SUNDANCE 2014: WHIPLASH

Andrew (Miles Teller) and Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) in Whiplash.

The beatings behind the beats

By Don Simpson

 

Inexplicably abandoned at an early age by his mother and raised by a father (Paul Reiser) who never achieved success as a writer, Andrew (Miles Teller) is riddled with an unquenchable drive to become famous. Though Whiplash does not make much of Andrew’s backstory, Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), the tyrannical band conductor at his elite music conservatory, makes good use of that information to emotionally destroy him.

 

Whiplash relays how Fletcher preys upon the emotional insecurities of a friendless first-year college student who regularly goes to the local movie theater with his father. Fletcher plays with Andrew’s sense of self-worth by boosting him up only to knock him right back down again. Andrew is constantly unsure of his standing with Fletcher, leaving him in a constant state of fear. Knowing that Fletcher could be his ticket to success, Andrew is willing to do anything to impress — or even appease — Fletcher, who takes full advantage of Andrew’s naïve desperation.

 

During one of Andrew’s high points, he musters up enough courage to finally ask out the girl who works at the movie theater concession stand (Melissa Benoist). Though this fleeting relationship serves mostly as a distraction from the primary narrative, it does highlight Andrew’s somewhat futile attempts at controlling a less confident person. Their relationship also serves as an example of just how willing Andrew is to discard anything in order to achieve his goals.

 

The story of Whiplashseems vaguely familiar, as if a similar narrative arc has been used to tell a story about a boxer with an emotionally abusive trainer. It seems as though elite music schools are successful because they have faculty like Fletcher who will relentlessly push the students beyond their natural abilities to see if they can reach a higher level of greatness. Fletcher looks and screams like a drill sergeant, ruling his students with extreme levels of fear. One could argue that Fletcher’s motivations are more sincere, as Whiplash strives to form the conductor into a well-rounded individual, showing the extremes of his personality and allowing him to explain his actions.

 

An opening night selection of Sundance Film Festival 2014, and recipient of numerous awards at this year's Sundance Film Festival, writer-director Damien Chazelle's Whiplash also explores the pros and cons of Fletcher’s behavior, existing in a moral grayness that opts to not really take sides. A teacher saying that someone does a “good job” might turn out to be a curse, but where does one draw the line between motivation to do better and psychological torture?

Whiplash was purchased at Sundance Film Festival 2014.

SUNDANCE 2013: BLACK METAL

Ian (Jonny Mars) in Black Metal

Murder and music

By Don Simpson

While on stage, Ian (Jonny Mars) dons creepy corpse paint as the lead singer of a black metal band; otherwise, he is just a normal, thirty-something husband to Rose (Heather Kafka) and father to Lily (Addisyn Stevenson). Like most performers, Ian's stage persona is merely a fictional character and he does his best to keep the two distinct personalities of his Jekyll and Hyde lifestyle quite separate.

On the fateful night that we meet Ian, it is revealed that one of his fans has murdered a high school teacher and tagged the crime scene with the logo of Ian's band. Ian instantly faces the hateful disdain of the media and surrounding community. Like any normal human being, he wrestles with the guilt and blame associated with the murder.

Mars plays the lead singer of the black metal band with blood-curdling authenticity, while also being incredibly tender and empathetic as a loving family man. In other words, Mars goes from being someone I would not want to run across in a dark alley to someone I would love to have as a close friend. Ian is sculpted into a real person, thus putting a human face on the discussion about the entertainment industry's role in perpetuating violence. Not to get all meta on you, but Mars' performance in Black Metal serves as a reminder that the members of black metal bands are merely acting a part -- this is something that rabid black metal fans should keep in mind when worshiping the fictional stage personas of their pale-faced heroes.

Writer-director Kat Candler's Black Metal comes from the rarely portrayed perspective of an artist who is blamed by proxy for a murder. Regardless, Black Metal does not take sides, the film prompts many of the right questions while purposefully leaving them all unanswered. Of course, with only a nine-minute running time, Black Metal does not have the time to delve deeper into the issues; instead, Black Metal plays like a succinctly edited teaser for a feature-length film that leaves us wanting a whole lot more.

LAFF 2012: NEIL YOUNG JOURNEYS

Neil Young in Neil Young Journeys.

Rocking chairman

By Ed Rampell

Jonathan Demme is one of those rare directors who seems to effortlessly foray from major Hollywood productions -- including the 1990s features, The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia -- to documentaries, such as 2003’s Haiti-shot, The Agronomist. Neil Young Journeys is Demme’s third nonfiction collaboration with the prolific performer and composer who has been one quarter of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, as well as a mover, shaker and rocker with Buffalo Springfield and Crazy Horse.

The documentary opens with Young driving around his old stomping grounds in Omenee, the town in North Ontario he plaintively sang about in CSNY’s "Helpless" on their landmark Déjà Vu album. Neil Young Journeys alternates between Young’s peregrinations around his beloved hometown and a one man show at Toronto’s Massey Hall where he performs new and classic songs from his considerable repertoire.

Some of those vintage numbers include "Down By the River" and "After the Gold Rush," wherein the socially conscious Young updated the lyrics, singing, 'Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 21^st century.' A rousing rendition of "Ohio" includes four names projected on the screen, who turn out to be the 'four dead in Ohio,' CSNY lyrically lamented after National Guardsmen killed a quartet of college students protesting the Indochina War at Kent State on May 4, 1970. The sequence is intercut with archival footage of the unarmed Kent demonstrators and the National Guard assassins. It’s hard to believe that each of the slain students was only around 20, youths robbed of their lives by Nixon’s henchmen. Thank you very much, Mssrs. Young and Demme, for remembering them, and for doing so in such a stirring, touching manner.

When I think of Young I remember a high pitched voice and acoustic guitar. Perhaps my memory is faulty? In any case, in Neil Young Journeys Young strums a variety of electric guitars, belting out amped up licks with lots of heavy reverb. He can still hit the high notes, but his voice is more gravelly and raspy here. It seems to be the opposite of the, say, Eric Clapton trend of taking and taming classic rock hits, such as Derek and the Dominos’ immortal "Layla," and updating them with more mature, tranquil acoustic, “unplugged” versions. In Neil Young Journeys Young is very much “plugged”; at the end of his set Young “plays” the speakers, inducing mindbending feedback worthy of Jimi Hendrix. (BTW, the only good thing about Hendrix’s untimely death is that we didn’t have to hear him play unplugged versions of Purple Haze and Foxy Lady on acoustic guitars when we grew up.)

The glammed down rocker also tickles the ivories of a number of keyboards during his solo performance, which features many searing extreme close-ups of Young, who is extremely emotive and soulful as he sings and plays. The film has a cinema verite, “you are there” flavor. At least one camera is, literally, in spitting range and some may have problems with Declan Quinn’s cinematography: Call it “Spittle-vision.” The audience is also rarely seen in this concert film, wherein the Canadian also croons newer tunes, such as 2010’s "Love and War."

At 66 years old, he remains forever Young.

 

  

  

 

NEWPORT BEACH 2012: UNDER AFRICAN SKIES



Paul Simon in Under African Skies.

Sounds of defiance

By Ed Rampell

Joe Berlinger’s complicated two-hour documentary Under African Skies has, on the one hand, a sonorous soundtrack featuring Paul Simon and his African Graceland band. On the other hand, the doc deals with a complex issue: The role of art and politics. When the better half of Simon and Garfunkel flew to Johannesburg to record tracks for an album mixing American pop and the South African sound, he ran afoul of a cultural boycott supported by the U.N. and African National Congress against the tyrannical apartheid regime, enforced in those gloomy days before Nelson Mandela was released from prison.

Twenty five years later Simon reunites with his onetime African bandmates and the doc examines the controversial role Simon played then and its resonance today. In crucial scenes the aging Simon meets one of the ANC revolutionaries who condemned the musician in the 1980s for breaking a boycott intended to strangle the segregationist state. Simon continues to decry the way politicians use artists and insists on the right of talents to express themselves. Who’s right? Having triumphed over apartheid, the ANC activist can afford to be magnanimous.

In any case, the music, featuring Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Simon, etc., is extraordinary, and creates a musical mélange that’s the dialectical opposite of apartheid.         

  



FILM REVIEW: ROADIE

Roadie (Ron Eldard) in Roadie.

White lined fervor

By Don Simpson

Jimmy Testagross (Ron Eldard) — the eponymous protagonist of Michael Cuesta’s Roadie — is a 40-something guy from Queens with an unfortunate last name (that earned him the childhood nickname of “Jimmy Testicles”) who has tirelessly schlepped Blue Öyster Cult’s gear for 26 years, a thankless career if ever there was one. While on the subject of thankless, BOC is leaving for a tour of South America soon, and Jimmy is getting the runaround from the band’s manager. It seems the washed-up band is leaving their washed-up roadie behind.

After dedicating over half of his life to BOC, Jimmy has no friends to speak of and nowhere to go. As Jimmy drifts hopelessly towards destitute poverty, he is drawn closer and closer to his childhood home. But Queens is not a happy place for Jimmy; he “escaped” it for good reason. His high school buddies — the same Neanderthal numskulls such as Bobby (Bobby Canavale) who christened him “Jimmy Testicles” — who stayed behind seem uneducated, adventureless and ambitionless to Jimmy. Bobby is exactly who Jimmy has rebelled against; guys like him are the exact reason he abandoned Queens many years ago. What makes matters worse is that Jimmy’s high school sweetheart, Nikki (Jill Hennessy), married Bobby. How could she settle for someone like him?

As is often the case for those of us who purposefully moved away from his or her childhood neighborhoods and dread any return visits, Jimmy’s first means of escape from this harsh reality is alcohol — and lots of it. Reconnecting with Nikki and Bobby further escalates Jimmy’s self-destructive behavior by adding cocaine to his dangerous recipe of escapism.

Roadie accurately represents the conflict between those who have “escaped” their childhood homes and those who chose to stay behind. Cuesta’s dedication to the gritty authenticity of his subject is quite impressive and his casting of Eldard as Jimmy turns out to be divinely inspired.

TRUE/FALSE FILM FEST 2011: BENDA BILILI!

Staff Benda Bilili in Benda Bilili!

Outside the scene



By Don Simpson

Staff Benda Bilili is, quite literally, a band of outsiders. Not only are most of them disabled, but they hail from one of the most unlikely of places: a slum in Kinshasa, Congo. The core of the band consists of four senior vocalists, all of whom are paraplegics as a result of poliomyelitis, including their de facto leader, Leon Libaku. They scurry around the slums on tricycles customized with hand pedals. The band has taken a cadre of ex-sheges (abandoned street kids) under their wings in an erstwhile attempt to steer them clear of violence and crime. Some of the kids play instruments in the band -- including Roger Landu, who created a unique single-stringed instrument with an empty can and a piece of wood -- while others act as rickshaw drivers, shuttling the paraplegics around.

Filmmakers Renaud Barret and Florent de La Tullaye stumbled upon Staff Benda Bilili while collecting footage of street musicians in the slums of Congo in 2005. (Benda Bilili were also featured in Barret and de La Tullaye’s documentary, Jupiter's Dance.) Barret and de La Tullaye obviously saw a ripe opportunity to expose Benda Bilili to the rest of the world and rather than simply shoot a documentary about Staff Benda Bilili, it seems as though Barret and de La Tullaye take things a few steps further. They make it their mission to save Staff Benda Bilili from the slums (or at least make their lives a little less harsh). Barret and de La Tullaye never go as far as clearly stating their roles or goals, but it seems as if they essentially become Staff Benda Bilili's temporary management. It is Barret and de La Tullaye who find financing as well as a producer willing to record Staff Benda Bilili on the cheap. (This all occurs offscreen, so it is very difficult to surmise Barret and de La Tullaye's exact involvement with the band.) If all goes according to plan, Staff Benda Bilili's music will be distributed around the world.

It is impossible to deny that this was a very good deed on the part of Barret and de La Tullaye. They take a huge risk -- we are never told how much is at stake -- and I imagine Staff Benda Bilili will be eternally grateful. But, being that Benda Bilili! screened at True/False, what better time and place to discuss the ethical responsibilities of documentary filmmakers. So are Barret and de La Tullaye showing us everything that we need to know? It is obvious that Barret and de La Tullaye are not impartial towards their subjects, but should they have tried to be? Barret and de La Tullaye seem to be invested -- quite literally -- in the outcome of this story; should they have revealed more details about their behind the scenes efforts in getting Staff Benda Bilili recorded, signed and sold? In my opinion, there lies the true story. How did Staff Benda Bilili become world music celebrities? We only see the results of -- what appears to be -- Barret and de La Tullaye’s assistance, but we do not know what precisely they did.

Benda Bilili! is an emotionally moving and heartwarming tale with a finely tuned narrative arc. But what really irks me is that there is something that seems almost self-congratulatory about Benda Bilili! It is one thing to film someone else as they attempt to turn a bunch of paraplegics from an African slum into world music icons, but when filmmakers seem to involve themselves directly in their narrative (especially when they do so offscreen) it is a different story. I am not saying that their choice to record the positive affects of their own good deeds is a bad thing but, by hiding so many facets of the business side of things, Barret and de La Tullaye make me a little suspicious of their motives and actions. Maybe they were not intentially being secretive -- it is actually more likely that Barret and de La Tullaye did not want the film to focus on their own involvement.

When it comes down to it, I seem to think Barret and de La Tullaye want it to appear as though Staff Benda Bilili’s success is self-made. I, however, would have preferred if they provided fuller disclosure of their participation in Staff Benda Bilili’s success. Just to clarify: this is all speculation, I left the theater assuming that Barret and de La Tullaye assisted Staff Benda Bilili in getting their songs recorded, signed and sold. Maybe I misread something?


(Benda Bilili! will screen at SXSW Film Festival 2011.)