"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.

And One Sword To Rule Them All: "Excalibur" (1981)

directed by John Boorman
Starring Nicol Williamson, Helen Mirren, Nigel Terry, Liam Neeson, Corin Redgrave, Cheri Lunghim with newcomers Patrick Stewart, Gabriel Byrne, Neil Jordan and Ciaran Hinds

Excalibur, the Sword Of Power.

I watched Excalibur last night. I've seen it a handful of times since it was first released and it's one of those flicks where if it's on, I gotta watch it to the end. So involving and detailed is its whole mise-en-scene that I get swept into that world and have a hard time coming back out. It's a weird movie with its own distinct mood. Still, I'm never ready for it to be over.

I'd been fascinated by the King Arthur myth since I was a kid, beginning with Disney’s The Sword In The Stone, in which the kid Wart is tended to by a daffy Wizard and a talking owl (the same Disney universe of woods where, apparently, Aurora is being seen to by three daffy fairies before meeting her spinning wheel fate the next glen over, and beyond the next clutch of trees Snow White is tending to her dwarfs). In the animated fable, Wart falls into a river and is transformed by Merlin into a fish in order to learn a few life lessons before resuming his human form.

I loved that sequence as a kid; the idea that a poor anybody could experience magic and then be transformed into a king was transfixing for a fantasy-minded kid from the Bronx. The boy-as-fish scene -- in fact the entire Disney movie and title -- is taken directly from the first book of T.H. White’s opus The Once and Future King, a thoroughly detailed and deeply researched rendering of the King Arthur tale that I read in high school. The book gave me a deeper understanding of all the players in the Arthurian legend, their motivations, and the ultimate tragedy that befell them all.

Excalibur pulls from that source but more directly from the 15th century Thomas Malory classic Le Morte D'Arthur, which I have never read. In my estimation, Excalibur is one of the best contemporary screen adaptations of that story. It retains both the folksiness and the grandeur of the legend, but also the abiding sadness of a world lost through the folly of man himself. All of that is due to the off-kilter but brilliant world view of director John Boorman. But while I live for this kind of artsy approach, the critics panned Excalibur when it arrived in theaters.

I saw Excalibur soon after its April 1981 release in Boston with a Cape Verdean guy I had just begun seeing. We were crazy about each other. We were young and there was a desperate, star-crossed lovers aspect to our relationship since I was graduating from college within the month and returning to New York, while he had no plans to go to college or ever leave Roxbury. Every moment we spent together had a dramatic urgency and perhaps this lent to the initial romantic impact of the film on my senses.

The spellbinding Excalibur is a cinematic dirge, mourning the loss of a world that was both more magical and more noble than ours. There is a pageantry about the film, a surreal, distant quality to it that is the embodiment of myth. Each shot is gorgeously composed in exquisite, painterly detail to serve as an eternal tableau. The film has its excesses, to be sure: the lighting of the titular sword and the outre musings of Merlin can be over the top. But the story is not to be imagined as taking place in the natural world as we know it. History has already shown us that things will not end well; Arthur will be betrayed and outwitted even as he establishes the roots of a democratic thought system that remains the bedrock of the British and American judiciary today. Excalibur is impressionistic art. It's high opera captured on film.

Excalibur also features a number of British stars we will come to know well later in their careers – Helen Mirren, Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson, Patrick Stewart, Ciaran Hinds – but for the most part, they are all unknown to us and are treated as an ensemble. Even the actor who portrays Arthur (Nigel Terry) is an unknown quantity to Americans, so this adds to the sense that the viewer is being plunged into a strange history in which there are no star turns (none of that “with Sir Laurence Olivier as Uther Pendragon!” crap). The plunge is also enhanced by the fact that Boorman uses “Siegfried’s Funeral March” by Richard Wagner in the opening and throughout the film, to give the whole a distinctly operatic atmosphere, and by the fact that Excalibur has no opening credits other than title and a few lines about the setting. The audience is dropped front and center into a medieval land-rights battle between the armies of King Uther Pendragon and the Lord of Cornwall, mud and spittle flying, armor clanking, broadswords hefted, grunts and curses and horse whinnies fogging the night air.

Merlin: "I wish I didn't already know what's going to happen here (sigh)."


Merlin the magician is adviser to Uther. He is the fulcrum from which the storyline swings, as he knows all that will happen before it does and can summon otherworldly powers to his and Uther’s aid. Uther forms a truce with Cornwall after hours of bloody night clashes, and Cornwall invites him and his men to his castle for a celebration where Cornwall’s wife Igraine is bidden to dance for the throng. Mistake. Within hours of forging the truce, Uther is rudely salivating over Igraine and announcing his lustful intentions toward her, which gets him and his men thrown out of Cornwall castle. As Cornwall plans to take his battalion into the forest to dispatch Uther et al once and for all, Uther prevails on Merlin to aid him in his quest to screw Cornwall’s wife. Merlin does so against his better judgment, magically transforming Uther into the image of Cornwall so he can slip into the palace unchallenged and bed Igraine. As Uther sates his lust, the real Cornwall meets his death in battle with Uther’s men. (“He came, and he went,” said my witty date.)

Thus is the story set in motion, for Uther takes the now widowed Igraine to wife as her young daughter, the necromantically gifted Morgana, watches. Igraine gives birth to a son, but Merlin shows up to collect the child as part of the bargain he struck with Uther to bring him to Igraine in the first place. Baby Arthur is secreted away and give to Sir Ector to raise alongside his son Kay.

We next see the teenaged Arthur at the jousting tournament where the misplacement of Kay's sword leads to the pulling of the Sword In The Stone. Lines among the local knights are quickly drawn between those who believe that with the sword Excalibur in hand, Arthur is the rightful king of England, and those who think its hooey, and new battles are fought. Tutored by Merlin in wisdom and the natural magic that is dying out with him, Arthur proves to be an apt pupil and a harmonizing force among the different factions. But as soon as Arthur claps eyes on Guenevere (Lunghi) he's a bumbling goner, and though Merlin tries to get him to cool his jets the two are eventually married.

The story is well known by now. The only notes left to add are that Lancelot is here played by hot stuff Nicholas Clay, and it would be tough for any Arthurian chick to ignore him. Lance's armor is highly polished so as to appear blindingly white on the screen, thus telegraphing the goodness of his soul. He appears truly tortured over his love of Jen.

Boorman's own son Charley plays Arthur's wicked son Mordred, spawned when Arthur was tricked into laying with his own evil sister Morgana (Mirren). The film takes a truly icky turn when Mordred shows up, and also when poor Percival is tortured by Morgana on his quest for the Holy Grail.

Excalibur is not a perfect movie. But its images, musical moments, and ideas about justice, peace, faith, and the destiny of Man will haunt you afterwards. It goes to show why the story of King Arthur and the ideal of the Round Table has endured for generations.

"Begin Again" (2014) or, A Music Industry Fairy Tale

directed by John Carney
with Keira Knightley, Mark Ruffalo, Adam Levin, Yasiin Bey, Hailee Steinfeld





Finally made it down to Ye Olde Cineplex to take a gander at Begin Again, the new film by director John Carney, who helmed 2006's Once -- a film I haven't seen all of and which is apparently so charming that a Tony-winning Broadway musical of it was mounted.

My principle reasons for wanting to see it were 1) Its storyline has something to do with today's music industry, 2) Mark Ruffalo, 3) Mark Ruffalo, and 4) Mark Ruffalo.

Ruffalo had been acting for a decade by the time I really noticed him, in 2000's You Can Count On Me, where he played the sexy, rumpled, rebel ne'er do well brother to Laura Linney's uptight big sister. The role fits him well. He did a version of the sexy interloper in The Kid's All Right, and here he reprises that kind of character as Dan, the hard-drinking down-on-his-luck record label exec reeling from the break up of his marriage to Catherine Keener and being fired from the label he co-founded after a streak of bad signings.

Drunken Dan stumbles into an East Village open-mike night event -- where A&R men do occasionally discover great talent -- and hears the reluctant singer-songwriter stylings of Gretta, played by Keira Knightley. Gretta herself is mourning betrayal by her songwriting partner and longtime love Dave, a budding pop star (Maroon 5's Adam Levine in a smarmy turn) with whom she had traveled to New York on his label's dime to start ramping up his career. Morose Gretta is importuned by a busking friend to come to this show, so her half-hearted performance is a skidmark along her tucked-tail retreat home to London. While the audience at this NYC hip-pit is lukewarm to Gretta's skills, Dan has A Beautiful Mind-like power to hear all the fully-produced potential in Gretta's music and accosts her with the idea that they can make beautiful music together. The sequence of how he hears her music more fully produced is magical -- but also doesn't quite fit with the rest of the film's tone. Up to now Gretta has been a behind-the-scenes-kinda chick in Dave's universe, so she's is reluctant to alter her music or step out front, and certainly not with Dave, whose glory days as a Grammy-winning producer are significantly behind him. He admits that his clout to get anyone signed is severely diminished if not nonexistent.

Ruffalo's grizzled boy-charm comes into play and Gretta finds herself convinced to do something outrageous -- record an album of her songs live at various outdoor locales in New York City. It's an intriguing idea, though thoroughly impractical. The fun of the film is seeing how this improbability comes to life with a motley crew of musicians, a rigged traveling recording studio, an influx of cash from a Dan-friendly artist (Cee-Lo Green, in a picture-stealing cameo), some risky locations, and even a guest turn on guitar by Dan's precocious teenage daughter (Hailee Steinfeld of True Grit fame showing an unprecedented amount of thigh). The songs are pleasant and mildly thought-provoking, but not earth-shaking.

Knightley, dressed down here to represent your average bohemian girl singer, doesn't embarrass herself at the microphone but has little real star power as a performer in this role. (I was astonished to notice in the closeups how jacked up Knightley's teeth remain this far into her full-fledged movie-star trip -- but perhaps the small physical flaw is part of her appeal? She's so easy on the eyes I guess it doesn't matter that her teeth are triple-rowed up in there.) Knightley's Gretta stands up for the craft of music, just making songs for their own sake and not wanting to sell out for pop stardom. Cute, noble, even, but from my current window seat in the music biz, this looks exactly like that time-honored recipe for starvation that bedevils many a brilliant music creator.

Begin Again gets the finer details of the music industry wrong. For instance, one of the founding partners of a label -- here played by Mos Def (officially credited as Yasiin Bey) -- can't just "fire" his co-founding partner. And while the music industry of yore (1940s through the 1990s) is rife with music execs who boozed, drank, screwed, smoked, popped pills, flouted the rules and barely functioned in their jobs, today's trouble-beset industry has no room and no tolerance for money-sucks and fuck-ups like Dan. There is too much still at stake. And if you're going to go around the city recording live music in open-air venues -- already a nightmare for background and ambient noise -- make sure that the tech holding the microphone isn't simultaneously jumping up and down, stomping his feet, and screaming "Great!" before the track is over (as Dan does a few times).

What it gets right is the power of music itself to transform, to heal, to bond, and to uplift. The real golden threads of Begin Again, at least for me, begin with the recognition that for many creative folks, music is the lingua franca not only of artistic expression but of human communication. One's musical tastes do tell a lot about one. Trading lyrics and song titles is a form of language that many of my friends indulge in. Bonding over appreciation for certain artists or tracks can be an indelible connection. By listening to each other's iPods, Dan and Gretta draw even closer and forge a deeper understanding of the other's musicality. This is probably a spoiler: Some moviegoers may find it jarring or unrealistic that when Dave plays Gretta a new song he has written on his own during a solo trip to LA, she knows instantaneously that something is amiss in their relationship. I thought it was a great detail about their music and their communication style.

The movie also demonstrates the many ways in which music brings together people who might never have met or worked together in any other capacity. Looking at the performers that Dan and Gretta gather for her project is a perfect example. Another detail I like is that the film may take place in New York City, a classic setting for thousands of films and my home town. The director doesn't give us the glossy, high finance, fantasy corporate center New York, and neither do we get the gritty, dark, crime-ridden mysterious New York either. It's just everyday life here, the weird mix of funk, grunge, utility, surprise, art, retail, and workaday monotony that undergirds the soul of the city. It's brownstones and bodegas, cobblestones and fire escapes, fire hydrants and chain link fences, plate glass and cement. And of course people of all shapes and sizes who flock there to make music.

For about five minutes in the latter part of the film, we think that we're going to get a pat, Hollywood ending tied up with a Valentine red ribbon. That it doesn't happen feels far more real and true. The two main characters do begin again, and that new beginning could not have happened without their meeting. But their beginnings are facilitated by their connection, not the goal of it.

Like most fairy tales, Begin Again is a sweet film (despite all of Dan's cussing). If you're a music person like me it will restore or reaffirm your belief in music as a tonic to the soul.

Backward Glance: "Three Days of the Condor" (1975)

Directed by Sidney Pollack
Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson, Max von Sydow

I caught this classic of '70s angst for the first time in 2010. Hearing the title, I would mix it up in my mind with similarly titled flicks, including Night of the Iguana, a Tennessee Williams drama with Richard Burton and Ava Gardner; Day of the Jackal, a thriller about Fench military hero and prime minister Charles de Gaulle that I’ve never seen; and Day of the Locust, an insane flick about 1930s Hollywood that still haunts me.

Director Sydney Pollack's political thriller is about an everyman caught in a nightmarish and hard-to-follow government plot that is scarily prescient. Robert Redford is Joe Turner -- can you get a more Everyman name than that? -- a CIA reader/researcher who is a little too good at his gig. When he discovers what he shouldn't, the running begins in earnest. Using a grainy color film stock that looks almost like newsreel, Pollack paints a portrait of sheer paranoia that fits perfectly with the Vietnam era of covert government operations and suppressed public information.

PLOT SUMMARY:
At a small CIA outpost inside a fashionable upper East Side Manhattan townhouse, Joe Turner works with a close-knit team. He's great at what he does. No sooner has he called his superiors in Washington to report evidence of a covert CIA operation set to invade the Middle East than a crew of government assassins is dispatched to hush it up. As fate and the gods of storytelling would have it, Joe slips out the back to fetch lunch and returns to find everyone in the office murdered, including his co-worker girlfriend.

Marked for death, Joe – code name Condor -- contacts his New York home office via pay phone for help and comes up with one Higgins (Cliff Robertson with an outsized 70s comb-over), a CIA deputy chief whom he’s never met. Higgins says he'll help and tells Joe to meet agents in an alley at the back of the Ansonia Hotel on 72nd Street. When Joe balks, Higgins tells him to bring a friend. Unsurprisingly, when Joe and his bestie arrive in the alley, a shootout ensues that leaves the friend and the two agents sent to meet them dead. Desperate to elude the killers as well as the police, who are converging on the crime scene, Joe stumbles into a clothing store and kidnaps a customer, Kathy Hale (played by an atypically vulnerable-looking Faye Dunaway) and has her drive him to her apartment in Brooklyn. She is justifiably terrified, doesn’t believe his tale, and struggles to get free of him.

Joe is not an agent, but a reader. He must rely on his wits and everything he has ever read about political intrigue, spying, hit men, even gun play to unravel the mystery of what has happened. Realizing that another friend is in imminent danger, he ties Kathy to the toilet and drives her car to the friend’s highrise apartment, convincing his wife to leave immediately. On the way out he unknowingly crosses paths with killing machine-for-hire Joubert, played by Max von Sydow. The two share a long and suspenseful elevator ride to the lobby in which Joe realizes who the guy is. He allows Joubert to leave the building, but knowing that he could be killed the minute he walks out the door, Joe engages a group of black people in the lobby to walk him to his car, promising them $5 apiece. Joe escapes, and Joubert, hiding in some bushes with Joe in his sights, must accede defeat for the moment. But not before noting the license plate of the car.

Joe returns to Kathy’s apartment and ungags her, and here’s where things get even more complicated. Her live-in boyfriend, who has gone to Vermont to ski and is expecting her to join him, calls up but Joe threatens her not to let on she's in trouble. She blows the man off with a tale of a car breakdown, and actually sounds none too sorry about it. Meanwhile, Joe is checking out her place, studying the black n white photos of spare, haunting autumnscapes she has posted and surmises that she is a lonely woman with secrets. Joe is no criminal, but he is hella observant. He tells Kathy that he needs time to figure things out, but he also needs at least one night to forget before he'll go away and leave her be. “You like men who go away,” he tells her, adding, “Why haven’t you asked me to untie your hands yet?” The handsome stranger has just looked deep into her hidden truth. And after all, it's Robert freakin' Redford. So of course she lays back and lets it happen. Cue the jazzy Fender Rhodes Dave Grusin score as Joe and Kathy get busy.

Their idyll is interrupted the next morning when a postman knocking with a package turns out to be one of the uniformed hitmen who helped take out all Joe's co-workers. The scene erupts into a full on fight with furniture flying and a struggle for the gun. Joe ends up shooting the assailant as Kathy screams. Joe calms her and the two leave the apartment. Love on the run.

This is the point at which the Hunted becomes the Hunter. Putting two and two together, Joe decides to turn the tables and now tracks the CIA chief who's rubber-stamping all the mayhem, while being dogged at every step by Joubert. The path leads to the home of an agency official in suburban Washington, D.C., where Joubert breaks in, grabs the gun and surprisingly offs the man Joe’s been trying to squeeze. Seems the hitman switched sides for a bigger paycheck. Joubert explains that he takes no sides, he’s just the hired help. No hard feelings. He lets Joe go.

Back in NYC, Joe uses Kathy as bait to locate and identify Higgins, whom they kidnap from a lower Manhattan lunch spot so he can get answers. Check the irony in this prescient exchange, when Joe asks, Would the US really secretly invade the Middle East over oil? Higgins says Yes. Joe thinks that the American people should be given the choice to vote on it, that government operations should be transparent. Says Higgins: “Today it’s oil, but what if it’s water, or food? When people run out, they won’t want to be asked, they’ll just want us to GET it for them.” Righteous Joe tells Higgins that he has leaked the information about the secret "CIA within the CIA" to the New York Times, as they stand in front of the paper's headquarters.

“You have no idea how much damage you’ve just done,” says Higgins.

“I hope so,” says Turner, who then melts into the crowd.




NOTES:
You know I love my New York, especially Dirty Old 1970s New York. In this film Times Square is still the delightfully sleazy neon cesspool it used to be, the buses are still forest green with sliver panels, Broadway looks like Broadway, the old apartment buildings still have the same old chain fences and cheesy lobbies, the Ansonia Hotel is in all its architectural glory on 72nd Street, and the World Trade Center towers still stand tall. That was the New York I grew up in, went to school in, spent my early career in.

Director Sidney Pollack makes a few nods to the city's diversity, with one of Turner’s murdered CIA co-workers was a lovely Asian woman. And of course there is the crowd of African Americans in the lobby, though when you get right down to it, Joe uses these innocent black folk as human shields. I was convinced that any of them would be gunned down in the scene, much as we've been conditioned to see the token black character be the first to catch a bullet in most mainstream flicks. This doesn’t happen, I was relieved to note, but neither does Joe Turner cough up the $5 he’d promised to dole out, to the crowd’s jeering disappointment. Also, several of the sisters and brothers are wielding tambourines, because of course any gathering of colored people in New York City would naturally include percussion instruments.

On first viewing I’m intrigued by the Redford-Dunaway relationship. I'm not a complete prude, but it always astounds me how quickly strangers fall into bed together in movies, particularly in the films of the ‘70s. Dunaway plays a truly complicated woman where still waters run deep, and when she finally believes him it’s a beautiful moment. She confesses, “You’re a really sweet man to be with.”

My favorite character is the nonpartisan Joubert, whose European coolness as the hitman (smarty-pants Joe IDs his accent as being from Alsace-Lorraine in France) actually makes him the most interesting person in the flick. Actor Von Sydow has one scene in a hotel room, passing the time between hits by painting a miniature soldier. He's a killer, but he has an inner life. It's a detail coopted by director John Frankenheimer in his ‘90s thriller Ronin, where the Jean Reno character's safe house contact lives in Alsace Lorraine and paints miniature ronin figures before removing a bullet from American operative Bob DeNiro.

Three Days of the Condor is a classic of the genre, where the Everyman knowingly or unknowingly comes in possession of The Thing That Will Change the World, and must run from those who violently want it stopped or violently want to take it for themselves.

FAVORITE LINE
Turner: Have I raped you yet? Have I even tried?
Hale: The night is young.