I’m always down for a little rock’n roll nostalgia. One can barely recall what music was before the rise of Kanye, Eminem, Swift and Snoop.
This one has Springsteen and Little Steven, among others, old men telling rock war stories about Asbury Park’s contribution to music, it’s rough history, the “redemption” of music that came from there.
The film has no IMDb page (yet), so details? Digging around for more, now. It will have two “one night only” showings — May 22 and 29 — for starters.
Rick Kelly was a famous New York luthier/guitar builder, a master of his trade, long before he added “The Bones of Old New York” to his work.
His Carmine Street Guitars shop in Greenwich Village was where musicians in the know — people like Lou Reed and G.E. Smith, longtime leader of the “Saturday Night Live” band — would come for custom-made axes, or to have their guitars –acoustic or electric, ancient or new vintage — repaired.
Then he got the idea of making guitars out of wood salvaged from bars and other businesses torn down, from burned-out churches. He’d scavenge the extinct elm and Ash, stack the lumber in the back of the shop and later take a scroll saw to it to create necks and bodies for guitars as works of art.
Inside the hollowed-out body, hidden where the neck attaches, he notes the place the”Bowery Wood” came from, the type of wood and its age.
That’s a lovely detail from “Carmine Street Guitars,” the eccentric, serene, almost poetic documentary about Kelly, his business, his protege guitar builder/decorator, the former art student Cindy Hulej.
Filmmaker Ron Mann lets us see the dust-bunny collecting business, where former sculpture student Kelly practices his trade with the quiet patience of a master craftsman. The walls of the shop are a clutter of news clippings and tribute photos from the guitarists who bought Rick’s guitars. Mother Dorothy answers the grimy, land-line phone, keeps the books on an adding machine and tries to keep the dust bunnies at bay.
Cindy is a 25 year-old with great skills with woodburning tools, crafting a “tribute to the Traveling Wilburrys” model, complete with engraved/burned images of each of the members of the All Star band, which came and went before she was born. When she or Rick finishes a guitar, she posts a picture on Instagram — “#guitarporn.”
Mann’s unhurried movie purports to show “a week in the life” of this guitar shop — Rick, pedaling a 10 speed to work, running the drills, saws and routers, and handling the rasps, files and draw knives of his trade.
And as he does, famous pickers drop by, to shop, to play, to chew the guitar fat.
Lenny Kaye of Patti Smith’s band drops by for a repair.
Guitars Kelly built for Lou Reed that came back to him after Reed’s death are trotted out for Reed’s guitar sideman, Stewart Hurwood, to play and see how they’re aging, how they sound now.
Jamie Hince of The Kills, Charlie Sexton of Bob Dylan’s touring band, Nels Cline of Wilco (shopping for a guitar for Jeff Tweedy), Christine Bougie of Bahamas, all “stop by” to visit, shop and pick.
Kelly, a soft-spoken enthusiast, shows off 150 year-old slabs from Chumley’s, a pre-Civil War era speakeasy, a gorgeous piece from the former Bowery bar and brothel known as McGirk’s, from a burned Serbian cathedral, and from another even more famous watering hole, McSorley’.
“People’ve been spillin’ beer on this wood for 160 years!”
Kirk Douglas of The Roots appreciates Kelly’s mania for simplicity, in both guitar making and the music he likes to hear from them. Kelly fell in love with the feminine shape of the Fender Telecaster, the quintessential solid body electric guitar of the rock era. Although he has created all manner of far-out designs, hollow bodies and Gibson Les Paul clones, it’s the simple “Tele” that is his great inspiration.
“Hard to beat a Tele,” Kelly says.
“One pickup, wood, electricity. Boom!” Douglas enthuses.
Eszter Blaint picks at a guitar with a fingerboard that looks like rescued, chipped lava. Kelly’s new passion of for worm-eaten, ancient wood that he leaves partly finished — “survivor wood.”
The film may feel scripted and staged — filmmaker and Sqürl band guitarist Jim Jarmusch comes in for a repair to his ash and catalpa wood acoustic, a tactless monied young realtor who just sold the property next door drops by to imply the shop is not long for this neighborhood. It’s more an essay on the Last of His Kind than a fly-on-the-wall documentary.
That doesn’t dull its virtues. We get a lesson on how wood for any instrument, even one plugged in, ages, feels and sounds. Some of the folk arty guitars look like an invitation to get mid-performance splinters.
But as Bill Frisell picks up a primitive-looking instrument and starts playing the music he loved as a boy growing up in Denver, “Little Surfer Girl,” the magic being made in that sea of wood, tools, ukuleles, banjos, hollow and solid bodies of every description, you can’t help but hope the pupil learns all the master has to offer and carries the trade forward.
“This one just went UP in price. Now it’s got Bill Frisell in there!”
Maybe she’ll outgrow that mania for gaudy woodburned filigree and flourishes — “#guitarporn” — and absorb the simplicity Kelly has kept as an ethos, in his instruments and the music he loves.
“Anything more than three chords is just SHOWING off!”
MPAA Rating: unrated, some profanity
Cast:Eszter Balint, Bill Frisell, Cindy Hulej, Lenny Kaye
Credits:Directed by Rom Mann, script by Len Blum. An Abramorama release.
Running time: 1:20
Merce Cunningham was the greatest “acquired taste” in modern dance. And living to the active old age of 90, with 60+ years in the public eye, we had a lot of time to acquire that taste.
His choreography is revived, explained and dissected in “If the Dancer Dances,” a revealing documentary about reviving his 1968 piece “Rainforest,” complete with the “Andy Warhol aluminum pillows” balloons), David Tudor music and ripped Jasper Johns “nude” costumes.
New York choreographer Stephen Petronio unleashes his company on one of Cunningham’s classics. But he doesn’t trust himself to stage it.
“The beauty…and amazing thing about dance is that it gets passed from one body, one soul, to another,” Petronio explains. “It comes out of the body, it goes into the air. And then it disappears…How do we keep their work alive?”
We convince the dances who worked with Cunningham — among them Andrea Weber and Meg Harper, to teach the work, the style, to young dancers in a company whose works about “constant motion.”
“There’s going to have to work from a different place within their bodies,” Weber notes. “Everything everything EVERYthing comes from the back!”
He’d build his company, and rebuild it around certain types of dancers, and certain physical types.
“Merce,” who starred in his own pieces late into life, “had these crazy-long arms and legs,” Weber says to Petronio’s troupe, emphasizing the difficulties that creates. Every body part is vital, every muscle just so.
“I’m going to HOUND you about the hands.”
“Rainforest,” a work of graceful, halting lurching, leaps, embraces, blooming and stalking, was inspired by Cunningham’s recollection of a rainforest near where he grew up in Washington state.
Backstage, the Gino Grenek, dancing the lead, gripes that “Everything is cramping,” thanks to the en pointe poses held impossibly long, legs or arms suspended in air for seconds upon seconds, the contortions demanded of the human back.
No wonder a young dancer in the company, Nick Sciscione, whispers “The name evokes FEAR.”
“If te Dancer Dances” — the film takes its title from a Cunningham truism, “If the dancer dances, everything is there!” — underlines what Petronio used as his reasoning for bringing in as many Cunningham vets as possible for the rehearsals. “You can’t teach it from the written page, can’t really learn the dance from a video,” Petronio says. It’s all about “muscle memory,” practiced and passed on, “dancer to dancer.”
If Cunningham’s work is to survive, it will be through efforts like this (The Cunningham Trust was set up to ensure that.).
Cunningham veteran Gus Solomons jr analyzes the essence of Cunningham’s art, “Shapes at different speeds, very fast, or very slow,” he says. “Stripped down abstraction” that can “approach physical impossibility. And that’s what’s exciting.”
Yes. “Everything cramps” performing his works.
All this explanation is useful to the viewer, casual dance fan or otherwise, because for all the glories of lithe, sweaty bodies moving in intense physical concentration, of seeing leads Dava (Davalois) Fearon and Grenek and others mastering the movements, no film version of Cunningham’s work can overcome that “acquired taste” thing in itself.
But “If the Dancer Dances” piques the interest and widens the appreciation for just what a test these pieces are, even to the performing arts world’s Olympic-level athletes — dancers.
MPAA Rating: unrated, some profanity
Cast: Davalois Fearon, Gino Grenek, Meg Harper, Nick Siscione, Andrea Weber, Stephen Petronio
Credits:Directed by Lise Friedman and Maia Wechsler. A Monument release.
Running time: 1:26
There’s an Eastwood in this — Francesca. And Alycia Debnam-Carey and Claire Holt and Ted Levine (“Monk,” “The Silence of the Lambs.” Gerald McRaney, too.
But it’s about brothers played by Brenton Thwaites and Ben Young. A shooting and “a cover up.”
“A Violent Separation” opens in theaters and on VOD May 17.
Several of these folks, including Leo and Don Cheadle, are more accessible to the press via the activism than their work. The most recent times I have spoken with several of them were on behalf of their causes.
Hollywood Reporter (@THR) Tweeted:
In honor of #EarthDay, here’s a look at 10 stars who are making an eco-friendly impact around the world https://t.co/EWh8oyNLxZ https://t.co/s0mYHo7J9d https://twitter.com/THR/status/1120302496449290240?s=17
Better than the fleet of Chevys Roger Moore was chased through New York with in “Live and Let Die,” the endless AMCs in “The Man With the Golden Gun.” https://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/films/1116976/James-Bond-25-product-placement-Omega-Aston-Martin-Bollinger-Heineken-Daniel-Craig/amp#referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&_tf=From%20%251%24s
Prett good explainer of why one needs to call “The Curse of La Llorona” “bastardized” as I did in my review.
VANITY FAIR (@VanityFair) Tweeted:
La Llarona is the stuff of legend and she will make her way to the screen once more in @LaLlaronaMovie https://t.co/YZdOTJq34M https://twitter.com/VanityFair/status/1119918777980866562?s=17
From Discover on Google https://www.indiewire.com/2019/04/kevin-brownlow-film-preservation-lost-silent-movies-cuba-1202060615/amp/
It’s always a shame, but rarely a surprise, when the best movie of a given weekend underwhelms at the box office. But DisneyNature’s “Penguins,” unless it has a boffo Saturday (when family films do the most business) and Sunday, will not earn the studio and the charities these films support more than $2 million.
Take your kids to see “Penguins!”
This weekend belongs to a scary movie you probably SHOULDN’T take the kids to, the latest title from the extended “Annabelle” universe. “La Llorona” is a one-off (allegedly) retelling of a Mexican folk legend, about “The Weeping Woman,” with one character (the priest played by Tony Amendola) here from “Annabelle” and referencing it, in his role of “explainer of the legend” to the harried mother (Linda Cardellini from “Green Book”) and why her children in 1970s LA are in mortal danger.
A $26 million dollar smash, it wasn’t helped by reviews (I thought it was a well-crafted formulaic thriller, well-acted as well).
The other wide release was the winning, upbeat faith-based drama “Breakthrough,” about a medical miracle those involved insist was caused by prayer. It’s headed towards an $11 million weekend, $15 million by weekend’s end as it opened last Wed.
Last night’s “An Evening with Richard Dreyfuss” at the Florida Film Festival was another of those delightful highlights of many a film festival — a public celebration of the life and work of a big screen legend.
Festivals premiere movies, host Q & As with up and coming filmmakers and stars, and panel discussions on the state of cinema, indie cinema and acting. But it is “victory lap” events like this that I’ve always enjoyed, as both a spectator, and on occasion, as a participant — doing the interviewing, moderating questions from the audience.
I led the Q & A with R.D. at the Festival’s home base, the Enzian Theater, after a screening of “The Goodbye Girl,” one of two classics Dreyfuss starred in during his breakout holiday season of 1977. The other Winter of Dreyfuss hit featured him staring — in perfect slack-jawed awe, gaping at the impossible — while sitting in a power company pickup truck at a railroad crossing in the dead of night in BFE, Indiana.
Dreyfuss was full of anecdotes about Neil Simon, whose life and career the festival wanted to celebrate with this event, as well as “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” “Close Encounters,” “Jaws” and “Down and Out in Beverly Hills.”
He talked about his Dreyfuss Civics Initiative, about taking years off from acting to study up on the subject,
He wanted to set the record straight on his alleged “feud” with Robert Shaw on “Jaws,” his efforts to acquire a reputation for being hard to please (A way to set himself apart from his late ’60s/early ’70s peers, he says.) and how he always thought of Simon as “my personal writer, my guy.”
Others may have heard versions of how “The Goodbye Girl” came to be, but I hadn’t, and most of the sell-out crowd there hadn’t. So we got into that.
In 1976, Dreyfuss recalled, the great Mike Nichols had lined up the already great Robert DeNiro to star in a Neil Simon script titled “Bogart Slept Here.”
It was based, Dreyfuss said, on Dustin Hoffman’s overwhelmed-by-fame-and-life experiences after blowing up in “The Graduate.”
“And they’d looked at like three weeks of rushes, and Bobby DeNiro wasn’t funny.”
This was long before “Midnight Run” and “Analyze This” found DeNiro’s funnybone. ‘
Nichols had to fire him, and Simon agreed. They brought in Dreyfuss for a table-read, and Simon asked him what he thought of “Bogart Slept Here.”
Dreyfuss says he pointed out “the obvious” to Nichols and Simon. That “nobody is going to feel sorry for a MOVIE star who’s having trouble” with his marriage, his loss of privacy, a career that had turned into a smorgasbord of choices. “Because he’s still a MOVIE star.”
“Neil said, ‘You’re right.’ They killed the project, basically right there.”
But Simon, the most prolific playwright/screenwriter of his generation, said he’d come with something else. “Three weeks later, he handed me ‘The Goodbye Girl,’ written with me in mind, I guess in my voice.”
Nichols had moved on, theater projects and film projects that failed to materialize.
Herbert Ross was brought in, and Simon’s then-wife Marsha Mason (already an Oscar nominee for the very fine “Cinderella Liberty,” NOT scripted by Neil Simon).
It became a career-making movie for Ross and Dreyfuss, with Oscar nominations as best picture, best screenplay, best actress (Mason, who won the Golden Globe that year) and best supporting actress (Quinn Cummings) — and an Academy Award for child-actor turned American EveryMensch — Richard Dreyfuss.
One other tidbit Dreyfuss mentioned about the movie stood out. They shot “probably two thirds” of the actor Elliot Garfield’s performance in a gay camp “Richard III,” the disastrous play Dreyfuss’s character comes to New York to star in (“off off OFF Broadway”). The footage “is somewhere in Warner Brothers’ vault, the negative anyway.”
THAT, I’d pay to see.
And the unknown actor in the play who runs Richard through at the Battle of Bosworth Field in the play’s climax? “A few years ago, Powers Boothe comes up to me at some event and tells me ‘I killed you in ‘Richard III.’ I had NO idea!”
Dreyfuss was a delight, and everything you’d want in a screen legend — anecdotes, a little edge, and the perspective of somebody who has been in on everything from The Birth of the Blockbuster to the Golden Age of Netflix.
I can’t find the Orlando Live Streaming archive of the chat, but when I do, I’ll link to it. Good audience questions, and a lot of funny responses from of the funniest guys the movies have ever produced.
Photos by Jim DeSantis of the Fla Film Festival and Kim Waddell.
