Keith Richards: Under the Influence is a good enough excuse to spend time with the ever genial Keith Richards. Keith is not just a rock icon and a medical marvel, he’s a great raconteur – ever genial, with an omnipresent cigarette-hacking chuckle.
Keith drops many a nugget while relating his own musical journey and much about American music of which he is a devotee:
About meeting Muddy Waters at Chess Records.
That he considers himself a better bass player than a guitar player.
How the intro licks to Street Fighting Man were recorded when only he and Charlie Watts came early to a recording session to mess around.
How his bass line with Charlie’s drumming sped up the pace to Sympathy with the Devil from a lament to really rockin’.
“I’m no longer a pop star and I don’t want to be one”.
A sharp observation that White “rock” can seem like a march, and “I prefer the ‘roll'”.
His period of not working with Mick Jagger in 1985-89 was “World War III”.
And there’s a VERY funny Johnny Cash-in-a-hotel-room story.
Here’s challenge – try to spell out Keith’s raspy chuckle. It’s something like “Huh-whey-whey-heh-heh”.
Keith Richards: Under the Influence has the feel of an infomercial for Richards’ book and newest solo album. But, no matter, it’s time well spent. Keith Richards: Under the Influence is available to stream from Netflix Instant.
During the years 1972-4, documentarian Les Blank hung out and filmed around Leon Russell’s Oklahoma recording studio, and A Poem Is a Naked Person is the result.
This was the period when Russell produced two of my very favorite albums, Leon Live and Hank Wilson’s Back, so I especially enjoyed the music. There’s also a nice snippet of Willie Nelson (pre-beard and pigtails) singing Good Hearted Woman.
In fact, all of the Leon Russell parts (both talking and performing) are great. The problem is that Blank filmed everybody and everything in the neighborhood, including a tractor pull, the demolition of a building and a seemingly deranged and snake-obsessed artist. There’s also a lot of conversation between people who are very stoned. Getting stoned is a lot more fun than listening to stoned people talk.
The documentary’s puzzling title originates from liner notes on a Bob Dylan album.
A Poem Is a Naked Person has been a bit of a Lost Film, until recently only shown at screening where Blank was present. Now you can stream it on Amazon Instant, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
The documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut is a Must See for cinéastes. In 1962, Francois Truffaut spent a week in Hollywood interviewing Alfred Hitchcock. These interviews formed the basis of Truffaut’s seminal 1966 book Hitchcock/Truffaut. At this moment, Truffaut was the hottest new thing in international cinema. He was horrified that Hitchcock was viewed in the U.S. as only a genre director and pop celebrity, but not as the master of cinema that influenced Truffaut and the rest of the French New Wave. Vertigo, now rated by many as the greatest of films, had only broken even at the box office four years before.
Filmmaker Kent Jones took the audiotapes and stills from those 1962 interview sessions and adds what Truffaut could not – illustrative clips from the Hitchcock films themselves. Because Truffaut is no longer with us, Jones also provides commentary from directors like martin Scorsese, David Fincher, Peter Bogdanovich and others. The result is an insightful celebration of Hitchcock’s body of work.
I had thought that I had a pretty fair grasp of Hitchcock, especially his love of surprise and the MacGuffin, his subversion of convention in Psycho and obsession with blonde actresses. But Hitchcock/Truffaut gave me a much richer understanding of Hitchcock’s visual sensibilities, his mastery of overhead shots, and his very limited expectations of his actors, as well as his compression and expansion of time.
Hitchcock/Truffaut will be interesting to any audience, but essential to serious movie fans.
If you’re like me and you worship the cartoons in The New Yorker, then the documentary Very Semi-Serious is a Must See. Very Semi-Serious takes us inside The New Yorker for a glimpse inside the process of creating and selecting the cartoons, chiefly from the perspective of cartoonist and currently Cartoon Editor Bob Mankoff. You will know Mankoff from his cartoon with the caption, “How about never? Is never good for you?”.
We also meet rick star cartoonists that include Roz Chast and George Booth, along with The New Yorker Editor David Remnick and some aspiring cartoonist newcomers. We are boggled by the tens of cartoons each cartoonist pitches each week and the hundreds that Mankoff must review. Rejection is a major part of the cartoon life.
We also learn how Mankoff scientifically studies the eye movements of readers to see how/when/if we “get” the jokes. And we get to laugh again at HUNDREDS of cartoons.
I saw Very Semi-Serious in May at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and now you can see it beginning tonight on HBO. Set your DVRs.
In the thought-provoking documentary The Spymasters — CIA in the Crosshairs, we hear from all twelve directors of the CIA, from George H.W. Bush through current Director John Brennan. They weigh in on the agency’s role in the War Against Terror, including harsh interrogation, drone warfare, the Kill List and “signature strikes”. They disagree among themselves on torture, with Iraq War era directors George Tenet and Porter Goss, taking especially belligerent positions. But there is a unified answer to this fundamental question about the War on Terror, “Can we kill our way out of it?”
The Spymasters — CIA in the Crosshairs showcases the decisions that a CIA Director must make, Leon Panetta poses one situation that he actually faced – do you take a rarely available missile shot at a terrorist who has just killed nine of your agents – when you know he is with his wife and kids? And several directors address the question, “What keeps you up at night?”
Besides the directors, we get to know a CIA operative with experience in Afghanistan, along with the agency’s chief of counter-terrorism. And we meet a most colorful character, the CIA’s former clandestine operations chief, Jose Rodriguez, who openly admits destroying the videos of CIA waterboarding.
The Spymasters echoes another talking head documentary The Gatekeepers, with the retired directors of the Shin Bet, Israel’s super-secret internal security force. I recommend a double feature with these two companion films. The Gatekeepers is available to rent on DVD from Netflix and for streaming on Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Flixster.
The Spymasters — CIA in the Crosshairs is currently playing on Showtime.
Amy, documentarian Asif Kapadia’s innovative biopic of singer-songwriter is one of the most heart-felt and engaging movies of the year.
In a brilliant directorial choice, Amy opens with a call phone video of a birthday party. It’s a typically rowdy bunch of 14 year-old girls, and, when they sing “Happy Birthday”, the song is taken over and finished spectacularly by one of the girls, who turns out to be the young Amy Winehouse. It shows us a regular girl in a moment of unaffected joy and friendship, but a girl with monstrous talent.
In fact ALL we see in Amy is footage of Amy. Her family and friends were devoted to home movies and cell phone video, resulting in a massive trove of candid video of Amy Winehouse and an especially rich palette for Kapadia.
We have a ringside seat for Amy’s artistic rise and her demise, fueled by bulimia and substance addiction. In a tragically startling sequence, her eyes signal the moment when her abuse of alcohol and pot gave way to crack and heroin.
We also see when she becomes the object of tabloid obsession. It’s hard enough for an addict to get clean, but it’s nigh impossible while being when harassed by the merciless paparazzi.
Amy makes us think about using a celebrity’s disease as a source of amusement – mocking the behaviorally unhealthy for our sport. Some people act like jerks because they are jerks – others because they are sick. Winehouse was cruelly painted as a brat, but she was really suffering through a spiral of despair.
The Amy Winehouse story is a tragic one, but Amy is very watchable because Amy herself was very funny and sharply witty. As maddening as it was for those who shared her journey, it was also fun, from all reports. Everyone who watches Amy will like Amy, making her fate all the more tragic. It’s available to rent on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming on Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Kitty Hart-Moxon is an elderly Holocaust survivor now living in the UK. In One Day in Auschwitz, she takes two seventeen-year-old girls – the same age that she entered the famed Nazi concentration camp – to Auschwitz. She guides them around the camp and narrates her experiences there. We already know about the horrors, but her matter-of-fact testimony helps us appreciate the extra lengths that the Nazis took to dehumanize, in addition to murdering, their victims. It’s a very personal account and a compelling one.
Chris Stamp, Pete Townsend and Kit Lambert in LAMBERT & STAMP
The documentary Lambert & Stamp is the story of the two guys, Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert, who managed The Who to rock immortality. It’s an interesting odd couple story: hardscrabble and posh, straight and gay. There’s also this improbable but actual premise – in a quest to become movie directors, Lambert and Stamp decided to find a rock group to manage, film themselves managing the group and then use the resulting film as their filmmaking calling card. Of course, because they stumbled on a struggling band named The High Numbers and turned them into The Who, they never got to make the movie.
Chris Stamp survives, along with The Who members Pete Townsend and Roger Daltrey, and we get to hear the story from their lips, and there’s plenty of film from the 60s and 70s, too. (The actor Terence Stamp is in the movie, too – he’s Chris Stamp’s big brother.)
However, rich source material can be too much of a good thing if you use more of it than you need. It’s interesting to see Lambert hold forth in German and French with European journalists, but not on and on and on. Lambert & Stamp is a little too long for me to recommend to a general audience, but to people interested in rock history or fans of The Who, it’s a Must See.
Lambert & Stamp is available streaming on Amazon Instant Video, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
The stars of 3 STILL STANDING: Larry “Bubbles” Brown, Johnny Steele, Will Durst
The San Francisco comedy club scene of the 1980s was a Golden Age for the art form of stand-up comedy – and its practitioners do consider it an art form, not just an entertainment product. That Bay Area scene launched major careers: Robin Williams, Dana Carvey, Paula Poundstone, Ellen DeGeneres, Bobby Slayton, Kevin Pollack, Whoopi Goldberg and Rob Schneider. The documentary 3 Still Standingtells the story of three of their comedy peers who flourished in the 1980s but chose not to “go to LA” and how they’ve dealt with the “downsizing”, when cable TV killed the market for stand-up comedy in clubs.
The three comics – Will Durst, Larry “Bubbles” Brown and Johnny Steele – are what make 3 Still Standing so compelling. Durst is a master of sharp political comedy in a society that is now more interested in vacuous celebrities. Steele’s observations are too subversive for a mainstream that is less hip and a whole lot less smart. Brown, whose appearances on Letterman were 21 years apart, is no longer young enough for the decision-makers who book comedy. But they’re all experts in their craft, and their material is hilarious.
Larry “Bubbles” Brown is a revelation. His comic persona is based on his half-empty world view and his self-deprecating view of his looks.
“It’s been a great day for me. Haven’t passed any blood.”
“I’m in the medical textbooks as one of the major causes of vaginal dryness”.
“Giving me Viagra is like giving a doorbell to a homeless guy.”
We’ve seen the global and technological economic changes that end once-promising career paths and force us to adapt or else. Here, the catalysts are both techno-economic (the supplanting/absorption of the comedy market by cable television) and cultural (the continued dumbing-down of our society). But it’s rare that the aging victims among us are so damn fun to watch as these three artists.
Filmmakers Donna Locicero and Richard Campos started the project “as a Valentine to the era that we enjoyed so much”. That would have been an entertaining movie. But 3 Still Standing gained more depth and texture when it evolved into the character-driven story of these three guys and their plight. In a post-screening Q & A, Campos also noted that “the San Francisco Bay Area is a character in the film”.
Robin Williams and Dana Carvey are prominent parts of 3 Still Standing. Locicero said that Williams had seen several versions of the film, including the final cut – all to ensure that his segments didn’t overshadow the story of the three principals.
3 Still Standing opens on November 12 at Camera 3 in San Jose. On November 11, the San Jose Improv will host a screening with outtakes from the movie and live appearances by Durst, Brown and Steele.
Durst, Brown and Steele are inventive originals and important artists. They prove that you can be on the wrong side of the marketplace and still be on the right side of history. I saw 3 Still Standing at the Camera Cinema Club.
The Showtime documentary Prophet’s Prey takes us deep into the world of renegade Mormon polygamist leader Warren Jeffs, now behind bars for sexual assault on young girls. In 1986, Jeff’s father Rulon Jeffs became the patriarch of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), a polygamous cult that straddles the barren borders of Utah and Arizona. When Rulon became in firm, Warren Jeffs took control and, upon Rulon’s death, became the Church’s leader, a position of unencumbered and accountable power within the Church.
Fundamentalist polygamy, as practiced by Rulon and others, often involves older men taking on underage girls as multiple wives, which is discomfiting enough. But Warren is a sociopath and a child sexual predator, who, when given total power as leader became a monster of unspeakable proportions. Reportedly, at least 24 of Warren Jeff’s “wives” were under 17 and as young as 12.
As in any effective documentary, the source material is top rate. Filmmaker Amy Berg directed Prophet’s Prey from the book of the same name by Sam Brower (who also appears in the film) the private eye who dogged Jeffs. We hear from Warren Jeff’s “wife” #63 Janet. We meet his brother Warren (once head of FLDS security) and his sister Elaine and his nephews Brent and Lyle. There’s even amazing surveillance camera footage of Jeffs in his cell.
Prophet’s Prey’s writer-director Amy Berg previously directed Deliver Us from Evil about pedophile Catholic priests in California’s Central Valley, which ranked in the top ten on my list of Best Movies of 2006. She’s well on her way to cornering the market on docs about sexually deviant religious leaders. Prophet’s Prey is narrated by the musician Nick Cave.
Prophet’s Prey is currently playing on Showtime and DirecTV PPV.
