Category: Articles

LFM Review: The Descendants

From "The Descendants."

By Patricia Ducey. Early on in The Descendants, the camera sweeps lovingly over the old family portraits that line the walls of Matt King’s Oahu den. His forebearers, among them a landed Hawaiian princess and her Caucasian husband – along with their many ambitious, high achieving progeny – stare back at us radiating a self-possession and grandness we soon realize is sorely missing from Matt’s present day world.

Matt King (George Clooney) practices law and lives a middle class existence on Oahu with his family, a wife and two daughters, whom he barely relates to. He and his many cousins are heirs to the huge coastline land grant left to them by their royal and self-made ancestors – but the law mandates that they must now dissolve the trust, so they must sell the huge estate to who they decide as a family is the best buyer. The meeting will take place soon. Oh yes, I think hopefully, this will be grand: a large, wealthy family in conflict as they grapple with the meaning of legacy and of the land in this last piece of American wilderness.

But then Payne switches to Matt’s domestic crisis; his wife Elizabeth after a boating accident lies in a coma, and weak, ineffectual Matt must rise to the role of father and husband –because the one parent who made the family work is unconscious. As the family story takes over, Payne, the visual poet of Middle America and middle age, goes a bit sideways; his excursion into the tropical Eden and Matt’s discontent is not as successful as his previous films. In Election, About Schmidt, and Sideways his Midwestern protagonists feel the dissatisfactions of less than fully lived lives out there in flyover country, but they eventually claw their way out of despair through action or love.

Matt King is not so lucky, or perhaps not so brave. He retrieves his wanton teenage daughter Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) from the boarding school that is attempting, unsuccessfully, to reform her. Matt is determined that he and Alexandra, and younger girl Scottie (Amara Miller), will face the end of Elizabeth’s life together as a family. The doctor has informed him her coma is hopeless; they will remove the breathing tube per Elizabeth’s prior instructions. Both girls are bratty and foul mouthed; they humiliate and disobey their father just for the pure sport of it — because in his bumbling immaturity he allows them to, playing the ineffectual father to their faux maturity. In short, they represent the now clichéd American family, Hollywood version.

From "The Descendants."

Alexandra is particularly angry with her mother, and she finally tells her father why: her mother was having an affair — something Matt, in his detachment, never even remotely suspected. Finally, Matt is furious; he confronts Elizabeth’s friends and they reveal his identity. He knows this is his chance to step up as man of action. Instead, he enlists daughter Alexandra’s help to find the man and confront him! This is something a teenager would do — and why would a man involve his daughter in the pathetic exercise of stalking her mother’s lover? Surely all hell will break loose, I surmise, and Matt will see his errors and grow up. Alas, when he and Alexandra find the hapless lover, Matt instead gives him a good talking to and then invites him to visit his dying wife in the hospital, despite the fact that the lover admits that for him the affair was not serious. At this point, I emotionally checked out. Even the plain spoken eloquence of Robert Forster as Elizabeth’s father, and the crackling life force of Woodley’s Alexandra were not enough to sustain this movie. Continue reading LFM Review: The Descendants

LFM Review: Chico & Rita

By Joe Bendel. In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, scores of Cuban musicians found success playing in American. Chico and Rita were two of them—almost. Their Afro-Cuban musical romance is told in Fernando Trueba, Javier Mariscal, and Tono Errando’s Chico & Rita, one of eighteen officially submitted films in best animated feature Oscar race and a 2011 European Film Awards nominee, which screened at this year’s African Diaspora International Film Festival.

Chico is a Bebop influenced piano player and something of ladies man. Rita is a stunning vocalist and all woman. During their first auspicious meeting, sparks fly and maybe a few faces are slapped. However, when Rita reluctantly sings Chico’s newest song in a radio competition, it is magical. Suddenly, Chico & Rita are the band to book. They also start to admit their mutual attraction, but circumstances keep getting in the way.

Before long, Rita is signed by an American producer, who whisks her away to New York. Chico eventually follows her, hoping to gain entree into the jazz scene through his old compatriot, Chano Pozo, whose tenure in Dizzy Gillespie’s band led to the creation of the so-called Cu-bop fusion of Bebop and Afro-Latin Jazz. Of course, those who are familiar with their jazz history know Pozo is not long for this Earth. Likewise, Chico & Rita’s rekindled romance appears equally ill-fated.

As the director of Calle 54, the best musical performance film frankly ever, Trueba’s participation inspires confidence and he does not disappoint.  C&R is an instant jazz classic, featuring infectious and sophisticated original music by Bebo Valdés, whose life sort-of-kind-of inspired Chico’s story. But wait, there’s more, including the classic music of Bud Powell, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, and Woody Herman’s Four Brothers band, performing Igor Stravinsky’s Ebony Concerto (which Chico sight-reads early in the film). Still not convinced? How about Freddy Cole performing one of Chico’s songs as his famous brother Nat, tenor saxophonist Jimmy Heath channeling Ben Webster, flamenco singer Estrella Morente appearing as herself, and a whole lot of Afro-Cuban percussion interspersed throughout the proceedings.

From "Chico & Rita."

Continue reading LFM Review: Chico & Rita

LFM Review: Africa, Blood & Beauty

From "Africa, Blood & Beauty."

By Joe Bendel. Sergey Yastzhembsky has surely seen a lot of savagery, but not in Africa. A former high ranking official in the Yeltsin and Putin governments, Yastzhembsky served as the Kremlin’s chief spokesperson during the Chechen “troubles.” Since then, he has preferred the company of Africa’s indigenous tribes, capturing their traditional ways of life, perhaps for posterity, in Africa, Blood & Beauty, which screened this past Sunday as part of the 2011 African Diaspora Film Festival.

Implying an unmistakable hierarchy, Beauty is organized into four sections, explaining the rituals and customs pertaining to children, women, men, and spirits, in that order. It quickly becomes clear spirits might be duly venerated, but tradition favors men over women. In nearly all of the surveyed tribes, the women bear the burden of nearly all the real work, except for hunting and sometimes fishing. Still, the Himba of Namibia have something of a safety valve in place, requiring a man who murders his wife to pay restitution of forty-five cows to her family – but mandating nothing from a woman killing her husband.

Indeed, Beauty is at is best when it explains the practical applications of painful-looking rites – though even with a compelling explanation, those endured by children might very well distress sensitive viewers. For instance, Pygmies sharpening their children’s teeth has obvious survival applications. However, as presented in the film, the Himba ceremony of knocking out young boys’ bottom teeth makes little sense from a pragmatic standpoint. Continue reading LFM Review: Africa, Blood & Beauty

Tibetan Buddhism in a Business Suit: LFM Reviews Crazy Wisdom

By Joe Bendel. Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche was a Tibetan Buddhist teacher who embraced the 1960’s counterculture, but could not abide rock & roll. He drank significantly more than he should have, openly and often, but he had no use for drugs. A former monk, Trungpa renounced his robes, developing ways to teach Tibetan Buddhism in the western vernacular. A study in paradoxes, Trungpa’s all too brief life avoided cliché, making him a rich documentary subject in Johanna Demetrakas’ Crazy Wisdom: the Life and Times of Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, which opens this Friday in New York at the Rubin Museum of Art.

A recognized reincarnation, Trungpa was the last of his generation to be entirely educated in Tibet. After the Chinese Communists invaded in 1959, he took a leading role securing the teachings and documents of his faith, personally guiding a group of his fellow monks to safety in India. Living in exile, Trungpa chose to embrace the west, trading his robes for a business suit. It was the start of a transformation that was decidedly controversial with his elders.

Living in Scotland, Trungpa married a young British woman and began teaching Tibetan Buddhism to hippies. For obvious reasons, they were attracted to his “crazy wisdom,” a recognized approach to enlightenment celebrating the eccentric and unconventional, sort of the rough Tibetan Buddhist analog to drunken master martial arts. However, Trungpa liked to keep people guessing.

As one of his students recalls, at the height of the anti-war movement, Trungpa was once asked to comment about aggression in America, to which he replied: “I want to talk about the aggression in this room.” Ouch. He was also evidently a stickler for the Queen’s English, perhaps giving scores of hippies their first elocution lessons. However, the greatest irony must have been the Dorje Kasung, the military drill team he established at Naropa University, the American Buddhist school Trungpa founded in Boulder, Colorado. Continue reading Tibetan Buddhism in a Business Suit: LFM Reviews Crazy Wisdom

YouTube Jukebox: The Legacy of Bert Jansch

By David Ross. Bert Jansch, storied fingerpicker and warble-voiced bard of the British folk movement, died last month at age 67. He achieved quiet glory as a guitar stylist and as guiding light of the folk group Pentangle, in which he was paired with equally legendary guitarist John Renbourn.

Above, Jansch performs “Moonshine,” a lovely tune of his own composition, circa 1975. Here Pentangle performs in the lush first flush of its jazzy, bluesy thirteenth-century folk rock. Jansch is seated to the right, the bearded Renbourn to the left. Jacqui McShee could not sound or look more the part of the British folk chanteuse. Her pale, somber, chinless face is a lovely study in the art of the church altarpiece, lacking only a halo and a swaddled Christ.

Jansch’s influence on Jimmy Page’s acoustic style is unquestionable. Page’s “Black Mountain Side” from Led Zeppelin I is a note-for-note nicking of Jansch’s “Blackwaterside” (here), which appeared on his 1966 album Jack Orion. Jansch was miffed enough to consider suing Page, but he could not afford a legal crusade on a folk guitarist’s salary and let the matter drop. One can easily construe Tolkienian epics like “Stairway to Heaven” and “The Battle of Evermore” (featuring Jansch’s old protégé Sandy Denny) as grand bastardizations of Jansch’s antiquarian interests. Admittedly, Page is the more gifted musician. In this clip, he transforms “Black Mountain Side” into a frenzied druidic raga, achieving an intensity that was well beyond Jansch and Renbourn.

Jansch’s complex, open-tuned stylings equally influenced Nick Drake, the Keats of British folk, in whom the movement’s decade of research and experiment became something new and consummate. As far as I know, there is no extant footage of Drake performing live, but a tune like “Cello Song” (here) gives the feel of his exquisite little nocturnes.

To have schooled both Jimmy Page and Nick Drake is to have helped midwife the music of the twentieth century. I hope that Jansch, his work done, rests where he belongs, in some old churchyard, amid the moss and weathered stone.

Posted on November 23rd, 2011 at 11:31am.

Terror Watch: Sony’s Bin Laden Movie Gets a Release Date + Updates on Rubicon, Thunder Run, Call of Duty & More!

Sam Worthington in a new ad for "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3." The game has grossed $775 million in its first 5 days.

By Jason Apuzzo. Since we first debuted Terror Watch as a series here at Libertas back on the weekend of September 11th, there have been a torrent of announcements regarding War on Terror-themed projects in Hollywood and in the indie film world – confirming that we have a major, bona fide trend in play here. The floodgates are obviously now open, and the War on Terror – interpreted as a traditional American fight for freedom – has suddenly become one of the hottest subjects in Hollywood.

What’s causing this trend? I have my theories, which are in order: 1) the weakening grip of the Baby Boomers on Hollywood; 2) the successful bin Laden raid; 3) Obama in the White House; 4) the astonishing success of video games like Call of Duty and Battlefield.

But actually I don’t particularly care what’s causing it any longer. All I know is that it’s about damn time.

• Among the big new projects announced recently, two really caught my eye: the Navy SEAL drama Rubicon, and the CGI Iraq War thriller Thunder Run. Rubicon will be written, directed and produced by Christopher McQuarrie – and the Rubicon story will serve as a platform for a movie, graphic novel and a videogame. Rubicon is set in Afghanistan and features the Navy SEALs as the heroes and the Taliban the villains. Fabulous! We’ve only been waiting for this sort of thing for what – 10 years? McQuarrie’s brother actually commanded a SEAL team, and the film will otherwise be co-produced with founding SEAL Team Six member Dan Capel.

As an added bonus: Rubicon will be a retelling of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, with the Navy SEALs taking the place of the samurai.

So am I looking forward to this project? Hell yes. The Seven Samurai connection in particular gives the storyline a kind of mythic overtone, elevating it above conventional action-thriller fare. Cineastes may recall, incidentally, that director John Sturges’ classic Western The Magnificent Seven had similar origins in Kurosawa’s film. Bravo to McQuarrie and team for having the ambition to try this, and we’ll root for this project getting fully off the ground in days ahead.

As for Thunder Run, that appears to be an even more unusual project – essentially a 3D CGI depiction of the heroic capture of Baghdad by American forces in April 2003. The film is based on the novel Thunder Run: The Armored Strike to Capture Baghdad, and Black Hawk Down screenwriters Robert Port and Ken Nolan are writing the adaptation. Amazingly, the film already has Gerard Butler, Sam Worthington and Matthew McConaughey attached, along with director Simon West (Con Air, Tomb Raider). In other words, this is a very hot property – and given the gigantic debut of Call of Duty this past week, expectations for this film could be absolutely off the charts. Also: Thunder Run already has a promo poster out. [Btw, I’m wondering if Sam Worthington is clearing all this stuff with James Cameron?]

"Seven Samurai"-inspired artwork (left) for "Rubicon."

As if that’s not enough, Brad Thor’s novel Takedown is now in development at Warner Brothers. Takedown deals with a butt-kicking former Navy SEAL Team 6 member who takes on an Al Qaeda plot to strike New York; think Jack Bauer on steroids

In other new projects: Michelle Monaghan (Machine Gun Preacher) will be playing an Afghanistan War vet in the indie drama Fort Bliss; Tom Hanks has been offered the lead in Patriot Down, about a U.S. President on the run after Air Force One gets shot down over Pakistan; Producer Frank Marshall (the Indiana Jones & Bourne films) will now be adapting some of Jeffrey Archer’s novels; Oliver Hirschbiegel will soon be directing Eye in the Sky about drone strikes; and Universal may be picking up a new comic book project called War Heroes – although that one looks vaguely annoying.

"The Devil's Double" hits Blu-ray.

• The Devil’s Double, which features an electrifying performance by Dominic Cooper in the dual role of Uday Hussein and his body double Latif Yahia, hits Blu-ray/DVD on November 22nd. If this film didn’t hit your area or you haven’t had the chance yet to check it out yet, this week will be your big chance. (Read Joe Bendel’s glowing review of the film from LFM’s coverage of Sundance.) Govindini and I were very impressed with the film and can’t recommend it enough.

• The big news, which came out just yesterday, is that the untitled Sony-Kathryn Bigelow ‘hunt for bin Laden’ movie has a new official release date of December 19th, 2012. Also: the movie apparently has its star, Jason Clarke (I’m not familiar with him), with prominent people like Tom Hardy (The Dark Knight Rises), Guy Pearce, Idris Elba (Thor) and Rooney Mara (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) circling other roles.

The initial rap against this film – in part – was that Sony had selected an October 2012 release date to capitalize on next year’s election and bolster Obama’s flagging re-election hopes. As I expressed in my initial Terror Watch, though, it didn’t seem very likely to me that Bigelow would even be able to make that date – and sure enough the movie has now been pushed off to mid-December, probably as late as Sony could go without dropping the film into January, a no-no for any film with award-season ambitions.

So what will the film be like? We simply don’t know yet. An interesting footnote, however: a competing Navy SEAL-bin Laden movie is already in the works called Code Name Geronimo, and yet another SEAL Team 6 project is currently being shopped around based on the new book SEAL Target Geronimo. Expect more of this sort of thing in the future. Someone might want to consider making a film, for example, called SEAL Team 6 Kills Code Name Geronimo bin Laden. Just a thought. Continue reading Terror Watch: Sony’s Bin Laden Movie Gets a Release Date + Updates on Rubicon, Thunder Run, Call of Duty & More!