Photo caption: Alfred Hitchcock in MY NAME IS ALFRED HITCHCOCK. Courtesy of Cohen Media Group.
The clever documentary My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock celebrates the filmmaking genius of Alfred Hitchcock. Writer-director Mark Cousins uses the cheeky device of resurrecting Hitchcock to narrate the film himself; (Hitchcock is voiced by an uncredited Alistair McGowan).
This isn’t a paint-by-the-numbers, chronological biodoc. Instead, Cousins explores, one by one, signatures aspects of Hitchcock’s filmmaking. In clip after clip, Cousins shows us examples of Hitchcock’s camera placement, humor and manipulation of the audience. Above all, as a storyteller, Hitchcock delighted in the role of trickster, and Cousins embraces Hitchcock’s playfulness.
Although it isn’t a conventional film class survey, Cousins manages to touch on Hitchcock movies from his silents through his final film (Family Plot). We see Hitchcock’s deployment of Ivor Novello, Robert Donat, Joan Fontaine, Judith Anderson, Robert Cummings, Tallulah Bankhead, Joseph Cotten, Theresa Wright, Ingrid Berman, Claude Raines, Gregory Peck, Montgomery Clift, Janet Leigh and Paul Newman, not mention the iconic use of Doris Day, Kim Novak, Tippy Hedren, Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart.
My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock opens in LA and NYC theaters this weekend.
Photo caption: James Carville in CARVILLE: WINNING IS EVERYTHING, STUPID!. Courtesy of CNN Films.
The CNN documentary Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid! brings insight into the colorful political consultant James Carville, today’s political environment and the example of his long-surviving marriage to another strong willed professional.
Carville is known as a strategic genius and earthy communicator, but the documentaryremonds us that he was an unaccomplished Baton Rouge lawyer who hadn’t won his first major election campaign until he was age 42. Then after producing some surprise US Senate victories, at 48, he created his masterpiece – the nine lives of the oft-doomed Bill Clinton presidential campaign. Just this much is a helluva story.
But Carville, who grew up poor, watching his single mother hustle for a living, selling encyclopedias door-to-door, has always appreciated the need to get people’s attention first. That’s why he is a grinning provocateur, unafraid to offend to make his point. And you will probably be offended by something he says in Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid!, especially when he argues that the Democratic Party can’t be too woke to win a national election; “Screw the ARGUMENT, win the ELECTION!’. Carville was ahead of the curve in recognizing that Democratic Party needed to dump Joe Biden in 2024, and he’s comfortable in the role of truth-teller (as he sees the truth).
Carville can be dead serious about politics without taking himself seriously. Sadly, his joie de vivre has become rare in today’s toxic political environment. That’s why his rascal persona is so refreshing.
Of course, Carville is half of a celebrity marriage to Republican political strategist Mary Matalin, and she is a major part of Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid! Matalin, as tough as nails and intolerant of bullshit, is the perfect foil for the blustering Carville. They share the tough episode when Matalin was back working in a GOP White House during Bush’s war in Iraq, which Carville bitterly opposed. Matalin comes off as very genuine and very wise about relationships.
I watched Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid! in its premiere on CNN. It is now in theaters.
Photo caption: Tamara de Lempicka (right) in Julie Rubio’s THE TRUE STORY OF TAMARA DE LEMPICKA & THE ART OF SURVIVAL. Courtesy of Mill Valley Film Festival.
The Mill Valley Film Festival is hosting the world premiere of The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka & the Art of Survival, a biodoc that reveals an astonishing life. The art deco artist de Lempicka was as groundbreaking in her lifestyle and self-invention as in her art.
De Lempicka painted her female subjects as confident and comfortable with their sexuality, and her highly-stylized nudes are striking. A de Lempicka has sold for over $20 million, the third-highest price ever paid for a painting by a modern female artist.
De Lempicka lived substantial parts of her life Russian-ruled Poland, France, the US and Mexico. Her adventurous personal life, dotted with rich husbands and affairs with celebrity lesbians, brazenly disregarded all the prevailing societal mores of the first half of the twentieth century. She said, “I live life in the margins of society and the rules of normal society don’t apply to those who live on the fringe.” Although de Lempicka didn’t care what anyone thought of her sexual behavior, she constructed much of her own image, sometimes embracing fiction as fact.
The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka & the Art of Survival is the third feature and first documentary from Bay Area director Julie Rubio, the producer of East Side Sushi. Rubio’s extraordinary research has uncovered that, in building her flamboyant persona, de Lempicka obscured much of her identity, including her heritage and her real name. Bringing birth and baptism certificates, 8mm home movies and the testimony of family members to light for the first time, Rubio completes a new and accurate understanding of de Lempicka.
The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka & the Art of Survival plays the Mill Valley Film Festival on October 11 at the Sequoia Cinema and October 13 at the Lark.
Photo caption: a scene from THE RED SHOES in MADE IN ENGLAND: THE FILMS OF POWELL AND PRESSBERGER. Courtesy of Cohen Media Group.
Martin Scorsese was immensely impacted by the work of British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger, and, in his documentary Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressberger, he explains how and why. It’s like a guest presentation in film school.
The screenwriter Pressberger wrote director Powell’s 49th Parallel, one of the very best WW II propaganda films. They found themselves to be each other’s muse. The two co-directed One of Our Airplanes Is Missing in 1942 and continued to co-direct 16 films through 1959’s Night Ambush. Their oeuvre includes several films generally acknowledged as classics of cinema: Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life and Death, and one of my personal favorites, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. The creative partnership wore itself out in 1959, but the two remained close friends, and were unashamed to describe their partnership as based on love.
Along the way, they routinely discarded cinematic conventions to make risky innovations:
Pausing the story in The Red Shoes to mount an original ballet in its entirety.
Using one actress to play three different roles in Colonel Blimp.
Building the drama to the pivotal duel in Colonel Blimp and then audaciously NOT showing the actual fight.
The humorous use of hunting trophies to mark the time passages in Colonel Blimp.
Using filmed music in Black Narcissus.
Evoking the set and production design of Fritz Lang’s iconic Metropolis in A Matter of Life and Death.
Switching between black-and-white and color in A Matter of Life and Death.
Creating Tales of Hoffman as a “composed film”, a marriage of cinematic imagery with operatic music.
A scene from A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH in MADE IN ENGLAND: THE FILMS OF POWELL AND PRESSBERGER. Courtesy of Cohen Media Group.
After his association with Pressberger, Powell made what I consider his best film, Peeping Tom, which was released in the same year as Hitchcock’s Psycho; I find Peeping Tom to be the better film, and more shocking and disturbing..
Made in England makes a passing reference to Powell’s last film, Age of Consent, but doesn’t mention that it features a voluptuous, nubile 24-year-old Helen Mirren naked.
Here’s another random thought sparked by Made in England – Anton Walbrook, who is not in the pantheon of famous actors from the Golden Age, was a really excellent actor.
Now you might NOT want to go to film class, and, in that case, this is an Eat Your Broccoli movie. But if you’re a hardcore cinephile and/or a Scorsese fan like me, this film is for you.
Photo caption: Norman Mailer in HOW TO COME ALIVE. Courtesy of Zeitgeist Films.
The superbly crafted biodoc How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer reveals a generational literary talent who managed to be immensely successful, all while addicted to turmoil of his own making.
Of course, How to Come Alive reminds us Mailer’s prodigious talent. This was a writer who published his first best seller, the definitive WW II novel, at age 25. He won a Pulitizer Prize for a novel he published at age 45 and another Pulitzer for an even more groundbreaking work at age 56. Yet that rare gift of being recognized in his own time as America’s greatest novelist wasn’t enough for Mailer.
Mailer both wondered at and crassly exploited his own celebrity. He picked public fights of all kinds whenever he could – the feuds of a public intellectual and the fisticuffs of a barroom bully. He drank immense quantites of alcohol and used uppers and downers simultaneously. His interior demons were so intense that, drunk and raging at a humiliation, he stabbed his wife. No wonder the film is taglined a cautionary tale.
Mailer went through six wives and produced nine children. This brilliantly sourced doc draws from interviews with Mailer’s sister and from at least six of his kids, who tell us about Mailer and about their mothers. And we hear lots about Mailer from Mailer himself, who seemingly never passed a microphone or a camera without discussing himself, his ideas and his behavior. “I am a narcissist…I love shocking people.”
While chronicling Mailer’s life more or less in chronological sequence, director Jeff Zimbalist and co-writer Victoria Marquette ingeniously structured How to Come Alive around Mailer’s own guiding principles. These topical chapters effectively introduce us to the paradoxical aspects of Mailer’s persona. Zimbalist and his editor Alannah Byrnes deliver one of the best edited films of any genre this year; they present their talking heads without lingering on any of them and keep us mesmerized with a firehose barrage of images and clips.
Mailer’s boorish and conceited behavior would be tiresome if not rooted in so many diverse aspects of his character. Sometimes he was genuine, throwing down on one of his intellectual principles. Sometimes he was posing to get attention. And sometimes, he was just out of control (as in wife-stabbing).
Certainly, his running for Mayor of New York, his organizing an anti-war march on the Pentagon, his running for Mayor again and his producing, directing and starring in a film about his own fantsy alter ego, were all vanity projects. If he were serious about his purported outcomes, he wouldn’t have put himself at the forefront.
Why is someone a serial provocateur and constantly oppositional? Is there pleasure in goading a reaction from others? Is it about defying conventions, discomfiting the comfortable? Is it about positioning himself as superior to others?
Mailer was one helluva piece of work, which How to Come Alive makes clear:
Mailer’s ambition in declaring, “I want to write the great novel of WW II” BEFORE he saw any combat, let alone wrote about it. Who does that?
The notorious “feminist debate” in which Mailer squared off against the leading feminist thinkers and leaders of his time. I didn’t expect the mutual respect between Mailer and the feminists. It’s pretty funny, and there’s one howling moment at Mailer’s expense.
And then there’s the most stunning sequence in How to Come Alive – while filming Mailer’s self-indulgent art film Maidstone, a demented Rip Torn, in the ultimate method acting, decides that the story demands that he assassinate Mailer’s character; Torn then tries to kill Mailer (really kill him) with a hammer as the camera rolls, all in front of Mailer’s real life family. Torn’s visage is maniacal, and some serious drugs had to be involved here. The video is disturbing, as are the recollections of Mailer’s traumatized children.
Mailer was a person who, above all, rejected safety; that turned his life into a high wire act without a net, and, in How to Come Alive, Jeff Zimbalist unspools it into a thoughtful, entertaining and engrossing 100 minutes.
Photo caption: Guy Clark holds his favorite photo of Susanna Clark in WITHOUT GETTING KILLED OR CAUGHT. Courtesy of Indie Rights.
The lyrical documentary Without Getting Killed or Caught is centered on the life of seminal singer-songwriter Guy Clark, a poetic giant of Americana and folk music. That would be enough grist for a fine doc, but Without Getting Killed or Caught also focuses on Clark’s wife, Susanna Clark, a talented painter (album covers for Willie Nelson and Emmylou Harris) and songwriter herself (#1 hit I’ll Be Your San Antone Rose). What’s more, Guy’s best friend, the troubled songwriter Townes Van Zandt, and Susanna revered each other. Van Zandt periodically lived with the Clarks – that’s a lot of creativity in that house – and a lots of strong feelings.
Susanna Clark said it thus, “one is my soul and the other is my heart.”
The three held a salon in their Nashville home, and mentored the likes of Rodney Crowell and Steve Earle. You can the flavor of the salon in the 1976 documentary Heartworn Highways (AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube). It features Townes Van Zandt’s rendition of his Waitin’ Round to Die. (Susanna was also a muse for Rodney Crowell, who, after her death, wrote the angry song Life Without Susanna.)
Documentarians Tamara Saviano and Paul Whitfield, have unearthed a great story, primarily sourced by Susanna’s diaries; Sissy Spacek voices Susanna’s words. These were artsy folks so there are plenty of exquisite photos of the subjects, too. It all adds up to a beautiful film, spinning the story of these storytellers.
Guy and Susanna Clark in WITHOUT GETTING KILLED OR CAUGHT. Courtesy of Indie Rights.
I loved this movie, but I’m having trouble projecting its appeal to a general audience, because I am so emotionally engaged with the subject material. I’m guessing that the unusual web of relationships and the exploration of the creative process is universal enough for any audience, even if you’re not a fanboy like me.
The title comes from Guy’s song LA Freeway, a hit for Jerry Jeff Walker:
I can just get off of this L.A. freeway
Without gettin’ killed or caught
There is plenty for us Guy Clarkophiles:
the back story for Desperados Waiting for a Train;
the identity of LA Freeway’s Skinny Dennis;
Guy’s final return from touring, with the declaration “let’s recap”.
There’s also the story of Guy’s ashes; the final resolution is not explicit in the movie but you can figure it out; here’s the story.
Without Getting Killed or Caught had a very limited theatrical run in 2021, but it’s now available to stream from Amazon and YouTube.
Photo caption: Geoff McFetridge in GEOFF MCFETRIDGE: DRAWING A LIFE. Credit: Andrew Paynter; courtesy of Gravitas Ventures.
The thoughtful documentary Geoff McFetridge: Drawing a Life examines a great artist who is decidedly not tortured. No ear-slicing, overdoses or bratty rampages here, just a guy whose disciplined lifestyle and commitment to his family subvert the stereotypes of an artist fueled by torment.
Where’s the interest in a movie about someone who creates without turbulence? This is a guy who is unusually fierce with both his artistic and family lives. He refuses to compromise his art; his attitude is, take it or leave it (although, as a good Canadian, he is polite about it). Just as tenaciously, he safeguards his family time.
At one point in Drawing a Life, McFetridge makes it explicit. He sees it as too easy to make everything else – good behavior, responsibilities – subservient to art. The achievement is to do great art while maintaining life balance.
You may not know McFetridge’s name, but you’ll recognize his art. McFetridge has exhibited in major cities around the world, collaborated with filmmakers like Spike Jonz and Sofia Coppola, and designed for brands like Apple, Hermes, Vans and Patagonia.
Director and co-writer Dan Covert has filled Drawing a Life with McFetridge’s art, and viewing the film is to be immersed in the art. The editing, by Covert and co-writer Eric Auli, is magnificent. Geoff McFetridge: Drawing a Life won the 2023 Audience Award for Documentary Feature at SXSW.
Geoff McFetridge: Drawing a Life opens in NYC theaters tomorrow, in LA next week and digitally on July 2.
Photo caption: Ennio Morricone in ENNIO. Courtesy of Music Box Films.
Ennio Morricone is one of the greatest composers of movie music and certainly the most original, and the thorough and well-sourced documentary Ennio traces his life and body of work. We hear from Morricone himself and plenty of talking heads – many film directors, composers and musicians, from Clint Eastwood to Bruce Springsteen.
Morricone is the first artist I’ve heard of who aspired to become a doctor, but was forced by his father to play trumpet. During WW II in Italy, the Morricone family business was a small town brass band that entertained occupying German, then American troops, which the young Ennio found humiliating. Nevertheless, he followed his talent into a music conservatory, and evolved into composing.
Circumstances brought him a gig writing movie music and led to his groundbreaking scores for Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Beginning with the whistle in A Fistful of Dollars, this now iconic music is described in Ennio as “cultural shock” “operatic” and a “whole new language”. We learn how Morricone built his score for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly around his interpretation of a coyote howl. Great stuff.
Ennio’s other highlights include:
His work with Joan Baez for Sacco & Vanzetti in 1971.
His 9/11 symphony.
How he was snubbed by the Oscars for The Mission and The Untouchables before wining for The Hateful Eight.
Ennio takes two hours and 36 minutes to comprehensively survey Morricone’s entire career, and I would have preferred a shorter film more focused on the highlights. There is an unnecessarily long exit ramp of accolades at the end.
BTW I recommend listening to Morricone himself conduct an orchestra’s performance of his music from The Mission; search YouTube for “morricone conducts the mission”
Ennio is now available to stream on Amazon, AppleTV and YouTube.
Maestro is the dramatization of the marriage between legendary conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper, who also directed) and his wife Felicia (Carey Mulligan). As portrayed in Maestro, the marriage was shaped by three factors:
The two shared deep affection for each other, along with interests and sensibilities.
Bernstein’s career, driven by his genius, soared into superstardom.
In the first decades of the marriage, the mainstream would not accept a public figure who was gay or bisexual, which Lenny was.
Lenny was the prodigious talent and the celebrity, but Maestro is really Felicia’s story, because she faces the major conflict and because of Carey Mulligan’s sensational performance.
Indeed, although I’m lukewarm about Maestro, Mulligan is one of the two best reasons to see it. The second is a magical six-minute scene in which Bernstein conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony No. 2 at Ely Cathedral in 1973; it is as spectacular cinema as we’ve seen (and heard) this year.
Bradley Cooper’s Lenny is a jumble of ebullience, creative energy and conflict-avoidance; he was always, perhaps compulsively, the life of the party. Sharing her life with a guy who sucked out all the oxygen in the room was enough of a roller coaster ride for Felicia. Felicia was pretty open-minded about her husband’s dalliances with other men; but his wanting to bring his male lover (Tommy Cothran, played by Gideon Glick) into her family was a bridge too far.
It seems that Lenny primarily valued Felicia for having his children and accompanying him to trendy parties; theNYT’s Manohla Dargis impeccably describes those as “those fabulously glamorous New York parties that mostly exist in old Hollywood films or in biographies of very important dead people.” He didn’t need her as a business adviser, a creative partner or even a muse, but she was much more than his beard. Her admiration for his artistry wasn’t that of a wannabe or a groupie – Felicia, as a working New York theater actor, was an accomplished artist herself.
So, as was common in the era, its was Lenny who defined their relationship, not he and Felicia together. Carey Mulligan inhabits a character who enjoys the initial exuberance and who slowly observes that Lenny is not going to deliver what she believed that he originally committed to.
Bradley Cooper is an excellent director, as demonstrated by A Star Is Born. Here, he is very cinematic, switching aspect ratios and toggling between black and white and color.
Sarah Silverman is delightful in a very small part as one of Felicia’s friends.
Back when the trailer was released, there was a tempest in a teapot about Cooper’s prosthetic nose, to make him resemble Bernstein, a familiar figure. Bernstein’s his family stepped in and quelled the silliness. But, I was distracted by another prosthetic, the folds of wattles and neck fat on Cooper playing the old Bernstein
I’m decidedly not a fan of classical music (although I did like Amadeus); The Wife likes classical music, and she liked Maestro a bit more than I did. We were both engrossed when Mulligan was onscreen, but I was bored when she wasn’t.
This is a BIG, ambitious movie, and all of my favorite critics liked it more than I did. It’s the kind of movie (like Kramer vs. Kramer or Spotlight) that may garner lots Oscar buzz (with Netflix support), but that we won’t remember in a few years. Maestro is in theaters and streaming on Netflix.
Photo caption: Colman Domingo in RUSTIN. Courtesy of Netflix.
We all know of the March on Washington, culminating in Dr. Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech, delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before 250,000 people filling the National Mall. It’s one of the most iconic and important moments in American history. Rustin introduces many folks to the overlooked greatness of Bayard Rustin (Colan Domingo), the organizer of the event.
Bayard Rustin was an important civil rights leader who was relegated to the background of the movement, and sometimes even ostracized, because he was a gay man. In the 1950s and 1960s, being a former Communist didn’t help, either.
Rustin’s mentor A. Philip Randolph (played in Rustin by Glynn Turman) is the other most overlooked male civil rights leader. Randolph’s two greatest accomplishments, the integration of the military and of the defense industries, occurred before television (and were filtered by the white mainstream print media). A personal note from The Movie Gourmet: my decades-long career has been in politics, and one of my very first political day jobs was funded by the A. Philip Randolph Institute. Here is more on Randolph and Rustin from the APRI website.
Rustin takes us behind the scenes, and we see the strategic disagreements, petty jealousies and jockeying for status between civil rights leaders. It’s important that the leaders came from generational strata. In 1963, Randolph was 74. Rustin was 52. NAACP head Roy Wilkins was 61, and Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell was 55, both at the peaks of their careers. MLK was a rising superstar, but still only 34. John Lewis was still only 23.
In birthing the March on Washington, Rustin was fighting the overt attacks of J. Edgar Hoover and Strom Thurmond and the covert obstructionism of Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. Rustin also had the contend with the antagonism of Wilkins and Powell. But, Rustin had two cards to play – the respect demanded by Randolph and the rock star sizzle of MLK.
In a stellar, commanding performance, Colman Domingo is charismatic as Rustin. Domingo has been so good in everything I’ve seen him in: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Zola,Selma and Lincoln. Glynn Turman brings gravitas and moral authority to Randolph. In ingenious, against-type casting, Chris Rock is excellent as the funny-as-a-heart-attack Roy Wilkins. Jeffrey Wright PERFECTLY captures Adam Clayton Powell.
Ami Ameen has the challenge of satisfying audience expectation in portraying MLK. He gets the speech patterns and mannerisms right, while inhabiting a still-young MLK growing into the leader he was just becoming.
If you want to learn more of Bayard Rustin, I recommend Matt Wolf’s award-winning, but hard to find, short doc Bayard & Me, which features Rustin’s longtime partner Walter Neagle’s recollection of his life with Rustin; it’s an important insight into both Civil Rights and LGBTQ history.
Rustin was directed by George C. Wolfe, whose previous feature, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, was my #2 movie of 2021. We need to see more movies from this guy.
