Photo caption: Andy Kaufman in THANK YOU VERY MUCH. Courtesy of Drafthouse Films.
Andy Kaufman was an original, whose art always confounded the expectations of others. The fine biodoc Thank You Very Much both reminds us of Kaufman’s gifts and explains the roots of his offbeat, often bizarre humor..
Director Alex Braverman takes us to Kaufman’s formative childhood and the parental lie that shaped much of his psyche. We hear from Kaufman’s dad, his creative partner Bob Zmuda and Andy’s girlfriend Lynne Margulies. Friends Danny Devito, Marilu Henner and Steve Martin pop in, too.
Kaufman was a prankster and a provocateur, so much so that, when a woman suffered a fatal heart attack on stage, the audience suspected that it might be a part of Kaufman’s act; (it wasn’t).
And what about his notorious wrestling wrestling against women? It’s the most controversial element of Kaufman’s work and the most inexplicable. Thank You Very Much sheds important light on this obnoxious performance art.
And here’s a delightful nugget – we even get to learn the origin of Latka’s accent on Taxi.
Thank You Very Much is in theaters, with filmmaker appearances at several LA theaters this week. You can also stream it on Amazon and AppleTV.
Photo caption: Janis Ian in JANIS IAN: BREAKING SILENCE. Courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment.
In Janis Ian, Breaking Silence, the biodoc of the earnest pop-folk singer-songwriter, a teen prodigy steps onto the roller coaster of the music industry at a tender age and experiences the highest highs and the lowest lows. And, it turns out that there’s more to Janis Ian than Society’s Child and At Seventeen.
The word prodigy is overused, but accurately describes Ian, who was doing professional-level song-writing at age 14. Her dad answers a booking request on the home phone with with, “You know she’s only 15, right?“
We’re not surprised that Ian experiences the shock of instant national stardom, the vicissitudes of record companies, the proverbial crooked business managers, (but not as MANY drugs as in most music biodocs). But it’s insightful to hear from Ian herself about how all this seemed and felt as it happened. Ian recounts her relationships while touring, with both men and women, and the impact of being outed involuntarily.
When Ian is unexpectedly confronted by someone who broke her heart years before, she blurts out the perfect last laugh.
Janis Ian: Breaking Silence was made with Janis Ian’s cooperation, and takes a very sympathetic point of view; that’s okay because Ian herself is clear-eyed, self-deprecating and maintains a solid, often wry, perspective on her experience. Janis Ian herself testifies, along with others close to her (including old pals Arlo Guthrie and Joan Baez).
This is the third feature for director Varda Bar-Kar, who is aided by excellent editing from Ryan Larkin in his first feature.
The theatrical release of Janis Ian: Breaking Silence is rolling out, including California cinemas: Laemmle NoHo, Laemmle Monica, SBIFF Film Center, SBIFF Riviera, Smith Rafael Film Center, Rialto Cinemas Elmwood and Rialto Cinemas Sebastopol.
Photo caption: Thomas Kinkade in ART FOR EVERYBODY. Courtesy of Tremolo Productions.
Art for Everybody, the absorbing and revelatory biodoc of painter-entrepreneur Thomas Kinkade, begins with an audio recording of a 16-year-old Kinkade, aspiring to become a famous painter when he grew up – but not a poor one. He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, harvesting great wealth by creating demand where none had existed and filling it with what he, controversially, called art. After trading on his conservative Christianity, his business model became unsustainable, and Kinkade, living apart from his family, drank himself to death.
That’s a hell of a rise-and-fall story arc, but it gets better. After his death, his family finally saw the other 90% of Kinkade’s work, secreted away in a room they had called “the vault”. Those paintings, so shockingly different than his commercial ones, revealed a Kinkade that he had hidden from everyone. I like documentaries that are jaw-droppers, and this is one. In her first feature, director Miranda Yousef, who also edited, unspools Kinkade’s story flawlessly.
Kinkade, an astonishingly fast and prolific painter, built his empire on sentimental and comforting landscapes with exaggerated light features, such as warm light glowing from the windows of a forest cabin at night. That signature became the Kinkade brand, and he even trademarked the self-given moniker, “Painter of Light”. Because they don’t evoke anything but passive contentedness, I wouldn’t even describe these paintings as art, but rather as decoration or collectibles.
Their themes are more fantasy than nostalgia. For example Art for Everybody shows a Kinkade street scene of busy San Francisco, filled only with all-white, heterosexual families; as a lifelong Northern Californian (like me), Kinkade would surely have known that this was a San Francisco that has never existed.
Kinkade’s open religiosity attracted customers and investors. He exploited the culture wars and even advocated the censorship of other artists like Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano.
Kinkade, busy opening galleries in shopping malls, was already the painter who had sold the most canvases and prints in history before many in the fine art world had ever heard of him. In 2001, when Susan Orlean profiled him in The New Yorker, pointing out that ten million people owned Kinkade products, the traditional art critics seemed to howl in unison, “how DARE he?“
Art for Everybody is impeccably sourced with testimony from Kinkade’s wife and kids, his siblings, the co-founder of his company, along with Orlean and a bevy of experts in the fine arts world. I can’t remember a documentary where the subject’s family was more clear-eyed about their deceased loved one. They clearly love the guy, but pull no punches about his quirks and flaws.
In one revelatory moment, Yousef shows us a home movie of Kinkade taking his family back to see the modest house where his single mom raised Thomas and his siblings. As a kid, Kinkade was deeply ashamed of this home, and vowed to live more comfortably as an adult. As Kinkade shows his wife and kids around, it’s clear that he saw it as hell hole. Placerville, however, is not a bougie place, and Kinkade doesn’t report that he was spurned or teased because of his home, nor do his siblings seemed to be scarred by it. Clearly, the shame he felt was internally driven. Kinkade’s brother spells out what appealed to Kinkade about painting cozy cottages.
This was a a very complicated man – fun-loving dad and workaholic, a talented fine artist who aimed for the lowest common denominator. Once we’ve seen him as a proudly philistine huckster, it’s breathtaking to discover what he painted for himself and hid away. Might Kinkade have destroyed himself by not working out his demons through his art?
After premiering at the 2023 SXSW and a strong festival run, Art for Everybody is rolling out in theaters.
A. P. Giannini in A LITTLE FELLOW: THE LEGACY OF A.P. GIANNINI. Courtesy of Cinequest.
A Little Fellow: The Legacy of A.P. Giannini: Here’s an underdog story – a boy loses his immigrant father, starts out impoverished and builds the nation’s largest bank, helping to rebuild San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake. This very comprehensive documentary also tells the less well-known story of Giannini as movie financier – backing films like City Lights, Gone with the Wind and Sleeping Beauty.
A Little Fellow is a very by-the-numbers doc and is pretty uncritical of Giannini, but it is impeccably sourced and has a damn interesting subject.
I screened A Little Fellow: The Legacy of A.P. Gianninifor its US premiere at Cinequest. The Cinequest audience will note the local interest. Giannini’s childhood began in San Jose, his father was murdered in Alviso, and his first bank branch building still stands, only 1500 feet from the Cinequest screening at the Hammer Theatre.
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.
In PBS’ American Experience documentary Jimmy Carter, The New Yorker writer and former Carter speechwriter Henrik Hertzberg says:
Jimmy Carter was what the American people always SAY they want – above politics, determined to do the right thing regardless of political consequences, a simple person who doesn’t lie, a modest man, not someone with a lot of imperial pretenses. That’s what people say they want. And that’s what they got with Jimmy Carter.
And herein lies the rub.
In 1976, Americans were reacting to Watergate and wanted a President the LEAST like Richard Nixon. We got him, in the form of Jimmy Carter; it turned out that Carter could deliver non-Nixonian decency, but not the leadership that the era required.
In Jimmy Carter, we hear from those who know Carter best – including his wife Rosalynn Carter, his vice-president Walter Mondale, and right-from-the-start Carter insiders Jody Powell, Pat Caddell and Bert Lance. How the times made this man, then propelled him to such improbable electoral success and then finally doomed his Administration, is a great and cautionary story.
Jimmy Carter is in two parts, which combine for two hours and 39 minutes. It’s available to stream from Amazon and AppleTV (I can find it on my app, but not on the website).
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.
