recent writing

every camera I own and the photobook review will return shortly. Meanwhile my writing for other venues continues apace.

DCist: Out of Frame: Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life


Can a graphic novel successfully make the transition to a live action feature film? The attempts have varied wildly from sources both independent (Terry Zwigoff’s spot-on adpatation of Dan Clowes’ Ghost World) to blockbuster (Zach Snyder’s muddled vision of Alan Moore’s Watchmen). Comic artist Joann Sfar bypassed the usual artistic differences by adapting his own graphic novel based on the life of an iconic and controversial French singer. The resulting film, Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life, straddles the fence between graphic novel invention and cinematic convention. Its cinematic successes and graphic novel excesses make me wish it had taken the real life plunge and left the comic art world alone.
Read the rest of the review here. 

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DCist: Out of Frame: 50/50

A lot of virtual ink and chatter has been spilled and offered about 50/50, directed by Jonathan Levine. The script by Seth Rogen’s longtime buddy Will Reiser is based on Reiser’s own cancer scare at the age of 24. The film is already being met with almost universal accolades that it Gets Cancer Right. 50/50 has a well-meaning script that gets a lot of the details right: of hospital life, of sickness and dying. But it’s so wrapped up in Hollywood convention that not even Seth Rogen, try as he might, can lift this out of the Lifetime Movie for Hipsters aisle.

Read the rest of my review here.

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DCist: my review of Thunder Soul from Popcorn & Candy: The Funky Passage of Time Edition

Thunder Soul

What it is: The inspiring story of an unlikely funk success.

Why you want to see it: Director Mark Landsman hits one out of the park with his feature-length documentary debut. Thunder Souldocuments the history and reunion of a legendary 1970s funk band that happened to be made of high school students. At the end of the 1960s, band director Conrad O. Johnson took charge of the music department of Kashmere High, an all-black school in Houston, Texas. He instilled his students with a sense of dignity, discipline and showmanship, and with his own stirring original compositions and arrangements he turned the Kashmere Stage Band into an international success. The stage band scene grew out of the big bands but with a pop bent -- think early Chicago or "Spinning Wheel" played in velvet suits. The bands were typically very square and very white, but Johnson proved that expert musicianship, both professional and soulful, could be achieved by inner-city kids -- and that they could blow away the competition. The film is told in vintage footage and photographs of the band along with contemporary interviews, as well as a look at the rehearsal process of the band's reunion for their 92-year-old prof.

You may have never heard of the Kashmere Stage Band, but the film opens with a sound clip that may sound familiar. It's DJ Shadow, working with Handsome Boy Modeling School. Josh Davis (a.k.a. DJ Shadow) appears late in the film to explain that when he found that drum break (from the funky theme song Johnson wrote for Kashmere High) he had no idea he was listening to a student band. A hipper director might have taken the DJ Shadow angle and framed the entire story around it, but thank your documentary stars that Landsman focuses on Kashmere itself and treats the rediscovery of the music as a sidebar. It is an important sidebar, as the music reached an audience far beyond the Houston community that spawned it. Interviews with record label owner/"funk musicologist" Eothan Alapatt tell the story of rediscovery, as he tracks down the albums in thrift shops and is eventually introduced to Conrad O. Johnson and his treasure trove of master tapes. A CD compilation of the Kashmere Stage Band's music band was, as Alapatt put it, popular with "middle-aged white people." It climbed as high as number 3 on the Amazon charts, and if Thunder Soul has the legs it deserves, their numbers will be going up again. The reunited band is available for gigs, although many of the reuniting band members had not picked up their instruments in more than thirty years. You hear those missing years in the early rehearsals. But then the voices come together again in unity and all is fight and funky with the world. (Note: I could insert an Amazon link to the CD, but ask your local independent record store -- if Melody Records doesn't have it in stock, I bet they can get it).

View the trailer.
Still playing at E Street and the AFI Silver.

Other recent writing:

For In The Muse: 

• Sheet Music of the Week: The Birth of Cinema Edition October 5th, 2011. In which I namecheck Tommy Wiseau for The Man.

For DCist:

• Popcorn & Candy: Visions and Revisions Edition, including blurbs for Blackthorn, Sweet Smell of Success, the AFI's Vincent Price Centennial, Time Regained, K.364: A Journey by Train, and more.
• Photo of the Day: October 6, 2011
• Photo of the Day: October 13, 2011

O Captor My Captor! DVD Review: Sweet Hostage

Article first published as DVD Review: Sweet Hostage on Blogcritics.

In this age of the 24-hour news cycle, we take it for granted that producers of reality television and made-for-cable movies will respond quickly to this morning’s headlines. Such was the case even in 1975, when the fondly remembered Sweet Hostage was featured as ABC’s Friday Night Movie. Today’s audiences may appreciate it for melodrama and even a little camp factor, but they may not be aware of the timeliness of the plot.

Martin Sheen plays Leonard Hatch , a mental patient who as the film opens is reciting Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, right before he escapes from a Boston asylum through a laundry chute. Linda Blair is seventeen-year old Doris Mae Winters, a farmer’s daughter who is wielding a gun when we first see her: she’s just shot a 6-foot rattlesnake and hopes to keep it as a trophy when her hysterical mother (a staple of the 1970s teenage movie - cf The Loneliest Runner) comes along and axes it to pieces. These efficient opening scenes are an overture to the movie’s themes: the ennobling nature of literature; escape from the confines of societal expectations; man vs. nature; sexual hysteria. The characters' names are ripe with meaning as well - Hatch opens up an escape route not simply for himself; Winters is clearly discontent in her life on the farm. It is also obvious that she can fend for herself. However, the only trophy she manages to salvage from her kill is the snake's rattle, which various characters treat as a talisman throughout the film.

This is a pair fated to meet, and when Sheen, on his third or fourth hot car, ends up in New Mexico, he chances upon Blair examining her broken pick-up truck. Their fate is sealed and Sheen takes her hostage in a remote cabin.

Stocklholm Syndrome  is the phenomenon where a hostage develops sympathy for their captor. Classified in 1973, its most famous example was the 1974 case of Patty Hearst and her abduction by and later affinity with the Symbionese Liberation Army. When Sweet Hostage was first broadcast, the notion of a hostage falling for their captor was very much in the news. Today it would seem sick if not entirely surprising that a major network would respond to the headlines with what is essentially a romance.

Sheen and Blair have an easy chemistry, so much so that despite her protestations, you never quite fear for her life. Sheen’s star-making turn in Badlands in 1973 also prepared us for a sympathetic depiction of his outlaw urges; and Blair's battle with the devil established her own strength.

Despite the captor's aggression, his intentions seem chaste, even professorial. The literary conceits that Sheen wields are hammier than we have come to expect from him, and we can probably blame a lot of erudite-insane characters on this performance (hello The A Team?). Hatch/Sheen takes to calling his hostage Christabel, after another Coleridge poem. Winters resists her captor’s didactic approaches at first but this becomes part of an enriching teacher-pupil dynamic.

The sympathy between captor and hsotage may be unusual and even distasteful but the actors play it well, especially when the script reins in the literary references that often lean this in the direction of camp. The script by Edward Hume (who went on to script the apocalyptic tv-movie The Day After) can be overheated and the symbolism heavy, with a serpent and an apple signifying Eden. Scenes in the cabin become a haven away from the townspeople, who seem to belong to a different tribe. The cabin itself is like a stage, Sheen and Blair players in a chamber piece reluctantly pulled away from to get provisions - and this is where the Fall begins. They don’t make them like this anymore, and that may be a good thing, but those who like their backwoods romances uncomfortable will love Sweet Hostage.


Like other Warner Archives made-to-order DVDs, the disc does not include any bonus features. You can pre-order it from Amazon, but it's cheaper if you order directy from Warner Archives, where it is available now.

a picture is worth 3000+ words: this week in movie and art reviews

Detail from Patrick McDonough's Doghouse at (e)merge art fair, Capitol Skyline Hotel. Photo by Pat Padua

I've written that much this week despite a summer cold that's been lingering since early August. My by-lines for other outlets this week:

In the Muse

• Arrr, it’s the Sheet Music of the Week Pirate Edition, Matey! which I liberally edited and wrote about a quarter of.
• Pic of the Week: Belated Birthdays Edition, in which I wrote about Muhal Richard Abrams and Paul Williams, and got to proclaim my newfound fondness for Ishtar.
• Congratulations to Dafnis Prieto, 2011 MacArthur Fellow

DCist

• Photo of the Day: September 22, 2011
• Popcorn & Candy: Death and Transfiguration Edition
- I recommend Tsui Hark's Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame
• Out of Frame: Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure
. Recommended, thoug h Ireally wanted to smack some of the people interviewed.
• (e)merge art fair @ Capitol Skyline Hotel

I'm ready to pass out now.