Tag: review

Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice

She seizes control of her life’s narrative

Linda RonstadtI went to the 12:55 pm showing of the documentary Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany, NY on the day it opened in town. There were a total of five people there, and I suspect they’re all over sixty. (In fact, I know the pair of women in line were because they ALSO took the senior discount.)

I can tell you that we were all blown away. Sad that she no longer sing (mostly) because of her Parkinson’s disease. Her last concert was in 2009. If you’ve seen the movie up to that point, you suspect that someone who was less than the perfectionist she was/is could have milked her career for another two or three years.

Naturally, because I’m like that, I then went to the early Rotten Tomatoes reviews. 85% positive from the critics, 100% positive from the fans. I’ve decided to address the negative reviews.

“She suddenly seizes control of her life’s narrative, careening herself towards a series of bizarre, baffling creative decisions that inexplicably kept succeeding.” As the film makes clear, she was tired of being on the road in arenas.

The decisions to do Pirates of Penzance was a function of the music she grew up with. Joseph Papp would have given her the gig, but she wanted to be sure she was right for the part.

Ditto her three American songbook albums. She heard those tunes in her youth and wanted to sing them, getting someone like Nelson Riddle to arrange it, only to discover the man himself was available.

Her foray into Mexican music came from growing up singing in Spanish the tunes from her father’s heritage, Germans who moved to Mexico in the 19th century.

Hagiography?

“It isn’t long into the film when the hagiographic soundbites from famous interviewees become the dominant mode.” Also, “Ronstadt speaks of herself honestly and modestly, but the talking-heads tributes in this doc are trite.”

I have seen documentaries when one could say, “Why are THEY here?” as they ramble about the subject. But we’re talking Don Henley, who was a drummer for her in an early band before he met Glenn Frey and started the Eagles. Jackson Browne was part of that scene, touring with Linda.

Emmylou Harris was befriended by Linda after Gram Parsons’ death, as explained in the film. Dolly Parton, who in the extended trailer calls Linda a PITA. The alchemy of their three voices in the Trio sessions awed them all.

I got sufficient insight into Linda from herself and the others. There were details I had totally forgotten. The original version of Different Drum by the Stone Poneys – Linda Kenny Edwards, Bobby Kimmel- was not successful. But the re-recording made it to #13 on the pop charts in 1968.

If I had any complaints is that The Sound of My Voice gave short shrift to her latter output, at least a half dozen albums, including one with Harris and another with Ann Savoy.

If you love Linda’s music, see this film. If you’re not familiar with the range of her work, see this film. Here’s the Still within the Sound of My Voice, the opening tune from the 1989 album Cry Like a Rainstorm, Howl Like the Wind.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco

complicated love/hate relationship with the place

last black man in San FranciscoWhen I was in Indiana, the youth director of my church had recommended the movie The Last Black Man in San Francisco to the teens in our charge. As it turned out, my wife and I had seen it at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany a couple of weeks earlier.

I hadn’t written about it, partly for time, but mostly because I was stuck in describing it adequately. The IMDB posting says, “A young man searches for home in the changing city that seems to have left him behind.”

Rotten Tomatoes (93% positive with critics, 84% positive with audiences) is more descriptive: “Jimmie Fails [Jimmie Fails] dreams of reclaiming the Victorian home his grandfather built in the heart of San Francisco. Joined on his quest by his best friend Mont [Jonathan Majors] Jimmie searches for belonging in a rapidly changing city that seems to have left them behind.”

Looking at the reviews, I’d agree that it is fresh, original, poetic, an aching portrayal, well-acted, “leaning into its ambiguity, humanity and a quizzical moodiness.” More than one critic notes the “complicated love/hate relationship with the place he calls home that makes [director Joe] Talbot’s love letter to the city so riveting and rewarding.”

So you get the sense of loss, a metaphor for the current housing shortage in the city by the bay. It’s perhaps confusing at first, these skateboarding buddies, one who wants to do upkeep on property not presently his.

Eventually, the story by Fails, Talbot and Rob Richert makes sense to me. There are some great performances by Danny Glover as Montgomery’s blind grandfather, plus Tichina Arnold, Rob Morgan, Mike Epps, and Finn Wittrock.

My friend David Brickman says it’s the best movie of the year so far, and he may be correct.

You probably won’t find The Last Black Man in San Francisco in theaters at this point. If you watch it on pay cable or on DVD/BluRay, you might well find it challenging but, I hope, rewarding.

Book review: The Library Book

“The people of Los Angeles formed a living library.”

Library Book.Susan OrleanThe Library Book by Susan Orlean is initially about a fire at the main branch of the Los Angeles Public Library in April 1986 that incinerated over four hundred thousand books.

Why was I not familiar with this story? Maybe because it took place around the time of the Chernobyl nuclear accident.

The book is about the development of the LAPL, which, invariably, reflected the growth of the city itself. Orlean describes the various characters who have been the city Librarian, some of them quite colorful. This discussion inevitably gets into gender roles in employment.

The Library Book gets into the history of libraries generally, how and why they developed, and for whom. We see the value of books and other things libraries collect, and the awful power of book burnings.

But it is mostly about the 1986 fire. Was it set by Harry Peak, a struggling actor, whose ever-contradictory stories frustrated the investigators? Was he even at the scene of the the fire, or not?

The book delves into the investigation of arson. Was the library fire set? Breakthroughs in technology makes clear that some of the fires that investigators thought were deliberately set may not have been.

It is so much about recovery, how, after the librarians there mourned the losses, the community came together fire, forming “a human chain, passing the books hand over hand from one person to the next, through the smoky building and out the door.

“It was as if, in this urgent moment, people, the people of Los Angeles formed a living library. They created for a short time, a system to protect and pass along shared knowledge, to save what we know for each other, which is what libraries do every day.”

Ultimately, The Library Book is a love letter to Susan Orlean’s mother, who taught her the wonder of libraries. That joy is contagious.

As one Goodreads writer noted, “It is in many ways a tribute to libraries and librarians and what they stand for and the importance of the library now and in the future.’

If you like your books linear, the structure of The Library Book may be a little frustrating, as it bounces among the themes. But it did not bother me at all. In fact, I rather enjoyed it. The Library Book is a lot of things, just like a library.

Movie review: Yesterday (2019)

Of course, the music was great

Yesterday_(2019_poster)The Saturday before the trip to Indiana, the family was in Binghamton for a family reunion. Since we started early enough, we decided to stop at the AMC Theater near Binghamton to see the new movie Yesterday.

I’d been seeing the trailer for months. The premise is high concept. “Struggling UK musician Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) decides to give up his career, despite the support of his manager Ellie Appleton (Lily James). But in a bizarre twist, he suddenly realizes that he remembers the music of The Beatles, but apparently no one else does.

“Realizing this improbable opportunity, Jack begins playing the music of the greatest of the rock bands, claiming it as his own. It pays off quickly and Jack becomes a worldwide musical sensation.” But how long can you pass off someone else’s art as your own?

I know this will come as a big surprise to y’all, but I’ve been a huge fan of the Beatles for over a half century. I accepted the premise, and laughed out loud few times. The performances were enjoyable, including those by Kate McKinnon as a hard-edged music producer, and Ed Sheeran as a character named Ed Sheeran.

The critics were only so-so about Yesterday (63% positive on Rotten Tomatoes, though 89% of the audiences liked it). It’s not without its flaws, but I found it a lovely, escapist tale. Hey, Paul and Ringo liked it.

I was particularly struck by Lily James as the friend taken for granted. She is SO much different than the her performance as the titular character in All About Eve.

Of course, the music was great. There’s always speculation how the Beatles would be received now, but the band is so much a part of the cultural DNA, it is really unanswerable.

A little about the AMC theater. We went there as a result of a retirement gift card from one of my sisters The venue on the Vestal Parkway has great, cushy leatheresque seats that recline. It was quite possibly the most comfortable cinematic setting I’ve been to.

On the other hand, it had fully 30 minutes of previews. I don’t mind seeing three or four coming attractions, but I lost count after eight. The nice thing is that they indicated when the film was opening, presumably so you could buy your ticket TODAY.

Movie review: The Farewell (2019)

What is a “good lie”?

The FarewellThe movie The Farewell address the apparently imminent death of a family member. Importantly, it’s about a huge lie designed to keep the news from that matriarch of the family. Why? Because it’s the Chinese way.

Awkafina stars as Billi, who now lives in New York City, as do her parents. But she’s often on the phone with her Nai Nai or grandmother (Shuzhen Zhou) in China, who she loves dearly. Billi is devastated when she hears that Nai Nai is dying of cancer. But she is bewildered when she learns that a mock wedding is being arranged so that Nai Nai’s family can say goodbye to her without Nai Nai realizing it.

The cliché in film/literature is that the more specific the story, the more universal the application. If you’ve ever gone to more than three weddings, you’ve experienced the groanworthy elements of this one, including the music. The brief appearance of the tall, handsome, unmarried doctor who helps maintain the fiction would play just as well if the characters were Jewish or Italian.

A placard early on says “Based On An Actual Lie”. What is a “good lie”? Billi’s uncle, who lives in Japan explains that in America, they’re into personal rights and responsibility. But in the East, it’s more of a collective burden. There is great effort extended in maintaining the façade.

The Farewell features some heavy themes. Yet it is often quite funny. The viewer relates to Billi, as she struggles with what she thinks is right versus what the family has agreed to. It’s also a paean to what one consider “home.” Awkwafina’s performance is quite credible.

The movie also stars Tzi Ma as Billi’s father. He is the quintessential, “Oh, THAT guy.” He’s very good, as is the rest of the cast. I should note, in case you’re allergic to such things, that the film, written and directed by Lulu Wang, features subtitles, not 100% of the time, but often enough.

My wife and I saw The Farewell on July 29 at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany, when I scored two free passes. We were sitting in the middle of the third row from the front. I told the woman on the aisle that there was a 90% chance that someone would come to sit on the two interior seats in the row after the lights went down; I was correct.

Since there were no previews, this meant their disruption was during an early scene. Then one was on her phone, which later went off. Had I been sitting next to her – my wife was – I would have been severely tempted to take the device away from her.

Ramblin' with Roger
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