New Albany is a state of mind … but whose? Since 2004, we’ve been observing the contemporary scene in this slowly awakening old river town. If it’s true that a pre-digital stopped clock is right twice a day, when will New Albany learn to tell time?
Showing posts with label flight documentaries. Show all posts
Showing posts with label flight documentaries. Show all posts
Flight documentaries happen when we're flying home after a European sojourn. An eastbound flight is for sleeping. Westbound is for reading, writing and watching.
Movies?
Not for me, seeing that 95 out of 100 are crap, but documentaries are another story. It also can be a good time to explore new music via audio selections.
Now as I've been saying about the genre of the documentary, as opposed to the biopic ...
Film-makers Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui open up about how they created the most compelling, moving McQueen tribute to date
... “If the subject matter is so amazing and you have visuals, visual support and stories to tell, then I think a documentary is better than a biopic because there’s no one better than the real people to tell the story,” Bonhôte told us. “Audiences don’t care if it has slick imagery; they care about the emotion of that visual or footage, whether it shows them something they didn’t know.”
Point made; point taken. I didn't know very much about McQueen or Whitney Houston, and now I do. The Houston documentary is considerably better than this idiotic trailer.
McQueen or Houston; lots and lots of talent, and just as many demons.
... As deep as “Whitney” explores Houston’s life offstage, it spends far less time on her music. Though Mr. Macdonald illustrates the astonishing reach of her success — Saddam Hussein used an Arabic version of “I Will Always Love You” as his campaign theme — her voice seems to exist as a kind of superpower she can turn on at will. In a section on her unforgettable performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the 1991 Super Bowl, we learn that she listened to the music director Rickey Minor’s arrangement exactly once before recording the song in a single take.
Flight documentaries happen when we're flying home after a European sojourn. Eastbound flights are for sleeping, westbound for reading, writing and watching.
Movies? Not for me, although it's usually a good opportunity to explore new music via audio selections.
I readily concede to being only a lukewarm aficionado of David Bowie, but an addiction to music magazines during the early 1970s has assured my lasting familiarity (and belated listening) with Bowie, Mick Ronson, the Spiders from Mars, Mott the Hoople, T. Rex, and the other "glam" period British acts that so influenced personal fave, Def Leppard.
Hence, the vital importance of this snippet from the Freddie Mercury tribute concert in 1992: Bowie, Ronson, Ian Hunter, the surviving members of Queen with Joe Elliot and Phil Collen on backing vocals on "All the Young Dudes."
Ronson was terminally ill and died not too long after his appearance. If you're a fan of music of the period, this documentary is a must-watch.
... After kicking around London for a few years and making little headway and less money, (Ronson) returned to Hull and became a municipal groundskeeper. One of his band mates in a group called The Rats returned to Hull to try to convince the contented gardener to travel back to London to become a member of David Bowie's backup band. Though hesitant after his previous experiences, Ronson made the trip and the rest, as they say, is a history in desperate need of telling, which this film manages pretty well so I'm not going to further synopsize it.
It's clear that Ronson was a masterful guitarist with a unique sound that's in part created by a partly open "Wah Wah" pedal that he matter of factly demonstrates on camera and that by the time Bowie's semi-breakthrough album Hunky Dory was recorded, he'd learned from Visconti the art of arranging and had become a brilliant one.
Rick Wakeman, who plays piano on that Ken Scott-David Bowie produced classic, says in his on-screen interview that Ronson, not Bowie, was the real co-producer and that his string arrangements on tracks like "Life on Mars" were, as all listeners know, nothing short of brilliant. While "Michael Ronson" receives arranging credit, it's kind of buried ...
Turns out I'm not the only person favoring flight documentaries.
Speaking of airplanes, I watched this on the flight back from Amsterdam so I can't get into the technical aspects of the film or the sound, though I did listen on my Jerry Harvey Layla in-ear phones, which are amazing. My conclusion is that while this is a somewhat flawed presentation, it's one every Mick Ronson fan should see as should every Bowie fan. In fact, it's indispensable. When it was over, having "met" onscreen, Ronson's wife and family I was left beyond sad by how this super-talented man, who was never a money-grubber, left this planet too young, under-appreciated and with little money to leave his family.
It's a fine overview, and as one reviewer wrote, "tantalizingly incomplete." The basic challenge isn't hard to pinpoint; how does one narrow the man's body of work to snippets capable of being fitted into two hours, much less interpret them?
Director Marina Zenovich talks about translating Williams’ comedy to the screen, his inner demons, and what compels her about complicated men
... Fashioned from archival footage, old audio tapes, interviews with Williams’ contemporaries and clips of the comic’s stand-up, Come Inside My Mind is the first documentary to comprehensively examine Williams’ life and art since his suicide in 2014. It includes virtually no narration, save for Williams’ own, which can have an eerie, almost ghostlike effect (if only ghosts were as charming and exuberant as Robin Williams). “Every person is driven by some deep, deep, deep, deep secret,” he says in voiceover about halfway through the film.
It’s a question Williams scarcely addressed, preferring to bare his soul by way of performance. “Steve Martin says in the film, when Robin was on stage, whether it was theater or standup, he was in charge,” says Zenovich. “But in his life he was trying to hold himself together.” Still, the comic’s embattled sense of sense worth threatened to impose itself on an otherwise supremely confident stage persona. As he says in voiceover, recalling advice from a shrink: “Be careful what you talk about, because you may be on stage in front of so many people and start talking about something you’re not able to deal with” ...
'Won't You Be My Neighbor?' has become an indie sensation by viewing Fred Rogers as a smiling force of goodness who can fight the darkness.
It’s difficult, and always has been, for a documentary to break through the clutter and beam itself onto the radar of mainstream moviegoing. When one succeeds in doing so, it’s revealing to look at why. “RBG,” an incisive portrait of the Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is a major documentary hit, but it doesn’t take rocket science to grasp the reasons for its success. The film presents Ginsburg, quite rightfully, as a feminist superhero of progressive action — a crusader who’s become an icon of the resistance.
Yet who would have guessed that “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?,” Morgan Neville’s transporting documentary about Fred Rogers and his quirky oasis of children’s television, would also turn out to be a tale for our time? Audiences lining up to see it are probably having the same experience I did: You walk in thinking that you’re going to take a nostalgic museum tour of a TV moment you grew up with, and maybe get a glimpse into the mystery of the man who created it (key question: was he really like that? short answer: yes). When you walk out, though, you realize that you’ve seen something much, much bigger. In 2018, Mister Rogers has become the last thing anyone might have expected him to be: a countercultural figure, a radical who can show us the way. You probably think I’m kidding (or deluded), but after you see “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” you’ll realize I’m not.
I finally got around to watching the 2016 documentary Oasis: Supersonic while on the flight home from Amsterdam. This account in Spin offers a solid summary.
... The Gallagher brothers themselves—always entertaining interviews—are articulate and speak with self-awareness, reminding you how sneakily sharp they can be, despite regularly behaving like parodies of themselves in public. It really is a small miracle that Liam and Noel—now 44 and 49, respectively—both agreed to be involved with this project, coming aboard to executive produce and be questioned separately. Even more amazing is how warm they are when discussing the band they both anchored for nearly two decades. They each attempt to describe their dynamic—Noel says it’s as simple as the differences between a cat and a dog—but there’s virtually none of the pettiness and ugliness that’s hung over the brothers since Oasis imploded in 2009. No one’s torn down or compared to a potato, and their still-ongoing feud is merely alluded to, never addressed directly. (Of course, when Liam saw the film, he apparently couldn’t help but throw popcorn at the screen every time Noel appeared.)
There's not much to add. The documentary does not attain unflinching honesty, but warts are allowed to appear. The framing device of Oasis' 1996 shows at Knebworth is significant, because if there is any one "moral" to the story, it's that such a phenomenon won't be witnessed again.
More than four per cent of the population applied for tickets to see Oasis at Knebworth, the largest ever demand for concert tickets in British history. A whopping 250,000 people got to see the band over two nights - another record - but incredibly, Oasis could have sold out another 18 Knebworth shows.
The conventional wisdom holds that Knebworth was the peak of the Oasis' trajectory; after two timeless classic albums -- Definitely Maybe (1994) and (What's the Story) Morning Glory (1995) -- and loads of hysteria, the band left the rails for good with Be Here Now, its third album, released in 1997, finally disintegrating in 2009 after another four workmanlike but hardly inspired releases.
But there is a worthy exception to this thinking. At the 1:25 mark of the trailer (above), a song can be heard that does not appear on either of the first two Oasis albums. It's the title track from The Masterplan (1998), a collection of B-sides and other songs recorded early in band's career, but not included on the two seminal LP releases.
In essence, The Masterplan functions as the third album of what should be viewed as a career-beginning tryptych. At AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine explains there was even more where The Masterplan came from.
For American audiences, the phenomenal worldwide success of Oasis was a little puzzling. That's because they only had part of the picture -- unless they were hardcore fans, they didn't hear nearly three albums of material released on B-sides and non-LP singles. Critics and fans alike claimed that the best of these B-sides were as strong as the best moments on the albums, and they were right.
None of the albums had a song that rocked as hard as "Fade Away" (cleverly built on a stolen melody from Wham!'s "Freedom"), "Headshrinker," or "Acquiesce." There was nothing as charming as the lite psychedelic pastiche "Underneath the Sky" or the Bacharach tribute "Going Nowhere"; there was nothing as affecting as Noel Gallagher's acoustic plea "Talk Tonight" or the minor-key, McCartney-esque "Rockin' Chair," nothing as epic as "The Masterplan."
Most bands wouldn't throw songs of this caliber away on B-sides, but Noel Gallagher followed the example of his heroes the Jam and the Smiths, who released singles where the B-sides rivaled the A-sides. This meant many American fans missed these songs, so to remedy this situation, Oasis released the B-sides compilation The Masterplan.
Oasis unfortunately chose to opt for a single disc of highlights instead of a complete double-disc set, which means a wealth of great songs -- "Take Me Away," "Whatever," "D'Yer Wanna Be a Spaceman?," "Round Are Way," "It's Better People," "Step Out," a raging cover of "Cum on Feel the Noize" -- are missing. But The Masterplan winds up quite enjoyable anyway. Apart from the sludgy instrumental "The Swamp Song," there isn't a weak track here, and the brilliant moments are essential not only for Oasis fans, but any casual follower of Britpop or post-grunge rock & roll.
If you're an Oasis fan and haven't viewed the documentary, or if you're indifferent to Brit Pop but have a taste for what now must be regarded as ancient history, consider watching it.
For better or worse, rock and roll simply isn't going to see another Oasis.
Nine hour flights home from Italy are a bummer. You can read, nap and drink as many free adult beverages as they'll keep feeding you, but that's about all. The good news is that these days, the in-flight entertainment offers more options than ever before. The bad news: Most of these options include the usual array of wretched mass market films and television series.
On our most recent flight from Rome in November, at least there were a few good documentary films on tap. They paired well with cans of a beer I'd never expect to see on an international flight: SweetWater 420 Extra Pale Ale. Corporate placement or not, it was a welcome change from the usual Heineken.
The fourth of four documentaries I watched in November was the most moving, at least for me. When the J.J. Abrams reboot of the Star Trek franchise was announced, I yawned. Never a Trekkie, I'd seen some of the movies with the original cast, and thought little about the topic.
However, when the first of these films appeared in 2009 and my wife dragged me to it, the tears were flowing. Something obviously hadn't occurred to me, as stated succinctly by film critic Ty Burr.
Trading on affections sustained over 40 years of popular culture, Star Trek does what a franchise reboot rarely does. It reminds us why we loved these characters in the first place.
The 1960s series had far more impact than I'd imagined. Even as a child, I was a McCoy kind of guy, but of course Leonard Nimoy's Spock also resonated. The documentary is as much about Nimoy's son as the actor, and it isn't perfect, but many gaps are closed. I recommend it without reservation.
Nine hour flights home from Italy are a bummer. You can read, nap and drink as many free adult beverages as they'll keep feeding you, but that's about all. The good news is that these days, the in-flight entertainment offers more options than ever before. The bad news: Most of these options include the usual array of wretched mass market films and television series.
On our most recent flight from Rome in November, at least there were a few good documentary films on tap. They paired well with cans of a beer I'd never expect to see on an international flight: SweetWater 420 Extra Pale Ale. Corporate placement or not, it was a welcome change from the usual Heineken.
The third of four documentaries I watched in November is an appropriate delaying tactic pending the beginning of spring training, when at long last life will make sense again. It's called Fastball.
While players, historians, and scientists might disagree on who was actually the fastest pitcher in history – and yes, the film does the math and seems to come out with a very clear verdict that might come as a surprise – FASTBALL tells the story of the game itself. Filmed at baseball’s most hallowed grounds, from the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown to Yankee Stadium to the sandlot field in Weiser, Idaho, where Walter Johnson's fastball changed the game over a hundred years ago, the film provides unparalleled insight into both the mechanics and the mythos of our National Pastime.
Nine hour flights home from Italy are a bummer. You can read, nap and drink as many free adult beverages as they'll keep feeding you, but that's about all. The good news is that these days, the in-flight entertainment offers more options than ever before. The bad news: Most of these options include the usual array of wretched mass market films and television series.
On our most recent flight from Rome in November, at least there were a few good documentary films on tap. They paired well with cans of a beer I'd never expect to see on an international flight: SweetWater 420 Extra Pale Ale. Corporate placement or not, it was a welcome change from the usual Heineken.
The second of four is the story of Tower Records, and this quote sets the scene.
"When the banks came in, we knew things were going to change."
I'm the crazed evangelist for "Death to Chains," and Tower Records definitely was a chain, but the documentary offers a corrective of sorts to my usual default assumption that chains arise from big-money corporate "concept development." Yes, it's true: Chains can develop from just one mom 'n' pop store, and grow to immense economies of scale with papa -- in this instance, Russ Soloman -- still calling the shots.
Until it all falls down.
Pick a cautionary tale. Perhaps the growth is too fast, and size becomes an impediment to adapt to market conditions. Can the founding ethos of laid-back passion be maintained? What happens when an entire world changes? When those bankers come in, is there any hope at all?
Trust me on the latter. There isn't.
Soloman still is with us, at around 92 years of age. I'm left with a rare pang of sympathy, in the sense that for a man like Soloman to live past the demise of his own personal creation must be a very hard thing, indeed. I'd suggest looking for the documentary at portals like Hulu, Netflix and Amazon. It's truly worth the time and investment to watch.
Established in 1960, Tower Records was once a retail powerhouse with two hundred stores, in thirty countries, on five continents. From humble beginnings in a small-town drugstore, Tower Records eventually became the heart and soul of the music world, and a powerful force in the music industry. In 1999, Tower Records made $1 billion. In 2006, the company filed for bankruptcy. What went wrong? Everyone thinks they know what killed Tower Records: The Internet. But that's not the story. All Things Must Pass is a feature documentary film examining this iconic company's explosive trajectory, tragic demise, and legacy forged by its rebellious founder, Russ Solomon.
Nine hour flights home from Italy are a bummer. You can read, nap and drink as many free adult beverages as they'll keep feeding you, but that's about all.
The good news is that these days, the in-flight entertainment offers more options than ever before. The bad news: Most of these options include the usual array of wretched mass market films and television series.
On our most recent flight from Rome in November, at least there were a few good documentary films on tap. They paired well with cans of a beer I'd never expect to see on an international flight: SweetWater 420 Extra Pale Ale. Corporate larceny or not, it was a welcome change from the usual Heineken.
The film focuses on the time when film star Steve McQueen tried to take control of his career. After the success of Bullitt and The Thomas Crown Affair, McQueen sought to pursue his dream of creating a film about his passion: race-car driving. The result, Le Mans, was a box-office flop.
The documentary details the making of the film. In his personal life, McQueen was a man's man, with the positives and negatives this characterization implies, and he was not the most admirable of human beings altogether. I have no interest in racing of any format, the motorized versions of which obsessed the actor. Still, I found the documentary riveting, if not pretty, and it's not necessary to be a racing fan to appreciate an explication of how someone does something.
Viewing portals include Hulu, and probably the usual gateways like Netflix and Amazon.
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