addiction

SLY LIVES! (AKA THE BURDEN OF BLACK GENIUS): rise, fall and legacy of a groundbreaking prodigy

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Photo caption: Sly Stone in SLY LIVES! (AKA THE BURDEN OF BLACK GENIUS). Courtesy of Hulu.

Questlove’s insightful documentary Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) traces the rise, fall and legacy of the groundbreaking musician Sly Stone (birth name Sylvester Stewart) of Sly and the Family Stone. It’s the remarkable story of a prodigy

Sly led and wrote the songs for Sly and the Family Stone, startlingly innovative as both a multi-racial and a multi-gender band. It’s too easy to use the label psychedelic soul (although it does fit Sly and the Family Stone’s music); but, Sly was an original and a genre-buster, whose music blurred (or erased) the lines between rock, R&B, funk, soul and pop.

The term prodigy also gets thrown around, but I didn’t know (until I watched Sly Lives!), that Sly was working as a songwriter, producer and D-jay as a TEENAGER, already moving the needle on Bay Area music culture during its most fertile period.

Sly Lives! also gives us file footage showing Sly to be articulate and charming, with the gift of being quick-witted even while stoned. But then came the heavier drugs, sabotaging his career with a pattern of concert no shows and walkouts that have persisted thru at least 2007. His productivity essentially ended in 1974. All members of Sly and the Family Stone were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993. Sly is alive today at age 81.

This is an exceptionally well-sourced fil. Besides lots of previously obscure archival material from before Sly’s stardom, we get plenty of footage of Sly in interviews and performances back in the day. Perspective comes from the band member themselves, Sly’s ex-wife and his former partner, and a slew of experts in the music industry,

Questlove asks his interviewees about black genius (and seems to confound them). There’s no question Sly was a musical genius. I think that Questlove is emphasizing the word burden in his subtitle – suggesting that having to achieve while battling institutional racism finally sapped Sly of his resilience.

Questlove also reminds us that Sly’s creativity peaked during one of our most turbulent periods – the MLK and RFK assassinations, urban riots and the political evolution from Civil Rights to Black Power. The Black Panther Party suggested that Sly bankroll them personally.

Questlove, who was three years old at the time of Sly’s last hit in 1974, is widely known as the band leader of The Roots on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and the producer for many recording artists, including Common, Jay-Z, John Legend Al Green and Elvis Costello. He is a musicologist and a historian of Black music and Black culture. In his directorial debut as a filmmaker, he won the Best Doc Oscar for Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised). (The Movie Gourmet predicted that Oscar BTW.)

I loved this nugget from the film – band members celebrated their first big paycheck by acquiring signature dogs. Not cars, jewelry or exotic vacations – dogs.

Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) is streaming on Hulu.

THE OUTRUN: facing herself, without the bottle

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Photo caption: Saiorse Ronan in THE OUTRUN. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

In the moving drama The Outrun, Rona (Saiorse Ronan) has escaped a difficult childhood in the harsh isolation of the Orkney Islands to achieve a Master’s in biology and a laboratory job in London. Like many of her twenty-something peers, she likes to party, and she’s also self-medicating from painful childhood issues, and the alcohol is controlling her. The drunken Rona thinks she’s having fun, but her friends and the audience cringe. She’s a falling-down, blackout drunk, and she loses her job, her romantic partner and her personal safety.

Rona recognizes that she must leave London for any chance at successful recovery, and returns to her parents’ sheep farm in the Orkneys. Her parents, while loving, aren’t able to provide an optimal recovery environment. Her father (Stephen Dillane) suffered a bipolar breakdown when Rona was a little girl, and now lives in a trailer on the farm, often incapacitated by depression or mania. Her mother (Saskia Reeves ), who lives in the farm’s cottage, responded by plunging into religion and sees everything through that lens. On Orkney, Rona has support from others in recovery and is safe from the temptations of nightclubs (there aren’t any), but she’s reminded of the childhood pain that she was self-medicating for. She moves to an even more isolated island in the Orkneys and faces herself.

This is a clear-eyed, unsparing look at alcoholism and recovery, of which relapse is a common element.

Reeves and Dillane are excellent, and Ronan will certainly be Oscar-nominated for an ever authentic and stunningly vivid performance.

The Outrun was directed by Nora Fingscheidt and adapted from the memoir by Amy Liptrot. The entire movie is good, but the final 20 seconds are perfect.

The dramatic weather of the Orkneys, raging from bleak to impressively violent, is another character in The Outrun; as turbulent as is Rona’s life, the weather rages even more.

Thanks to Saiorse Ronan, The Outrun is raw, moving and satisfying.

SWEETHEART DEAL: a triumph of cinéma vérité

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Photo caption: Kristine in SWEETHEART DEAL Courtesy of Abramorama; copyright Aurora Stories LLC.

The engrossing documentary Sweetheart Deal follows four Seattle sex workers; none of them want to be working in prostitution, but each is a heroin addict and sees obstacles to getting sober. They are at best indifferent to the men they service and fear that some night’s customer will turn out to be a murderer.

Elliott is a man in his 60s who lives in an RV parked on the strip. He says his mission is to keep the prostitutes safe, offer them comfort and encourage them to kick their addiction. All four women drop in to Elliott’s RV for a meal or a nap. Elliot’s RV is the hub of Sweetheart Deal.

This is a remarkably empathetic film. Each woman tells her own story of addiction, and we witness the ravages of heroin addiction upon their health and the carnage in their family relationships. In the third act, there’s an an unexpected betrayal, sickening and monstrous. Not every heroin addict who works the streets is going to survive. But even the most vulnerable can sometimes find the power to find justice and save themselves – and that’s the ultimate redemption in Sweetheart Deal.

It’s harder to identify with Elliott, despite his self-proclaimed altruism. Essentially, he’s just another homeless guy who is getting a form of status and authority from his vocation with the women. He enjoys the attention of the documentary crew and reporter, so much so that he doesn’t notice that the reporter is appalled by an inappropriate boast.

Sweetheart Deal is a triumph of cinéma vérité. A project of over seven years, Sweetheart Deal is the first feature directed by Elisa Levine and the late Gabriel Miller, and it is brilliant filmmaking on several levels. The filmmakers managed to engender an amazing level of trust with their subjects, resulting in the access tht allows the audience inside their world. It’s also brilliantly constructed and edited; the very first shot of the film – a man feeding pigeons – takes on new meaning and importance by the end of the film.

I’ve reviewed fifteen documentaries this year and screened another 80 while helping to program a film festival. Sweetheart Deal is the best documentary I’ve seen this year.

Sweetheart Deal releases in LA on October 18, including at the Laemmle Royal.

AMY: emotionally affecting and thought-provoking

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AMY
Photo caption: Amy Winehouse in AMY. Courtesy of A24.

An Amy Winehouse movie (Back to Black) is coming out this weekend, but I’m not aware of any reason to go see it, when you can watch a great Amy Winehouse movie, an Oscar winner, at home. Amy, documentarian Asif Kapadia’s innovative biopic of the singer-songwriter, is heart-felt, engaging and features lots of the real Amy Winehouse.

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.

Amy, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature can be streamed from Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube and is included in Max and Hulu subscriptions.

THE ANONYMOUS PEOPLE: bringing long term recovery out of the closet

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Over 23 million Americans are living in long-term recovery from addiction. How many (or how few) of us know this, is the core of the thought-provoking 2013 advocacy documentary, The Anonymous People.

We all know about Alcoholics Anonymous, where anonymity makes it possible for alcoholics to work on their recovery without stigma. Anonymity is an integral pillar of AA, but some in AA interpret this to preclude publicizing their own recoveries. The Anonymous People challenges that orthodoxy.

The anonymity of those in long-term recovery also keeps the manifestations of recovery invisible to the general public, including the addicts who need it and the policy makers who need to know about it.

The carnage of celebrity addiction, as with Lindsay Lohan and Charlie Sheen, is high profile fodder for the popular media. But comparatively few of us know the stories of Samuel L. Jackson and Russell Brand, who are open about their own long term recovery.

The Anonymous People is about the open recovery movement (or public recovery movement). We hear from John Shinholser, President of The McShin Foundation, a leader in the movement, and others in long term recovery like actress Kristen Johnson of Mom. They advocate that folks come out of anonymity to say, “I am a person in long term recovery, and for me that means that I have been sober for X years.”

After all, who needs a role model more than someone struggling with addiction?

There is a strong parallel to the AIDS activists in the 1980s who defeated the stigma of AIDS by shedding the secrecy.

I saw The Anonymous People at a special screening, in an audience with over 90% people in recovery, and they loved it; (I am what people in recovery call a “Normie”). The Anonymous People will also resonate with anyone also for anyone interested in public policy issues like treatment and incarceration.

The Anonymous People can be streamed from Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.

UNCUT GEMS: neo-noir in a pressure cooker

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Adam Sandler in UNCUT GEMS

Adam Sandler and filmmaking brothers Benny and Josh Safdie serve up neo-noir in a pressure cooker in the relentlessly tense Uncut Gems.

Howard (Adam Sandler) is a Jewish jewelry dealer in New York City’s Diamond District, who makes his big bucks catering to NBA stars brought in by his associate (LaKeith Stanfield). He’s also a gambling addict. One of the consequences of gambling addiction is losing more than you can afford and owing money that you don’t have to very nasty people.

Kevin Garnett, LaKeith Stanfield and Adam Sandler in UNCUT GEMS

Howard has a lot – a wife and kids in a luxurious suburban house, a young mistress in a Manhattan apartment, a thriving business. But he’s always on the verge of losing it all because it’s not enough; his life is driven by the compulsion to make five figure exotic sports bets.

That means that he is constantly robbing Peter to pay Paul, shifting money, jewelry, schemes and bullshit around like a spinning plate act on The Ed Sullivan Show. Throughout Uncut Gems, the chaos elevates, as Howard bets on being bailed out by the Big Sale and the Big Bet. There’s a massive Ethiopian opal (a MacGuffin like the Maltese Falcon), a spine chilling auction and an even more gripping sports bet.

It’s clear that the inevitable will catch up with Howard – we just don’t know where it will fall on the continuum between having all of the bones in his hand broken and wearing cement shoes in the East River. Or whether his spiking blood pressure will send him out with a stroke or heart attack. Come to think of it, this probably isn’t the best movie choice for a cardiologist.

Adam Sandler in UNCUT GEMS

Here’s the challenge that the Safdies faced in writing this character and that Sandler faced in playing him. How do you make him just appealing enough to keep us engaged with his situation? This is a guy who, were we in the same family or community, we would dread his every approach (Here comes trouble).

This is an extraordinary, awards-worthy performance by Sandler; he inhabits a perpetually frenetic guy, fueled by his compulsions and by the resultant desperation.

Idina Menzel is superb as the wife who knows Howard best and assesses him the most accurately (and cruelly). Stanfield is very good, as are Julia Fox as the girlfriend and Eric Bogosian as a frustrated creditor. Former NBA star Kevin Garnett plays NBA star Kevin Garnett and holds his own with the professional actors.

The 2 hours and 15 minutes of Uncut Gems flies by (and you feel like you’ve been running the whole time). This is one of the Best Movies of 2019.