Category: Little Big Screen

I’m guessing that we have seen the coming attractions for the David Crosby documentary four times now, each time in front of another movie. I know we asked for this by the movie choices we made.

“Echo in the Canyon,” ostensibly about the significance of Laurel Canyon in the sixties, is full of Jacob Dylan as MC and then bandleader with a roundup of contemporary artists when the only people who’d come to this movie would only want the real stuff from that magical period. The Tom Petty footage was good though.

“‘Marianne & Leonard” was a better movie but it would have played just as well on the small screen because the best footage was old movies and still shots. Leonard was a ladies man and the Marianne & Leonard thing was doomed. His guitar player, interviewed in the movie, said he realized early on that most of the people who came to see the band were young, depressed women. The love story was touching. This movie could appeal to a younger crowd because Cohen’s music is so universal but there weren’t any young people in the theater when we saw it.

“Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” was really great to look at, especially in the film version that our city is lucky to have. And the acting was was just as good but there wasn’t much story here. It was more like a few days back in the day. Some weird stuff happened. A lot of ordinary stuff happened. I was so back there I never noticed how long the film was until I had to go to the bathroom.

The movies, cover bands, Americana, MAGA. Everybody wants to go back. It’s getting a little depressing. I think I’ll go put my Silver Apples lp on.

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Gloria and Pete invited us over for dinner on my birthday. Pete asked me what I liked. Easy for him, Gloria does all the cooking. I had been thinking about Chicken Cacciatore for quite a while and I couldn’t lie so I spoke up. Gloria’s masterpiece includes artichoke hearts, carrots, celery, mushrooms, black olives and chicken that was just falling apart in the sauce. It was the best I’ve ever had.

We got caught up in the One Take Film Festival this weekend, documentaries playing at both the Dryden and the Little. Caught “Dennis & Lois” on Friday afternoon, about a couple who met at a Ramones show at CBGBs and never stopped going to shows together, over 10,000. The Happy Mondays wrote a song about them. The director said he has about six hundred hours of footage of the couple. They can barely walk now but they’re still doing it. They haven’t even seen the film either.

We saw the Aretha Franklin movie on Saturday, the gospel show she recorded in Los Angeles in ’72. She was spellbinding. We came home and watched a Robert Johnson documentary and then some of Beyonce’s drum and bugle Coachella performance. Wow.

“Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable,” at the Dryden today, was the best. Absolutely brilliant. I think it’s running on PBS. You take his street photos in with your whole body. They are physical constructions. Animated with life. And there are hundreds of them in the movie.

 

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I guess I joined Flickr ten years ago. At least that is what it says at the top of my Photostream page. Mostly I used it as a backup for my photos. With a free membership they gave you an insane, one terabyte of storage. Well, that business model broke and free members were recently informed that their limit will now be a measly 1,000 photos and the new owners threatened to dump the rest of your photos unless you go pro. I didn’t upload a thing for months while I looked around for an alternative. Today I went pro.

I promised my cousin I would send her a link to photos from the second leg of our Camino adventure. Peggi and I did the first half of the Camino with her but we had to be back here for some Margaret Explosion gigs. She continued on without us and then we covered the same ground – Leon to Muxia – in October.

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We watched Greendale again last night and it has only gotten better. We are a small cult, those that love this movie. It is in my top ten. I have an affinity for the form, 8mm and family members as cast. I made the movie above in the winter of 69/70. It features my brother, Tim, on drums, my drums. He’s wearing my clothes too. My brother, John, is playing guitar and their friend, John Spar, playing harmonica. I hung one of my lithographs on the garage door and my youngest brother, Fran, and his friends did double duty as a rental crew and snow acrobats. Years later I added a soundtrack from Invisible Idiot.

The cool thing about filming without sound is that you can direct (bark orders or offer encouragement) while you’re shooting. Neil Young adds an amazing soundtrack from Crazy Horse, just three musicians with very few overdubs, and then has his cast lip-syncs his lyrics. The whole thing is beautiful and brilliant. A rock opera without the hysterics.

The characters, all mouthing Neil’s vocals, make you realize how good the lyrics are, the storytelling and the character development. I remember my nephew telling me the only thing he didn’t like about Neil Young was his voice. I love it. And you realize how expressive it is while you watch all these characters voice the lyrics.

The movie is relentlessly good. When this 2003 movie finally catches on I could see it playing with Rocky Horror Picture Show-sized crowds singing and dancing along with every line.

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Press for “BlacKkKlansman” was everywhere so we bought tickets on opening night. The screening was followed with a discussion, part of a monthly presentation the Rochester Association of Black Journalists (RABJ) and the Little Theatre. Both the movie and discussion were great. The discussion, the range of reactions from disgust to anger, was actually better than the movie but then it would not have happened if not for the movie. It was heartwarming to hear how fired up people in attendance were. There was a real resolve to do something.

This passage in A.O. Scott’s review of the film really caught my attention. “Spike Lee has often been a gleeful curator of racial invective, and he observes the Klansmen with a fascination that stops only a few degrees short of sympathy. They are monstrous and clownish, but more than just figures of fright or mockery. Understanding what makes them tick is as much Ron’s (main character) mission as bringing them down.” This is exactly how people interrupt Philip Guston’s portrayals of the Klan, the hooded characters in his late paintings. We laugh at them because they are hideous and tragic and so much like ourselves. This is an artful movie.

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We had not been down the west side of Durand Lake in a while so this was the first we had seen of the beaver damage there. What were they thinking trying to gnaw their way through trees this big?

Duane suggested we add the 1957 French film, “Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday,” to our Netflix queue. We have but we’ll have to watch “Advise & Consent” first and mail it back. I wish they would just make the switch to everything streamable. We streamed “The Dinner” a few nights back. I loved the story, a moral dilemma, almost like a nightmare. Laura Linney was great as the over protective mom and Richard Gere made a pretty good straight man. The guy who played his brother, Steve Coogan, surprised us because we had just seen him in “A Trip To Spain” and couldn’t stand him. Our friend, Claire, loved him in that movie. Guess that’s the sign of a good actor. I read that “The Dinner” was based on a book and it has already been made into three movies. I think some could do a killer movie with this story but it might take a few more tries. It has been compared to Polanski’s “Carnage” so we will have to track that one down.

Although we have been Amazon Prime members for some time we had never watched anything from them so we lined up a queue there. Jim Jim Jarmusch’s “Paterson” is great. Peggi and I think it is his best movie. He wrote the story as well. It’s understated, slow, beautiful, and a real fantasy. Adam Driver is fantastic.

Driver is great in Scorsese’s “Silence” too but unfortunately he is not the lead. I loved the look of this movie. I loved the whole Catholic thing and the way the Japanese fought it. Whoever it is that’s writing Roger Ebert’s site put it this way, “Silence is a monumental work, and a punishing one. It puts you through hell with no promise of enlightenment, only a set of questions and propositions, sensations and experiences.”

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Peggi reads everything by Stephen King. I read only his “On Writing.” I experience King through the movies and Peggi keeps reminding me that the book is so much better. Except in the case of “The Shining.” I guess they got that one right. But I hear Stephen King didn’t like it. We just finished watching the eight part “11/22/63,” something we rented from Netflix, and we were telling John Gilmore about it. He told us his Kennedy assignation story.

He was in band class in the first trumpet seat. The teacher and band leader was forever banging his baton on the lectern trying to bring order to the class. When he announced the president had just been shot, John assumed it was a ploy to get the kids to behave so he shouts, “Fake Out!” The teacher orders him out of the class and he never played trumpet again.

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We startled this group of bucks. There were five of them sleeping in a cluster and one ran out of my picture frame. It is, of course, rutting season but these racks are all fairly small. Young bucks do not normally challenge mature large ones. They fear the more mature bucks and avoid the dominant deer’s territory. We’ve seen some epic, knock down, cinematic fights between two mature males. They’re every bit as dramatic as a Quentin Tarantino movie.

My life has felt like a movie in the last few months. Neither all good or bad but as dramatic as one of those buck battles in the woods. We saw “Carol” last night, a slow burn of a love affair but not much of a movie, at least compared to other Patricia Highsmith penned marvels like “Strangers On A Train” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley. We plan to tackle “The Hateful Eight” next.

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About twenty years ago I started my own version of the Passion Play, the last day of Christ’s life. I planned to do paintings from collected source material but I haven’t got there yet. “Stations of the Cross,” a German film from 2014 had its Rochester premier at the Dryden Theater last night. It is a beautiful film, one that sweeps you up and takes you away into its own world. That is, it felt really strange in the parking lot after the movie.

Told in fourteen fixed-angle, single shot, tableaus that parallel Christ’s journey to his own crucifixion, the film is as close a depiction of the church I grew up in as I have ever seen. Lea van Acken as Maria (Mary, Virgin) perfectly plays the innocent whose entire thought process is corrupted by deranged religious purists – Catholic fundamentalists. The opening scene has her preparing for her Confirmation as the priest lays the classic guilt trip on the class with a capsulized version of hard-core Christian dogma. Nothing short of total devotion to God is ever enough. Maria sacrifices earthly pleasures and her short life so that her autistic brother can speak in a crazy quest for sainthood.

When Maria passes out at her Confirmation service (the Catholic bat mitzvah) I was thinking about the many times one of my brothers dropped in the aisles after fasting for communion. She is taken to a doctor who thinks he see signs of bullying or abuse in the pale and weak Maria. “Stations of the Cross” walks a very fine line. The film is gorgeous like a Gerhard Richter painting, it feels intimate and real. The indictment of religion as an abuser is just below the surface in every scene. I really loved this movie. Maybe someday I’ll finish my Passion Play paintings.

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There is nurture and there is nature and then there is the “Wolfpack,” the type of documentary that just sweeps you away into another world. This one a site in plain sight, an tall apartment building in the lower East Side of Manhattan where six Angulo brothers and their sister were locked away by their parents. Home-schooled and deeply immersed in the movies, an oddball combination, they lived a surreal life until one of them escaped and the director became their “first friend” outside the family.

Conversations with Steve Hoy cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time with hardly a discernible path to look back on once you hang up. A science fiction buff, he somehow got around to “Illustrated Man,” the 1969 movie with a clunky Rod Steiger whose tattoos came alive for anyone who looked too close. Peggi added it to our queue. Ray Bradbury’s book must have been better than the movie. With most people running out of space for tattoos today, it is ripe for and updated film version.

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Even after reading this review in the New Yorker I still wanted to see “Whiplash” and what better opportunity than the $5 Monday Night Movies at the Little. I loved it. A bit aggressive but intense and pretty close to what I imagine music school to be like and more importantly the exploration of the drive aspect in art making was well worth the five bucks. And Sean behind the bar at the Little, an opera major at the Eastman, confirmed the picture.

“Birdman,” tonight’s feature presentation at the Little started off but really grabbed me about five minutes in, about the time Edward Norton took the stage. And it was really a stage. The movie is theatrical production of a play and that is where it worked magic. I loved watching the actors dig deep to make the fake real. Too bad they had to get goofy near the end with Michael Keaton flying in his underwear. The soundtrack was brilliant. Mostly drums played by Antonio Sanchez. He was just in town last week with Pat Methaney’s band.

Tomorrow, for the third night in a row, we make the same trip down Culver to the Little Theater Café for the record release party of the psychedelic jazz combo, Margaret Explosion.

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