"Reality, What A Concept": RIP, Robin Williams

Robin Williams was a funny man. But funny seems to come with a price.

When I first saw his standup on an HBO special in the late '70s, I was astounded by the rapidity of his speech and his movement, by the level of his free associations and mimicry, and by his ability to keep it all wired to a free-flowing but lucid performance. He was able to channel all this energy and multiple streams of influence into one comedic whole and deliver it up. You had to be smart enough to keep pace with him and get all of his references. Even when you didn't, you were able to glean enough of his comic essence to appreciate his artistry. He seemed to be always "on."

Robin parlayed that artistry to stardom in his role as Mork from Ork in Mork & Mindy, the TV sitcom that spun off of the phenomenally popular Happy Days. An alien proved the perfect role for him, as he seemed otherworldly. His style was closely associated with the quicksilver, oddball performances of his idol, Jonathan Winters, but with a more contemporary bent.

Robin Williams gave me plenty of laughs, but I have to say that I preferred his more dramatic roles. I'm rather sensitive myself, so something about his comedy suggested to me that he was thisfreakinclose to becoming completely unhinged. "Manic" might be one way to describe his art. While this was a draw -- he always seemed to be able to pull back from the edge -- it made me nervous. Was there desperation behind it? Pain? Insecurity? A mental imbalance? I wondered.

Robin soothed my concerns when he played more constrained roles in film. I remember him in the late Paul Mazursky's Moscow On The Hudson, which was a dramedy about a Russian circus musician who defects to America in the middle of a good will tour. The film is a valentine to the American way of life, while also a meditation on the sadness and isolation of immigrants who make a tough choice and then must assimilate to a bewildering new culture. Robin's performance made you feel Vladimir's longings, fears, regrets, joys, and frustrations in such a fresh and heartfelt way that it was a revelation. He gave compelling performances in films that ran the gamut from low comedy to high drama, to thrillers and fantasies. He could channel his energy into creating a complete film portrayal.

Many of his comic films were targeted to kids and families: Aladdin, Mrs. Doubtfire, Hook, Jumanji, Night At The Museum. Kids seemed to connected to his joyous and freeform antics. These kinds of films weren't really my thing; I didn't realize until now just how influential Mrs. Doubtfire has been for a whole generation of divorced families! (I'm like: Meh, a meddling man in a dress confusing his kids and interfering with his ex-wife. And--angel chorus--Pierce Brosnan.) He never gave anything less than his all in every performance.

It's been said that comic personalities need laughs. They live for them and live by them -- it's how they get paid. The laughter of strangers becomes like the air they need to survive. Without it many comics falter and flail. Some literally die without a constant diet of approbation.

Robin reportedly suffered bouts of depression. He battled addictions. He may well have felt pressure to keep to the high bar of comic genius that he set for himself early in his career. He may not have been getting the steady diet of laughs (or therapies or prescription drugs or nurturing) he needed to keep himself level. He may have been heartbroken about the state of his past, present or future. He may have just looked down the road and seen a seemingly endless cycle of balance, relapse, rehab, balance, relapse, rehab, and lost the will or any compelling reason to continually submit himself or his family to the painful cycle. NPR just reported that he was in the early stages of Parkinson's disease. Maybe he saw what is in store after a Parkinson's diagnosis and didn't want to go through it publicly. I don't pretend to know. He opted out.

I'm not sad for Robin Williams -- he's at peace, and he left a comic legacy of considerable proportions. I'm sad for us. Because we've lost his talent and his humanity. By all accounts, he was a warm and caring person, something that came across in many of his film performances, in his devotion to Comic Relief (which raised money for the homeless), and his appearances before our troops.

I'm sad because every time someone takes his own life we have the same old debate about mental illness and addiction, looking for something outside of ourselves to blame it on. We don't seem to understand that we are all (Robin too) part of the same fabric of social and cultural standards, the same outlandish expectations, the same senseless acts of violence, the same media ignorance passing as wisdom that negatively impacts all of us in this country. No wonder so many of us regardless of celebrity, class, gender or race are spinning in confusion, despair, and hopelessness in a vacuum that no one dares to identify or claim. I'm saddened by all the denial, by the tacit agreement that those who take their lives are selfish or weak or cowardly, by the hand-wringing we do about those who fall through the cracks even when we blame those who have fallen for creating the cracks in the first place.

We behave as if we know something about life that Robin didn't, and we think that if he really knew it, he would not have asphyxiated himself on Monday morning in Marin County. I'm sad because we will never know what Robin thought he knew when he made that fateful decision.

Yes -- reality is a helluva concept that few of us can completely get our arms around. Thanks, Robin, for making us laugh while you tried.


[Photo 2: fanpop.com]

Deconstructing James Brown: "Get On Up" (2014)

directed by Tate Taylor
starring Chadwick Boseman, Nelsan Ellis, Octavia Spencer, Viola Davis, Dan Aykroyd
Jill Scott, Tika Sumpter, Aunjanue Ellis, Tariq Trotter

August 6, 2014

If you didn't know it before, by now you should all know the name of Chadwick Boseman. Let's hope Oscar knows it too when awards season rolls around.

How can any performer truly embody the essence of a preternaturally talented, conflicted, driven, troubled, egomaniacal, essentially history-making artistic personality -- especially one who, in his later years, became something of a frazzled caricature? Watch Chadwick Boseman portray the mighty James Brown in Get On Up, and the answer is there before you on screen. It's uncanny: the cadence of his speech, his physicality, the street-wise logic, and the hair (oh, the hair). The darkness and the light of the Soul Man, while still lending him dignity.

Yes, the winds of controversy are blowing around this film. African Americans, so prominent on the screen, are missing from the production team in this instance (it was produced by British rock icon Mick Jagger, among others). A story about one of the most influential, beloved, and conflicted figures in American music seems to skip over some essential facts. The film itself hopscotches through times, cherry-picking pivotal moments. It skirts the protagonist's problems with domestic violence and drug abuse. But what it does show adds up to a lasting impression of the man's life and times, and engages the audience in co-authoring the import of the narrative from what we thought we knew and what we learn here.

col·lage
[kuh-lahzh, koh-] noun
1. a technique of composing a work of art by pasting on a single surface various materials not normally associated with one another, as newspaper clippings, parts of photographs, theater tickets, and fragments of an envelope ....

Yada yada yada, let's get to

4. a film that presents a series of seemingly unrelated scenes or images or shifts from one scene or image to another suddenly and without transition.

This is a film collage, a sewing together of scenes, inspirations, influences, and ideas about Brown. As a piece of art, Get On Up stands out as an attempt to add context to the myriad pieces of a divided soul. The performance by Boseman, as well as those of the stellar supporting cast, is toweringly compelling.

Controversy aside -- Watch it, and have a funky good time.

Backward Glance: "Django Unchained" (2012)

directed by Quentin Tarantino
starring Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson, Christoph Waltz

WAY BACK IN 2011 A FRIEND sent me a pdf copy of script for the then-upcoming Quentin Tarantino flick Django Unchained. I took a couple of days to read it. It was sick. I wasn't sure how I felt about it. The script was kind of like Mandingo (trashy soap opera) meets both Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (WWII revenge yarn that I did not like at all) and his Kill Bill (modern-day femme revenge yarn, which I did). Tarantino called it a "Southern," in that it's a Western genre piece set in the South. The time period is slavery, so the n-word, which Quentin sprinkled liberally all over Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, is now the inch-high frosting on the entire thing, And here Tarantino graphically depicts the very worst treatment of slaves: psychological torture, mutilation, humiliation, sexual abuse, and other forms of degradation and violence. While this is meant to give a true picture of the horrors of slavery, it also borders on exploitation; since this is Tarantino, after all, he takes things to stomach-churning extremes.

The story centers on Django, a slave who was just sold away from his beloved wife and is being marched to a new plantation with a shackled coterie of other slaves until a German bounty hunter shows up, shoots his sibling overseers (a criminal lot with a price on their heads), and then mentors him to be his bounty hunting partner. With a Beatrix Kiddo-times-ten focus on vengeance, Django only wants to rescue his beloved and do some death-dealing to those who mistreated her, primarily infamous plantation owner Calvin Candie. The German King Schultz (who explains that as a European he has no stake in the slavery game) agrees to free Django and help him rescue his love in exchange for help nabbing some high-priced quarry.

The storyline also involves slavers who operate literal death matches between slaves, basically human dogfights where white gentlemen of leisure can gamble and entertain themselves with a bloody spectacle (critics have since said that few slave-owners would throw away money by allowing one of their slaves to be incapacitated or killed unnecessarily, but seeing as how the institution of slavery itself was mutilating and killing black folk on the daily, who knows). The script also lingers quite a bit on the existence of exclusive brothels where white men can use pretty black slave women, here called “ponies,” for their pleasures. And wouldn't ya know, this is one of the fates in store for Django's missus (many of the brothel scenes do not make it into the final film).

I could only guess at what actress would want to take on the role of Django’s beloved, since she appears nude for most of her scenes and is raped, beaten, abused, and worst of all made to speak German (horrors!) in the film! (just kidding). Somehow Kerry Washington springs to mind. (And indeed, that is who they cast.) And I can't picture who will be Django -- it's a role that requires a Sam Jackson, but he's too old. And I couldn't see Will Smith operating within the Tarantino milieu.

What amused me most about the script I saw is that it was riddled with misspellings – and why should that make me feel good? Bleh. Culture doesn't stop for little things like spelling. Anyway, the black female character is here named "Broomhilda," a name that Tarantino tells us is a legendary moniker connected to a Rhine-soaked folktale of yore, as in Wagner's Siegfried opera. Except, Quentin, “Broomhilda” is the cartoon witch whose name was a play on the real name, which is actually Brunnhilde or Brunhilda.

At least get your lore right, when you are basing a whole plot point around it! For indeed, the story of Django's quest to reunite with his Broomhilda is equivalent to Siegfried's quest to climb a mountain, slay the dragon and claim princess Brunhilde for his own.

In the months after reading the script, I watched as Tarantino cast Jamie Foxx as Django, Leonardo DiCaprio as the sadistic owner of Candyland plantation, Samuel Jackson as a typical house n---er, and Christoph Waltz as the bounty hunter.

I did see the film, Christmas weekend, 2012. It is an odd movie, both visually arresting in some places, and cold and flat in others. So many of Quentin's films are about paying tribute to other films and other genres that occasionally the here-and-now of the singular narrative gets obscured. By turns irreverent and chilling, Django at times feels like it should have stayed in the oven a bit longer. Appearances by spaghetti western icons Lee Van Cleef and Franco Nero (star of the 1966 Italian-made western Django), as well as '80s TV veterans Tom Wopat and Don Johnson, character actors Bruce Dern, Russ Tamblyn, and black film pioneer Don Stroud, not to mention a completely anachronistic Jonah Hill, smack of stunt casting. Seeing Tarantino himself as an Australian in the slave trade just totally takes you out of the movie.

Overall Django Unchained is stylish, in that Jamie looks the part, and you root for him to win: He goes from a whip-scarred, unkempt, downtrodden slave in rags to a gun-totin' badass who looks damned fine on a horse in his western duds as he carries out a mission in the name of love. Christoph Waltz, playing an alternate version of the courtly killer Nazi in Basterds, does a fine turn (he won his second Oscar). As Calvin Candie, the sadistic owner of the Candieland plantation, Leo DiCaprio is a bit of a surprise -- as a racist scion of a Southern family he hits all the marks with chilling ease, particularly the scene where he lovingly strokes the skull of a former slave and expounds on his twisted belief in the inferiority of the black race. Washington has little to do but look pretty and helpless, as she becomes the star of her very own Perils of Pauline.

But when Sam Jackson, as the most nefarious of all Uncle Toms, shows up, the film takes an even nastier and more depressing turn. The final shootout is an unrelentingly gory bloodbath that makes the shootout at the climax of the Tarantino-scripted True Romance look like a pajama party.

I have a fondness for many of Tarantino's films, but this isn't at the top of my list of faves. I didn't hate it by any means; Quentin took home a Best Original Screenplay for Django, and that seems fair. But the script lacks the snappy, memorable dialogue of many of his other classics. Django says relatively little during the first half of the story, compared to other Tarantino heroes, though he gets off some choice lines. (Waltz's King Schultz character gets most of the laughs for his turns of phrase.)

Many of the scenes may trigger your squeamish side. By the time it's over you will be glad of the outcome, but if you watch it again you may wish you could fast-forward a few times. In my opinion.

Django is a film unlike any other -- no western has yet starred a black protagonist since the days of Buck And The Preacher and Thomasene & Bushrod (the 1970s) or, perhaps, Will Smith in 1999's the Wild, Wild West. Certainly none were set during slavery, when a black man had any agency. Tarantino continues to draw criticism for how he treats African American stories and characters on film, but he is one of very few filmmakers whose worldview includes people of color.

Purple Passion: Looking Back At "Purple Rain"

30th Anniversary of Purple Rain

When Prince's “Soft And Wet” from For You hit the airwaves I was somewhere around my first year of college and somewhat scandalized by the subject matter. But the booty knew better; the dancefloor payoff was too rich to ignore. By the time of the Dirty Mind album, I’d been fully indoctrinated into the provocative peacock funk, raw and clever wordplay of the Minneapolis wunderkind (and saw him perform at a club in Boston during the boots-underpants-overcoat phase). I played 1999 on an endless loop at the house one summer, driving my parents insane. Controversy further fueled the fires of fandom.

So I was a devoted Prince fan when Purple Rain came out. Devoted after a fashion – I was never one to go whole hog over-the-top with buying every piece of material he issued or aping his look. For one thing, I couldn’t afford it. For another, in 1984 I had some semblance of a professional life (yes, that’s how old I am). I was not yet working within the realm of the music industry; I was wearing preppy oxford-cloth shirts with jacquard bows and feathered hair as a book production manager for Scholastic in Greenwich Village. My boyfriend at the time was in law school but gigging in a covers band on weekends. (Btw: It’s interesting to note the varying impact the film had on those above and below the legal drinking age at the time.) The conversation within our music-fan circles was all about Prince and his cohorts.

Why? Because he was different. His music was different. He looked and dressed ... different. And if he was channeling James Brown and Jimi Hendrix with a spine of George Clinton and the ghost of Little Richard, who among the new power generation would really know or care? He presented the old in an exciting new package. In addition to his musical virility, he was an enigmatic beauty. Easy on the eyes, androgynous, power and posturing in a pint-sized package. An exhibitionist on stage yet oddly monosyllabic in the press glare. A man of color, but with a heritage murky enough to seem pan-ethnic. A man sho-nuff, but with enough eyeliner and hair gel to make one wonder. This dichotomous, international man of mystery had a broad-based appeal. He was a phenomenon, and one whose talent and surrounding mythology was already a buzz beginning to blanket the cultural landscape like some sort of nuclear fallout.

Purple Rain the movie was an anticipated event among fans. We were waiting with the proverbial bated breath, with our little puppy tongues hanging out. We were going to see the man himself on the big screen and lap up every ounce of artistry he was prepared to offer. It was going to be like a Prince show to the 8th power, because he would actually speak to us, show us who he was. Our appetites were whetted by the brilliance of “When Doves Cry,” which had landed on the radio and sounded like nothing else we'd ever heard. Anticipation was at a fever pitch.

Because Purple Rain was the locus of our attention, my boyfriend and I snatched up a copy of the soundtrack -- which arrived weeks ahead of the movie -- on release day. We rushed home and placed the vinyl album on the turntable, prepared to be transported into bliss. We were ... disappointed.

“What the hell is this shit?”

“I don’t get it.”

“Me either.”

“There’s a couple of good jams on there, ‘Baby I’m A Star,’ ‘Doves,’ 'Take Me With You,' but overall…?”

“I know, right?”

“So disappointing.”

What we heard was distinctly more pop and rock-edged, darker and more serious than what we were expecting, with lyrics that were either trite or confusingly opaque. And Prince’s tortured screeching at the end of the introspective “The Beautiful Ones” and the rude “Darling Nikki” left us scratching our heads. Just what was “purple rain” anyway? Purple Rain the album seemed impenetrable, inscrutable, in a word, weird. We began to jokingly refer to it as Prince’s epic project, “Screams In The Night.”

Needless to say: Context is all.

We saw Purple Rain the first weekend it opened, if not the first night. I know the theater was packed. Primed by our reaction to Prince’s opus "Screams In The Night," we were prepared to witness a royal mess. Instead we had our minds blown. The film was simultaneously amateurish, retro, misogynist, inspired, affirming, engrossing, compelling, funny, eye-opening and brilliant. It gave us a heaping helping of the Minneapolis music scene that had birthed Prince, and it was like stepping into another country with its own style of dress, language, and culture. This world was informed by the artistic, the outré, the retro (the ‘40s style dress and chitlin'-circuit comedy routines of Morris Day and Jerome Benton and The Time) and the overtly sexy. The Revolution was the coolest band a guy could have. It was a world we all wanted to be part of, where everybody wanted to go. After seeing the film we went home and put the soundtrack back on the turntable. Now it all made sense, it told the complete story of The Kid's struggles.

Was Prince a good actor? He didn't really need to be. The picture gave us enough of a sketch of what it was like to be him, even if the script was not supposed to be a dyed-in-the wool autobiography. And he gave us some of the best music of his career to that point. And if that wasn't enough, what about the visuals? Minneapolis in winter -- had we really ever seen it before? (Indeed, did we not need proof that people of color actually lived in the Land of 1,000 Lakes?) The purple motorcycle, the constructed fairyland of The Kid's basement apartment, Apollonia's cape (I looked everywhere for one just like it), the iconic white guitar, Morris' yellow Cadillac -- everybody has an image that sticks with them.

It was not a perfect film. But it was one of the closest things we'd seen to contemporary artistic reality in a spell (Wild Style had debuted the year before; Krush Groove would arrive in 1985). Its very rawness contributed to its popularity. Like many fans, I went back to the theater multiple times to plunk down my money and watch it from beginning to end. Most of the time I went alone. I might have seen it eight or ten times on the big screen during its run (not to mention numerous VHS, cable and broadcast TV viewings since) because I could not get enough of it. This collective need to experience it repeatedly turned Purple Rain into box office gold -- much to the surprise of its producers and the motion picture suits in charge.

Because more than anything else, Purple Rain is the story of triumph over adversity, which is something we all relate to and aspire to. And when Prince & the Revolution sing "Baby I'm A Star," we know that it's our own personal theme song. Years before the ubiquity of reality shows, we looked at Prince and projected ourselves onto that stage, in the spotlight, moving and grooving and being cooler than hell.

That idea was sexy enough to keep us all coming again and again.