Tag: review

MOVIE REVIEW – Seymour: An Introduction

Seymour: An Introduction is recommended musicians, teachers, and many others.

seymourActor Ethan Hawke was at a dinner party a few years back, where he met composer/pianist/ teacher Seymour Bernstein.

Hawke was struggling with his artistic direction and found the octogenarian’s insights from his most interesting life both inspiring and useful.

Deciding that the world needed to know more about this accomplished man, who I had never heard of, Hawke directed and coproduced Seymour: An Introduction. Read this New York Times article about that meeting, and the subsequent filming.

From Rotten Tomatoes, 100% positive from the critics and 88% positive from the audience:

“[Seymour] enjoyed a long and illustrious career as a performer before he gave it up to devote himself to helping others develop their own gifts. While Ethan Hawke’s gentle, meditative study is a warm and lucid portrait of Bernstein and his exceptional life and work, it’s also a love letter to the study of music itself, and a film about the patience, concentration, and devotion that are fundamental to the practice of art. Seymour: An Introduction allows us to spend time with a generous human being who has found balance and harmony through his love of music.”

Here is the trailer. Also, Ethan & Seymour talking to David Poland about life, happiness, and art.

When I saw Seymour: An Introduction with my friend Mary at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany in May 2015, it was already down to one showing, so you’re not likely to find it at a cinema. Assuming it comes out on DVR/on-demand, et al., I recommend that you watch it all at once – it’s only 84 minutes long – and get to know Seymour properly.

Recommended for those who perform or listen to music, teach or desire to be taught.

MOVIE REVIEW: Danny Collins

I’m always happy to see Bobby Cannavale NOT playing a mobster or thug.

Danny_Collins_Official_PosterI pretty much HAD to see the movie Danny Collins, which is based, sort of, on a message John Lennon sent to a budding musician named Steve Tilston, interviewed in a magazine back in 1971. Lennon saw the piece and sent a letter to the Tilston, care of the magazine, inviting Steve to call John, complete with his phone number. But the young musician never saw the letter until years later.

That actually happened, and it is the jumping-off point of this fictional piece of an aging musician (Al Pacino), who stays on the road, performing the same songs he wrote three decades ago, essentially selling out, and he needs to “self-medicate” to get through it all. His friend/manager Frank (Christopher Plummer) gives him the present of the aforementioned letter, and suddenly his too-young girlfriend, and excesses in his lifestyle, seem lacking.

He essentially moves into a New Jersey hotel room, tries to woo the hotel manager (Annette Bening, who reminded me of an older version of Annie Hall), and fix up a pair of hotel employees (Melissa Benoist, Josh Peck). Mostly, he tries to make things right by Tom (Bobby Cannavale) and his family (Jennifer Garner, young Giselle Eisenberg), though Tom, for good reason, wants nothing to do with Danny.

The Wife and I saw this at the Spectrum Theatre on our anniversary, and we liked it quite a lot. I think nearly ALL the reviews, positive (78%) and negative, are largely true. The cast makes the mushy journey about self-discovery palatable. The narrative isn’t particularly surprising, though it has a few twists, yet the story by writer/director Dan Fogelman was charming, engaging, and probably a bit schmaltzy. The John Lennon songs that made up most of the soundtrack, were overly familiar to me, but might be revelatory for someone not so seeped into his music.

I’m always happy to see Bobby Cannavale NOT playing a mobster or thug, but just a guy trying to get by.

As usual, I must complain about people leaving the moment the credits start, as they miss the REAL guy (Tilston) talking about, belatedly, getting the Lennon letter.

Oh, two last things: apparently, Michael Caine was originally cast as Danny’s manager, before being replaced by Plummer; Caine’s name still shows up in some cast listings. The original name of the film was to be Imagine, based on the Lennon song; I’m glad it was changed.

Movie Review: Home

The movie Home addresses the danger of group thought.

Home MovieIt must be the low expectations syndrome. Both the Wife and I knew that the new animated feature film Home had not great reviews – only 47% positive on Rotten Tomatoes. The Daughter wanted to see it, however, and we all did, at our neighborhood Madison Theatre in Albany.

Sure, the logic of the Boov sucking up all the humans on earth, except one, and relocating them, is far-fetched. The single girl, Gratuity ‘Tip’ Tucci (voiced by Rihanna) was a preternaturally resourceful 12-year-old. I found the music, by Rihanna and Jennifer Lopez (who voiced Tip’s mom, Lucy) was pretty generic.

But the film has something to say about being the screwup, as the Boov dubbed Oh (Jim Parsons) most certainly was; I can relate. It addresses the danger of group thought, and how leaders, such as Captain Smek (Steve Martin) are capable of deceiving the masses, and the people believing them. And it addresses how one can change one’s mindset and have a positive outcome.

Moreover, the boys behind me squealed with glee during some action scenes. The film developed one bathroom joke that even my spouse and I laughed at.

I think the problem is that Home lacks those adult references that movies such as Toy Story or the Lego Movie have. It’s a kids’ movie, and while it’s not desperately original, I enjoyed it enough that I wasn’t shrieking when I left the cinema, and there is plenty of children’s film fare that I’ve found painful to watch.

If you’re stuck at home watching the video, you might find it not a terrible waste of 90 minutes.

Book review: The New Jim Crow

new jim crowLaw professor Michelle Alexander wrote a book called The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, which has become not only a surprise best seller since its paperback version came out in January 2012, but arguably THE definitive book on mass incarceration, particularly of men of color.

From the New York Times: “The book marshals pages of statistics and legal citations to argue that the get-tough approach to crime that began in the Nixon administration and intensified with Ronald Reagan’s declaration of the war on drugs has devastated black America.

“Today… nearly one-third of black men are likely to spend time in prison at some point, only to find themselves falling into permanent second-class citizenship after they get out… Professor Alexander’s book [asserts] that the crackdown was less a response to the actual explosion of violent crime than a deliberate effort to push back the gains of the civil rights movement.”

Our church studied the book in February during the Adult Education hour. In brief, Alexander shows an imperfect, but palpable, link from slavery to the Jim Crow laws that took effect, from after the American Civil War to perhaps a half-century ago. That was followed by a NEW Jim Crow of mass incarceration, where the number of people in prison in the United States grew from about 300,000 in 1970 to over 2 million by 2000.

Check out Uneven Justice: State Rates of Incarceration By Race and Ethnicity and Breaking Down Mass Incarceration in the 2010 Census: State-by-State Incarceration Rates by Race/Ethnicity.

Impact

Moreover, that mass incarceration has had a devastating effect on communities. From the book:

What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind.

Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

The problem with having read this book is that, once you’ve done that, you know the basic premise to be self-evidently true, and don’t understand why EVERYONE doesn’t know this. The one saving grace is that, when Alexander first started investigating the issue early in this century, SHE hadn’t connected the dots either.

I will note that the author occasionally repeats the narrative, I reckon, so that she’s certain the reader gets the point she’s making. But these are important points. Moreover, the issues are still taking place. Read Jails: Time to Wake Up to Mass Incarceration in Your Neighborhood.

MOVIE REVIEW: Cinderella

The short before Cinderella was Frozen Fever, a sequel to the massively successful movie, with most of the original cast.

This was to have been a family outing a couple of weeks ago, to see the new live-action adaptation of the story Cinderella but we were all, in turn, under the weather. Finally, it’s school vacation week, the film is about to leave the Spectrum, so the three of us, plus a friend of The Daughter finally get to see this Disney film.

At some level, the Wife and I wish we had seen it sooner, for while it reviewed reasonably well (85% positive), it’s always the thumbs down that the mind remembers.
disney_cinderella_2015
Truth is, I’m not sure we NEED another Cinderella film at all. Still, it looked quite fine, the sets, and lovely costumes, and the production design. Director Kenneth Branaugh does a decent job with pacing this. One of the better scenes was the deconstruction of the carriage, shortly after midnight.

One of the complaints was that there was a lot of death in this film. Hey, there’s ALWAYS death in a Disney film from Bambi’s mother to (Finding) Nemo’s mother. In fact, one gets to actually get to know Ella’s mother (Hayley Atwell, Agent Peggy Carter in the Marvel TV show), and feels sad when (CAN THIS BE A SPOILER?) she dies. Often in the Cinderella narrative, she’s quickly, or already, dead. This narrative was a good choice.

Her father (Ben Chaplin) spends enough time with his daughter (Lily James, Lady Rose MacClare from Downton Abbey) before he decides to remarry. Cate Blanchett is, unsurprisingly, masterful as the stepmother, and we get a sense of why she’s so wicked. Her daughters (Sophie McShera, Daisy Robinson Mason from Downton Abbey; and Holliday Grainger, who has played villains Lucrezia Borgia and Bonnie Parker) are far more ugly inside than out.

That Ella meets the prince (Richard Madden, Robb Starkin in Game of Thrones) before the ball makes the narrative less the “Suddenly, their eyes meet, and they fall in love” of other iterations. It’s a bit more empowering without being too heavy-handed.

My favorite character may be the captain of the guard (Nonso Anozie from Game of Thrones), but there were other nice performances, by Stellan Skarsgård as the Grand Duke, Derek Jacobi as the King, and especially Helena Bonham Carter as the somewhat dipsy Fairy Godmother. Oh, the mice were good too.

The short before the film was Frozen Fever, a sequel to the massively successful movie, with most of the original cast, but none of its joy, unless you like the one joke, which is about booger snowmen. I was going to say it left me cold, but I was forbidden from doing so.

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