At the risk of sounding callous, Hollywood has always clamored for sagas about mental illness, especially when they’ve been books first. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Girl Interrupted,” “Silver Linings Playbook,” “Sybil,” “Ordinary People,” “I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can”: The list goes on and on. It’s not that all these movies are great (though I’m certainly fond of them). It’s that they possess all the key elements of a classic Hollywood weepie: Hero faces dark night of the soul; hero lives to tell the tale. But what of the hero who doesn’t live to tell the tale? Very few movies to date have told those stories, no doubt because they don’t offer the inspirational endings that fill multiplex seats. Continue Reading →
Archive | Film Matters
What We Owe to Mike Nichols
When Mike Nichols died in 2014, the news was met by such an enormous outpouring of grief that it’s surprising that, in the eighteen months since his passing, the director’s cinematic legacy mostly has been overlooked. As is the case with the late, great Robert Altman, it’s as if no one knows how to approach Nichols’s immensely varied – some might go so far as to say uneven – body of work. Continue Reading →
Social Music, Jazz Music: ‘Miles Ahead’
Thelonious Monk once said, “Talking about jazz is like dancing about architecture.” Having dated a jazz trombonist, I know this to be true, but I hadn’t considered until recently that making a movie about jazz might be an equally quixotic process. Free-form if not formless and often wordless, the musical genre asks us to abandon our need for structure and surrender to a purer state. Such trust in audiences is not exactly bottom-line Hollywood’s forte, yet “Miles Ahead,” the new film about Miles Davis, has the remarkable audacity to take all its cues directly from jazz. Continue Reading →