Movie Nation

Bert Stern only directed one documentary. But “Jazz on a Summer’s Day” is widely considered the greatest jazz performance documentary ever, a 1959 classic that was designated to be preserved as part of the Smithsonian’s National Film Registry.

The film, newly-restored and heading back into virtual cinemas Aug. 12 (stream it through your favorite indie theater), is a glorious celluloid time capsule. None of the grit and grain of black and white or the pixelated blandness of today’s digital. Stern captured one place at one moment in time, and does so with an artful and fun movie shot in the fluid beauty of  motion picture film — Color by Deluxe.

Jazz had already been eclipsed by blues, rock’n roll and folk when the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival rolled around. Blues shouter Big Maybelle and rock progenitor Chuck Berry were on the bill. And when the film was finished, it didn’t figure in the Oscars, didn’t even premiere in the US. Sweden got first crack at it, because jazz hadn’t faded in Scandinavia.

But here are Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarten, with Armstrong’s “All Stars,” popping through improvisation-rich standards, Dinah Washington taking “All of Me” for a spin, Sonny Stitt and George Shearing and Chico Hamilton and Thelonious Monk leading ensembles through signature numbers.

Mahalia Jackson, O’Day, Maybelle and Washington perform, dressed to the nines in summer wear of a more conservative age — white gloves and in Maybelle’s case, a white tiara to match.

That’s half of the glory here. It’s not just the music, which became a best-selling jazz concert (soundtrack) LP. It’s the look, the feel, the optimism of this moment in time. Integrated audiences sitting (mostly) in rapt attention, men in sport coats, women in hats, performers on stage dressed for the occasion as well. Watching this documentary, you could sense a country of reasonable, smart people ready for any change the world threw at them.

Stern intercuts other summer 1958 Newport, Rhode Island events with the festival stage footage — kids and parents on the beach, bands jamming in the ancient seaside boarding houses (Rheingold beer at hand), a Dixieland combo riding through town in a Beverly Hillbillies jalopy (staged for the movie) or jamming at seaside or on a tiny train at a children’s fairground.  Collectible cars from the “brass automobile” era (pre-1920) toodle down the streets.

And offshore? The sea was filled with sails as spectator boats crowded Rhode Island Sound to watch the lovely 12 meter yachts race in the 1958 America’s Cup — Britain’s “Spectre” vs. America’s “Columbia.”  It was “Columbia” 4, “Spectre” 0, for those keeping score at home.

Stern turned out an important concert film, documenting Chuck Berry at his pre-arrest peak, playing before slack-jawed jazzmen on stage as he duck-walked through “Sweet Little Sixteen,” Shearing losing himself in a bossa nova with his combo, Maybelle blasting through “All Night Long.”

But “Jazz on a Summer’s Day” is a work of beauty in and of itself — gorgeous images, an America at its serene and confident peak, with integrated Newport stages and audiences far from the civil rights struggles erupting in the rest of the country — all filmed and edited into an 85 minute movie that captures both a moment, and the possibilities that moment promised.

MPAA Rating: unrated, general audiences

Cast: Louis Armstrong, Anita O’Day, Dinah Washington, Thelonious Monk, Chuck Berry, Mahalia Jackson, George Shearing, Gerry Mulligan

Credits: Directed by Bert Stern. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:23

Seaside locations on the scenic Kentish coast, a period piece story set “during the war” and a stellar cast can’t quite make the debut feature of playwright-turned-writer/director Jessica Swale come off.

She’s probably kicking herself over “Summerland” as it is, what with wasting a rare pairing of Gemma Arterton and Gugu Mbatha-Raw. So I’ll leave my boots off for this review, no matter how disappointing the film.

It’s a sad, drab tale told by pretty faces in a pretty place, a slow-footed story wrapped in the most boring part of myths and legends — the academic study of them — and a love story tested by too-convenient coincidences.

We don’t have to ask who took lots of notes during “deus ex machina” week at playwrighting school, in other words.

An impatient older woman (Penelope Wilton of “Downton Abbey”) smokes and types away in 1975. Something gives her a case of the flashbacks, and she remembers a long ago summer in Kent, when she was even grumpier.

Alice Lamb (Arterton) is a loner who won’t let a little thing like World War II keep her from hunting for “the reality” behind famous bits of folklore and myth. She’s hated in the town, and her nicknames are many, which the headmaster at St. Nicholas School (Tom Courtenay) will list, when prompted.

“Bad apple,” “the beast on the beach,” “the witch,” “a Nazi” — that’s what the kids, and the adults, all say about her. Stomping about in trousers, chasing schoolboys who sabotage her mailbox and making littler kids cry are what “provoke” the locals. Not that she cares.

Then she’s abruptly “assigned” a little boy (Lucas Bond) who’s been evacuated from London, as children were in the early years of the war. All her outraged protesting gets her is a “We’ve all got to do our bit” lecture that lasts about as long as that sentence.

Her “find somebody else to take him” and “Don’t expect me to cook for you” barking isn’t what a lonely child needs to hear in a stranger’s home in a remote village. But she’s Miss “You’ve got to toughen up…Nobody likes a coward.”

But but “I always have milk before bedtime.”

“Good for you.”

Oh, she’ll soften. Maybe. A little bit. Eventually. His constant questions are the start of it, his thin grasp of her research — about King Arthur, Morgan Le Fay, “floating castles” (mirages) — makes her a teacher, whether she wants to be, or not.

“Summerland” is a piece of pagan myth that gives the film it’s title, and little else. Viking heaven? Kind of.

That’s kind of interesting but thinly developed. Even less screen time is devoted to his equally reluctant “partner” at school, Edie (Dixie Egerickx). She’s “an individualist” who doesn’t believe in “partners” or “sharing.” It’s all a pose. They become pals.

Alice spends part of each day rummaging through the kid’s things, picking up his story and reminiscing — yes, there are flashbacks within the flashback — to her long lost college friend (Mbatha-Raw) who was her one true love, back when both were flappers.

As her connection to Frank grows, she shares a little of that past with him.

Arterton does her utmost to make Alice funny-mean and lonely by choice. The script doesn’t give her many good moments, just a lovely deflated look when Alice gets the news that women often got “during the war” and most movies set “during the war” feel the need to replicate.

Mbatha-Raw has absolutely nothing to play, and whatever promise might have come from casting these two opposite each other is wiped away in flashbacks that serve a structural purpose, but fail to give them the emotional connection we need for us to feel the pain of their separation.

Courtenay and Wilton are similarly wasted, accomplished actors who sparkle when given a sliver of a chance, but so limited in screen time as to smother their contributions.

Even the kid with, his anachronistically long hair, fails to register.

Swale did some of her homework in setting her story mostly in 1942 or 1943. But no way this doctoral student of hers would have the petrol to galivant about looking for mirages when “there’s a war on.” Not that early in the war.

But it’s not period detail that lets “Summerland” down. It’s not moving beyond the story’s naturally watchable qualities (cast, setting, period) to give us a film that ever feels it doesn’t need one contrived situation after another just to stagger to its feet. Not that it ever moves those feet once it does, mind you.

MPAA Rating:  PG for thematic content, some suggestive comments, language, and smoking

Cast: Gemma Arterton, Gugu MBatha-Raw, Lucas Bond, Penelope Wilton and Tom Courtenay.

Written and directed by Jessica Swale. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:39

Don’t see a lot of Wilford Brimley interviews Youtube archived from chat shows.

But Craig Ferguson had him on, and with a little coaxing and a lot of rooting from the audience, the veteran character actor, who just passed away at 86, just delights.

First time I noticed him was as a folksy decent rancher helping “The Electric Horseman” make his escape with a race horse turned Vegas show horse.

Never a big fan of “Cocoon,” but he was wonderful in decades of films — “The Natural,” “The China Syndrome,” “Harry and Son,” “Absence of Malice,” “Brubaker” among them, generally cast as “decent,” common sensical and righteous. He was so grumpily beloved that he became a breakfast oatmeal spokesman, a TV diabetes activist and a guy who was in on the joke when “Seinfeld” cast him as the Postmaster General.

He toured with shows like “Love Letters,” worked here and there,and lived an interesting life on and off camera. 

“The Burnt Orange Heresy” is a ham-fisted thriller with a cast so “on the nose” it shows little imagination on the part of the filmmakers, who seem determined to leave the viewer unchallenged.

But what it has going for it atones for those shortcomings.

It takes place in a villa on Italy’s gorgeous Lake Como, for starters.

Mick Jagger plays a posh, ruthlessly unscrupulous art dealer and collector. Claes Bang of “The Square” is a scrambling, unethical fraud of an art critic. Elizabeth Debicki of “Widows” portrays a mysterious, willowy and sexy siren with a possible hidden agenda.

And Donald Sutherland is a reclusive artist of legendary reputation and no “surviving” works for dealers to haggle over.

Not a stretch for any of them, especially Sutherland, who twinkles whenever he isn’t playing the heavy, and doesn’t so much speak as “intone,” especially in this part.

“May I be direct, in the modern way?” Jerome Debney, his character, never is. “A favorite spot of mine,” he says, showing a guest a rocky beach on the lake, “one must labor to apprehend it.”

Who talks like that? Archetypes on a novelist’s page, of course. But the plummy locutions, the pithy digs at art, artists, “legends” and critics can be a quotable delight, and often are in Scott B. Smith’s script, adapted from Charles Willeford’s book.

Bang is James Figueras, an art critic who scrapes out a living publishing reviews, here and there, and giving this cleverly calculated lecture to art fans and tourists in cities around the world.

He weaves this florid metaphor, critics as “the banks of a river,” with the river “art flowing between us.” Then he, with a slapdash-looking work of modern art as his prop, proceeds to weave a back-story for the painting that convinces the unsophisticated that no no, this is a work with meaning and genius behind it.

It’s all a ruse, a joke and a lesson. No, we shouldn’t care that Hemingway’s mommy dressed him like a girl or how much your indie film cost. The work’s merits should be manifestly obvious. But critics, and art dealers and collectors, traffic in “the myth” as often as what’s inside the frame. Beware of such “critics,” Figueras and the novelistwarn us. They’re manipulators of reality.

A brazen American (Debicki) approaches, flirts and confronts James with the word “liar” so quickly they’re bound to wind up in. “Berenice,” she says her name is. From “Duluth,” she insists. It’s “the telling details” in such lies that put them over, he notes. And he should know. He’s an expert.

Jagger is Cassidy, the art dealer who invites James — and by extension his “freshly minted” friend — to his villa on Lake Como, ostensibly to get the guy to write a gallery catalog or some such. But what slithery Brit really has in mind is something rarer. He’s housing a famous artist on his property, one whose works have all burned in gallery fires. He wants one of whatever Debney (Sutherland) has been working on.

And being the criminal once-removed type, Cassidy the collector blackmails James into “procuring” such, by whatever means the enterprising and unscrupulous “critic” deems necessary.

When the two outsiders meet the J.D. Salinger of painters, there’s no drama — just pretentious musings about “blue.” But with four people capable of lies and trickery involved, deceit and dares, death and destruction await.

Director Giuseppe Capotondi (the speed-dating thriller “The Double Hour” was his) can’t hide the story’s too-few/too-obvious secrets. So he wisely leaves this one to the cast, letting them turn the script’s anecdotes, reminiscences and unreliable “history” into fascinating word pictures.

This is a storyteller’s movie, one where we can’t really trust any story to be true. That’s something of a cheat, because we are set up to believe there are bigger deceptions going on and hidden agendas that simply don’t pan out or are left hanging.

Even the third act’s twists have a prescribed order about them.

But if you can’t revel in Jagger’s delivery of every I’m-rich-and-you-have-no-idea-what-I’m-capable-of smiled threat, you’re missing out.

“I should never let a thing’s worth obscure the value.”

If you can’t take pleasure in Sutherland’s boring tales from an artist’s past, anecdotes freighted with gravitas because a “great artist” mouths them, this might not be for you.

“I saw a blue once, genuine blue, you understand.”

And if you can’t hear the danger in all the sexy but unromantic banter between James and Berenice —  “You treat serious things as if they’re trivial, and trivial things as if they’re serious.” — “The Burnt Orange Heresy” will be a mystery you won’t see the value in unraveling.

MPAA Rating: R, for some sexual content/nudity, language, drug use and violence

Cast: Claes Bang, Elizabeth Debicki, Mick Jagger and Donald Sutherland

Credits: Directed by Giuseppe Capotondi, script by Scott B. Smith based on the Charles Willeford novel. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:38

Betcha good money that this is the ENTIRE movie. Seriously, every twist and action beat is previewed in this Oct release. Every one of them.

It could still be gritty and entertaining, and Liam always gives fair value. But hey, give away the whole movie in the trailer? Not cricket.

“Seriously Single” is a seriously inconsequential Buppie rom-com from South Africa, a movie with a few laughs, lots of wigs and costume changes and little else.

But it’s very existence makes it another movie that points to the massive footprint Netflix is establishing in international cinema. It’s lame in a lot of perfectly conventional ways. In the U.S. this story of a Black woman desperate to not be alone, and to get married, and learning to see that trait in guys she’s dating, would be set in Atlanta and might very well have Tyler Perry’s name attached to it.

Beautiful Black professionals mingling and mixing, drinking and sexually getting around, with their white collar jobs funding all these clothes, apartments-with-a-view? Seen it.

But we’ve never seen it Johannesburg. Netflix is spreading formulaic rom-coms like this from Peru to Italy, France to South Africa.

Yay.

Dineo, played with a lot of spunk and spark by Fulu Mugovhani, works in social media marketing and cannot stand to be without romance, a man in her life. But everybody in her office, whether they speak Zulu or Xhosa, English or Afrikaans, knows her romances have a two to three month life span.

She loves being in love, and gives every relationship the full court press, right from the start. She ends up socially stalking her exes, because she scares them off.

“You men don’t get how hard we love!”

Vivacious roommate and BFF Noni (Tumi Morake) is always dragging her “back out there,” pushing to up her “bounce-back game.” That’s what brings her to Lunga (Bohang Moeko), a good-looking guy with a “just roll with it” game.

“Sometimes, relationships aren’t meant to last. We should enjoy them while we can.”

“Why hold onto the past when your future can be right in front of you?”

She’s all about having “someone to come home to.”

“I say it’s better to have someone to come home with!”

She falls for it and falls for him. Noni may cluck that “You’re already picking out baby names,” but Dineo isn’t hearing it. Yes, she’s headed for another fall.

Meanwhile, Noni’s ethos — never sleep with a guy more than once, “otherwise, it’s a ‘relationship,” is tested when hunky bartender Max (Yonda Thomas) gives her all his attention.

Who will change? Who will learn her lesson? Guess. Come on, it’s easy.

“Seriously Single” suggests we seriously need to rethink what we label as “generic” crutches in such romantic comedies. Yes, they’re conventional and worn out — the clubs, “doing shots,” Instagramming (renamed here) your “fun,” having your shame “go viral.”

Here, that’s in the form of Dineo’s wigless rant about faithless, feckless men not wanting what she wants, getting her labeled “#DesperateBae.”

That directors Katleho Ramaphakela and Rethabile Ramaphakela and screenwriter Lwazi Mvusi put that trope in a South African film suggests that either Netflix is handing a checklist to filmmakers in Spain, Italy, Colombia or wherever, or this “generic” device is now universal.

The viral rant, by the way? Funny. Morake gets most of the scattered funny lines and double-takes.

Mogovhani makes a perfectly cute, interesting, plucky and pouty heroine. And the little of South Africa that we see — integrated workplaces, beautiful and distinctly-decorated apartments, Africa-meets-nightclub-couture fashions — dazzles.

Leave the closed captioning on, because there’s a dizzying array of dialects listed. But in any language, this weary, overlong rom-com doesn’t deliver enough that’s distinctive about the “rom” or much of anything that’s funny in the “com” to come off.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, sexual situations, alcohol abuse, profanity
Cast: Fulu Mugovhani, Tumi Morake, Bohang Moeko, Yonda Thomas.

Credits: Directed by Katleho Ramaphakela, Rethabile Ramaphakela, script by Lwazi Mvusi. Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47

Netflix owns teen comedies and has done well with romance. But Amazon takes its shot at gaining a foothold with that audience and those genres with the serious high school romance “Chemical Hearts.”

Looks hopeful and poignant and very romantic.

Talked to him a few times over the years. A class act, sort of a British Norman Jewison.

“The Commitments,” “Fame,” “Bugsy Malone,” musicals that often didn’t play like musicals.

“Mississippi Burning” took deserved heat for its “white savior” tropes. But who else was making movies on that sort of subject at the time?

Hard to think of another director who would attempt at “Bugsy Malone.” A bigger deal in the UK than it ever was here, “The Commitments” likewise took on icon status in its Nation of Origin.

Parker was 76. Here’s the New York Times obit.

http://www.nytimes.com%2F2020%2F07%2F31%2Fmovies%2Falan-parker-versatile-film-director-is-dead-at-76.html%3Fsmid%3Dfb-share&h=AT1K6zlpUqhDzZuTgKDhXxWejNrGxkvnk9fMHnQt9VsqRiv6HzSj6xjq99iWWci3rqghd9U_pTSq-B7efvuKr18ltdLNl2IFGiVVT8Cxd9yzVGvG8A3tL1ESVDsTK9D5zFjjktkJ6_rE8bb3x8rpTDo

It’s not so much a rule, as an understanding — an agreement between filmmaker and audience. If your comedy or rom-com is only 80 or so minutes long, you’ve got to give us something to laugh or at least smirk at in the first hour.

“I Used to Go Here” is an enervated laugher in a minor key starring Gillian Jacobs of TV’s “Community” “Ibiza” and “Walk of Shame.” For much of the movie, all that’s demanded of Jacobs is that she look cute and lonely.

She plays a first-time novelist deflated by the news that her book isn’t selling, that her publisher’s book tour has been canceled, and that her ex-fiance isn’t that interested in returning her calls.

And “deflated” is the only note Jacobs hits for most of this Kris Rey (“Unexepected”) comedy.

Kate’s book, “Seasons Passed,” has just come out. She’d love to celebrate, paint the town (Chicago), etc. But while her friends are thrilled for her, most of them seem pregnant and are otherwise distracted. The ex isn’t taking her calls. The publishers are underwhelmed, and their assurance that “a good New York Times review could change everything” is small comfort.

And we viewers know ominous foreshadowing when we hear it.

A call from out of the blue is her salvation. Her mentor at her alma mater down in Carbondale (called “U of I” here, but really the home of Southern Illinois U.) invites her down for a reading, a few days of being lauded and mentoring student writers.

Her “book tour” is how she describes it, in yet another message to the ex. Yay. It’s been 15 years, a little return-in-triumph is in order, and a walk down memory lane.

We sniff out the mentor in an instant. Casting Jemaine Clement in the role seals the deal. This writing teacher falls in the “those who can’t teach” bin, and a cozy college’s tenure will have to do. And even though he’s married, we do wonder about the student he lavishes his attention on (Hannah Marks) and wonder what he and Kate might have shared.

Kate revisits her old rental house, now filled with mild-mannered college boys, stumbles into a classmate and cyber-stalks her ex, who has plainly moved-on. But no matter what she puts out there, how needy and ready-for-a-rebound fling she advertises, the sophomoric sophomores aren’t buying, or are missing the signals.

Actress turned writer-director Rey is an alumnus of the “mumblecore” school of rom-com, films more about the banter than the action. She used to be married to mumblecore king Joe Swanberg.

But while this Aug. 7 release is plenty chatty, it’s not particularly witty, just winsome and sad. It’s starved of oxygen and incident, of funny lines or clever exchanges. Nothing the least bit amusing happens until Kate joins the generic college kids for some over-the-top hijinks, “hijinks” we’ve seen in scores of other comedies — “American Pie” is referenced, perhaps unintentionally.

It’s not grim to sit through, but casting comic talents like Kate Micucci (girlfriend of an old classmate) and Clement sets up expectations Rey can’t or won’t meet.

The movie this most resembles in a most superficial sense is “Liberal Arts,” which sent Josh Radnor back to campus to fall for Elizabeth Olsen. Like Radnor, Jacobs is used to the rhythms of sitcom acting. Like Radnor, she’s trapped in a movie that doesn’t have sparkling writing to rescue her or a particularly interesting character to play.

Like Radnor, she’s waiting for something clever or cute or funny to perform. You can almost see the wheels turning, “Maybe NEXT week’s script’ll be better.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, drugs, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Gillian Jacobs, Jemaine Clement, Zoe Chao, Hannah Marks, Josh Wiggins, Khloe Janel, Forrest Goodluck and Kate Micucci

Credits:  A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:20