivors and support professionals. I recommend Noir Talk, the Film Noir Foundation’s excellent podcast on iTunes. Search for Gaslight and domestic violence in Episode 10. Here’s one of the tidbits from the podcast: Ingrid Bergman thought she was too vibrant and healthy-looking for the part; but that works to show how the manipulation can work on a woman who doesn’t look like a victim.

This famous Gaslight is actually a remake of the original 1940 version, which is also especially well-acted. Anton Walbrook is suave and evil as the hubbie and Dyana Wyngard is unforgettably haunting as the wife. Only 19 minutes in, we see his duplicity, manipulation and control. Frank Pettingell is very good as the detective, and the cast includes Robert Newton (Long John Silver in the 1950 Treasure Island). Cathleen Cordell plays the oversexed maid Nancy in a less nuanced performance than Angela Lansbury’s. This film version is reportedly the most faithful to the stage play source material. (Oddly, there’s a very good can-can dance in this 1940 movie, too.)

Stream of the Week: JIMMY CARTER – “What people say they want”

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In PBS’ American Experience documentary Jimmy Carter, The New Yorker writer and former Carter speechwriter Henrik Hertzberg says:

Jimmy Carter was what the American people always SAY they want – above politics, determined to do the right thing regardless of political consequences, a simple person who doesn’t lie, a modest man, not someone with a lot of imperial pretenses.  That’s what people say they want.  And that’s what they got with Jimmy Carter.

And herein lies the rub. 

In 1976, Americans were reacting to Watergate and wanted a President LEAST like Richard Nixon. We got him, in the form of Jimmy Carter; it turned out that Carter could deliver non-Nixon decency, but not the leadership that the era required.

Today, many – and the polls indicate, most – Americans seek a non-Trump. I share the view that ANYONE would be better then Trump, but Jimmy Carter is instructive that “anyone”, while better than Trump, might not be the best for the country.

In Jimmy Carter, we hear from those who know Carter best – including his wife Rosalynn Carter, his vice-president Walter Mondale, and right-from-the-start Carter insiders Jody Powell, Pat Caddell and Bert Lance. How the times made this man, then propelled him to such improbable electoral success and then finally doomed his Administration, is a great and cautionary story.

To stream Jimmy Carter from iTunes, search for “Jimmy Carter” under TV Episodes (not under Movies). Jimmy Carter is also available on DVD from American Experience.