Welcome to WeeklyWilson.com, where author/film critic Connie (Corcoran) Wilson avoids totally losing her marbles in semi-retirement by writing about film (see the Chicago Film Festival reviews and SXSW), politics and books----her own books and those of other people. You'll also find her diverging frequently to share humorous (or not-so-humorous) anecdotes and concerns. Try it! You'll like it!
Connie has been reviewing film uninterruptedly since 1970 (47 years) and routinely covers the Chicago International Film Festival (14 years), SXSW, the Austin Film Festival, and others, sharing detailed looks in advance at upcoming entertainment. She has taught a class on film and is the author of the book “Training the Teacher As A Champion; From The Godfather to Apocalypse Now, published by the Merry Blacksmith Press of Rhode Island.
As Press, we are not allowed to write a full review of any of the films or documentaries until they are released. We can only write capsule reviews, so I shall write capsule reviews of the 10 films I’ve seen so far. I was unable to take part in viewing any films yesterday (Wednesday, Oct. 21) as I was on a panel in Highland Park regarding writing children’s books. My Toyota GPS took me right past the front of Wrigley Field both going and coming, just as the Cubs were being trounced by the Mets, so, as you can imagine, getting there and back was a lengthy ordeal.
Here are the films in the order in which I saw them, with a capsule review or comment (full reviews later and some Q&A material to follow):
“I Smile Back”
This small budget film features Sarah Silverman proving she has serious acting chops. She portrays Laney, an attractive, intelligent suburban wife and mother of two adorable children who suffers from depression and turns to destructive coping mechanisms. The film electrified this year’s Sundance Film Festival crowds with its unblinking plunge into the nature of addiction and the roots of self-loathing. The routinely excellent cast includes Josh Charles (“The Good Wife,” “Masters & Johnson”) portraying her long-suffering husband, veteran actor Christopher Sarandon as her father, and television’s Thomas Sadoski as Donnie (“Life in Pieces,” “The Newsroom”). Directed by Adam Salky, the film was shot for $100,000 in just 20 days.
“Embers” – Director Claire Carre’s film depicts a world where a neurological epidemic leaves survivors with no long-term memory. (Think a world where everyone has Alzheimer’s disease.) One young woman, quarantined by her father, craves freedom. Two lovers struggle to remember their connection. Described as being “like Memento en masse” this was one of the slowest-moving films of those I screened.
“James White” – Directed by Josh Mond, the best thing about “James White” is the acting by Christopher Abbott (“Girls”) and Cynthia Nixon (“Sex and the City) as a mother dying of cancer. A raw, affecting film that nearly everyone who has ever lost a loved one will be able to relate to, it is as depressing as it sounds. Abbott has the intensity of a young Pacino and Josh Mond has done a great job of translating to the screen some of the emotions he experienced with the passing of his own mother. (“The movie feels like I’m opening up my diary all the time to strangers.”) Q&A from the director and star of the film to follow.
“They Look Like People” – by Director Perry Blackshear. The write-up made the film sound like a modern take on “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” which is not totally incorrect. However, the film turned out to be less a horror movie and more a disturbing look at a young man on the edge of paranoid schizophrenia. The Q&A following this film featuring Wyatt Goodwin as the lead proved that a talented filmmaker can work nearly alone and produce a film in one month on a shoestring budget. (I can honestly say that, having reviewed film since 1970—45 years, if you’re counting— this is the first time the lead in a movie I am about to attend came down the line of patrons beforehand handing out buttons promoting the film.)
“Howard Shore” – See previous article on the Tribute to Howard Shore and check for it on Saturday, up on ReadersEntertainment.com.
Director Eytan Rockaway of “The Abandoned.”
“The Abandoned” – From Director Eytan Rockaway comes this psychological horror film starring Jason Patric. In a vacant luxury complex, a young woman takes a job as one of two security guards covering the night shift (the complex is actually several New York courthouses). As she patrols the vast hallways, increasingly sinister phenomena threaten her, seemingly born from the building’s catacombs. A claustrophobic, bone-chilling thriller that features sound from the soundman honored for “Gravity.” A confusing ending, but a great beginning and middle.
“Looking for Grace” – This Australian film from Director/Writer Sue Brooks featured an almost all female group behind making it and the acting of Richard Roxburgh, who cleaned up at the 1st Annual Australian Oscars a few years back. Roxburgh played the lead in the television series “Rake” (which was later made into a tepid, short-lived American version starring Greg Kinnear). The amazing thing about the film is its ability to mix humor with pathos in the story of a rebellious teenager who leaves home by bus without permission to attend a concert several days away. It’s a look at rural Australia (shot in western Australia) and contains not only the story of Grace, the runaway off to see the rock group “Death Dog” with her friend Sapphire (and a pocketed $13,000 from the family’s safe), but also a story of everyday life and how everything can change in an instant. Recommended.
“Brooklyn” – This Ireland/UK film from Director John Crowley tells the story of Eilis (Saoirse Ronan of “The Lovely Bones”), a young Irish immigrant in 1950s Brooklyn who must decide whether to stay in America with her Italian boyfriend or return home to her widowed mother and a romance that develops unexpectedly when she must attend her sister Rose’s funeral. Beautiful cinematography and a well-told tale, but IMHO, they either needed to tell Miss Ronan to take off her high heels or they needed to find a taller male lead. The scenes in Central Park where she is to lay her head on her date’s shoulder are about as awkward as can be, since she is taller than he is, and must practically become a pretzel to pull the scene off at all. Develops slowly, but was enjoyable.
The entire clan came to the World Premiere of “Motley’s Law” at the Chicago Film Festival on Oct. 20th.
“Motley’s Law” – A documentary from Danish filmmaker Nicole Horanyi, this was the World Premiere of the film and both lead and director were present, so I will be getting some Q&A remarks posted later. A captivating documentary about a former Mrs. Wisconsin, Kimberley Motley, who is the only American allowed to practice law in Afghanistan. Motley defends US and European citizens detained in a corrupt system and finds herself targeted as a foreigner. (A grenade is thrown through her apartment window). Meanwhile, Claude, her husband, back home watching their 3 children, goes to Milwaukee for a class reunion and is shot in the face! More to come on this one.
Kimberley Motley and Danish director Nicole Horanyi at the World Premier of their film “Motley’s Law.”
“I Am Michael” – U.S. Director Justin Kelly takes on the true life story of a former gay advocate (Michael Glatze) who goes from outspoken champion of the gay community as a writer and magazine editor to become a conservative Christian pastor and “ex-gay” therapist. (Michelle Bachman’s husband might like this one). Zachary Quinto gives a great performance as James Franco’s gay lover. The film was executive produced by Gus Van Sant.
On October 18, 2015, Howard Shore celebrated his 69th birthday inside the AMC Theater in Chicago, Illinois, listening to a studio audience of fans sing an off-key version of Happy Birthday To You. Shore was being given an award at the 51st Chicago International Film Festival, and the Canadian composer (Shore was born in Toronto, Canada)—winner of 3 Oscars, 3 Golden Globe awards and 4 Grammies—shared many stories of his collaborations with such great directors as Martin Scorsese (5 films) and David Cronenberg (all but one of Cronenberg’s films). [*See the Filmography at the end of the article.]
As Shore told it, he had admired David Cronenberg’s dark films from the age of 14, but didn’t get up the courage to ask if he could do the music for one of Cronenberg’s horror films until the age of 28 in 1978, after completing his training at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, (where he is now on the board.)
Howard Shore waves to the audience singing “Happy Birthday” to him on October 18th.
Shore described how he selected a clarinet housed in a shoebox as his first musical instrument at the age of 8, saying, “The clarinet seemed pretty hip for a 10-year-old.” He began writing musical harmony with a pencil (which he said he still does today) and training in harmony and counterpoint from an early age, thanks to an early teacher Morris Weinstein, and the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), a government institution, welcomed him and gave him an early start. Shore says the government tested the hearing of all young children. When his hearing was found to be excellent, they encouraged him to become a musician. He reminisced, “I was a kid in a room with a tape recorder listening to a lot of good music.” Shore acknowledged that his life has been one of capitalizing on opportunities that came his way as they came his way.
Howard Shore in Chicago.
A chance meeting at summer camp with another future prominent Canadian, Lorne Michaels, creator of “Saturday Night Live,” would lead Shore to do summer camp productions of plays like “West Side Story” as well as a show called The Fast Show with Michaels, and, ultimately, to perform onstage with the original “Saturday Night Live” greats gathered from such diverse cities as Detroit (Gilda Radner), Los Angeles’ Groundlings troupe, and Chicago’s own Second City. Shore would do 103 live episodes of “Saturday Night Live” between 1975 and 1980, even appearing as a beekeeper in a Belushi skit. He gave John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd their nickname “The Blues Brothers.”
In the Q&A following the showing of clips from his many film triumphs, Shore spoke about his illustrious career.
Q1: Was collaboration stimulating for you, or was it just a means to an end? A1: I was used to writing and acting with other people. Working in film is really working in the theater, but you’re till the lonely kid in the room. It sort of combined everything I liked.
Q2: How did you end up on “Saturday Night Live”? A2: I met Lorne Michaels in summer camp in Canada. We used to do summer camp productions and we did some collaborating at the CBC. Then, a few of us ended up in New York City putting on this show. I didn’t give up my home in Canada, at first. I don’t think I really thought I could make a living at this or at putting music in film, or that “Saturday Night Live” would last, but I was always interested in working with strings and orchestras. I think I worked for 10 years before it occurred to me that I might be able to make a living at this. In 1986, after I had done “After Hours,” “Big” and “The Fly,” Scorsese knew Cronenberg and, from word-of-mouth, I got the job of doing the music for “The Aviator,” which was set when silent films were giving way to sound. There was a certain sound then. I was doing concerts of “Lord of the Rings” with a symphony in Belgium and that West German sound was good for “The Aviator,” which used percussion and castanets—the castanets because of the Hispanic influence in Los Angeles. Marty was using Bach, also.
Q3: Working with Scorsese was another big collaboration of your life. How was that? A3: Marty doesn’t like to watch his films with temporary music inserted, as some directors do, or any music inserted that doesn’t belong. David Cronenberg is very similar. What Marty does that I love is that he collects sounds, from a jukebox playing in a scene, etc. I’ll collect them and slowly build from that material. For “Hugo,” a couple of sounds per month were collected. I’ve never seen a director do that as well as Scorsese. But Peter Jackson (“Lord of the Rings”) works completely differently. Marty doesn’t want to give anything away with the music, but Peter wants to reveal and have it out front in his films.
Q4: Tell us about your music for “The Silence of the Lambs”? A4: In “Silence of the Lambs” the music moves in very claustrophobically. Spooky sounds near the end. Heavy breathing when Clarice is in the basement in the dark. Muted somber tones. Jonathan Demme directed that film and he said to me, “Suppose we take the point-of-view of Clarice?” You could have written the music for Hannibal Lecter, but the score wasn’t created that way. Early nineties opera was really influencing me at the time—Verdi, Puccini. Now you see a lot of films being done this way. I did it in 1986 for “The Fly,” but I had difficulty with the producers—never with Cronenberg—but when the movie was a hit, the producers were going, “Oh, right.” Up until “The Fly” I hadn’t really had full London Philharmonic type sound access. All of that later developed into “The Fellowship of the Ring” music. I used to set up all of my recordings the way the New York Metropolitan did, splitting the violinists, the cellos over here, bass over there. Most movies at that time weren’t being done that way. This score was interesting, because depending on how the orchestra was playing that day, I’d adjust. It even led to things like the film “Crash” and the techniques in that 1995 film sort of led to surround sound. Film music is a perspective. You could take any scene and do it 7 or 8 different ways. David Cronenberg wants his music to be more ambiguous. He doesn’t want to tell the audience anything up front, but Peter Jackson wants it the opposite with everything in the center. He wants clarity.
Q5: Tell us about your work for the movie “Seven.” A5: With the movie “Seven,” directed by David Fincher—who is a great director— I was going with electronics, ocean sounds, underwater things, whereas the music in “Silence of the Lambs” always sounds a little unsettling and disturbing.
Q6: What about your score for the Johnny Depp movie “Ed Wood,” directed by Tim Burton? A6: That was set in a great period for music—the late fifties . Jazz. Cuban music. Mancini scores. They were all coming in. It was a very rich period for music and the theramin instrument was being used. It’s the only instrument that you don’t touch. It was created as a classical instrument. Working with Tim Burton was a great project, a lot of fun. You couldn’t really do anything wrong in his world.
Q7: What about Cronenberg’s “Crash”? A7: I did “M Butterfly” right before “Crash” with 2 harps…actually 3 harps: left, center and right. I added 6 electric guitars, so it became sort of a live ensemble. Then, I added 3 woodwinds and then metal percussionists, playing into the idea of machines and their fetishistic relationships to people. (“Crash” was David Cronenberg’s 1995 film.) It produces a sound that’s hypnotic and dangerously inviting.
Q8: How was collaborating with Scorsese on “Hugo,” for which you received your 4th Oscar nomination? A8: Collaborating with Marty again felt the same. This was Scorsese’s first 3D picture and the films of Michael Powell influenced his approach. Powell is widely regarded as a British filmmaker who should perhaps be considered up there with Hitchcock, but his controversial 1960 film “Peeping Tom” made it nearly impossible for him to work again. His career went off the rails, but he was married to Thelma Schoonover, Scorsese’s long-time film editor, from May 15 of 1984 until his death in February of 1990, so there was that influence in “Hugo.” The entire movie is really a love affair: a movie about making movies.
Q9: What about “Lord of the Rings?” How much music did those films require? How long did those scores take? A9: “The Fellowship of the Rings” project was like scoring 4 films. The extended version would be 5. It is eleven and one-half hours of original scoring for film and it took me 4 years writing the music. It was a great project and came to me with great timing. It had a lot of good strokes for me. It all came together for me, as a composer. I was trying to put Peter Jackson’s images into music. [*Note: Since 2004, Shore has toured the world conducting local orchestras in performances of his new symphonic arrangement of his highly acclaimed “Lord of the Rings” scores, a new work entitled “The Lord of the Rings: Symphony in Six Movements.”]
Filmography:
“I Miss You. Hugs and Kisses” (1978) “The Brood” (1979) “Scanners” (1981) “Videodrome” (1983) “Nothing Lasts Forever” (1984) “After Hours” (1985) “Fire with Fire” (1986) “The Fly” (1986) “Nadine” (1987) “Moving” (1988) “Big” (1988) “Dead Ringers” (1988) “She-Devil” (1989) “An Innocent Man” (1989) “Signs of Life” (1989) “The Local Stigmatic” (1990) “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991) “A Kiss Before Dying” (1991) “Naked Lunch” (1991) “Prelude to a Kiss” (1992) “Single White Female” (1992) “Sliver” (1993) “Guilty as Sin” (1993) “M. Butterfly” (1993) “Mrs. Doubtfire” (1993) “Philadelphia” (1993) “The Client” (1994) “Nobody’s Fool” (1994) “Moonlight and Valentino” (1994) “Seven” (1995) “Before and After” (1996) “Crash” (1996) “The Truth About Cats and Dogs” (1996) “That Thing You Do!” (1996) “Striptease” (1996) “The Game” (1997) “Cop Land” (1997) “Gloria” (1999) “eXistenZ” (1999) “Analyze This” (1999) “Dogma” (1999) “High Fidelity” (2000) “The Cell” (2000) “The Yards” (2000) “The Score” (2001) “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” (2001) “Gangs of New York” (2002) “Panic Room” (2002) “Spider” (2002) “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” (2002) “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” (2003) “The Aviator” (2004) “A History of Violence” (2005) “The Departed” (2006) “Soul of the Ultimate Nation” (2007) “The Last Mimzy” (2007) “Eastern Promises” (2007) “Doubt” (2008) “The Betrayal” (2008) “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse” (2010) “Edge of Darkness” (2010) “A Dangerous Method” (2011) “Hugo” (2011) “Cosmopolis” (2012) “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” (2012) “Jimmy P” (2013) “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” (2013) “Gynasiearbetet: En Introduktion” (2015)
Amy Winehouse died on July 23, 2011, at age 27. She died 17 years after another famous self-destructive singer,Kurt Cobain, died at the same age, causing some to dub this coincidence “the 27 Club.”
In the documentary “Amy,” directed by Asif Kapadia and produced by James Gay-Rees, Kapadia and Universal Music, home video footage and still photographs, together with interviews of those closest to the singer, combine to produce a compelling and oh-so-sad Oscar-worthy look behind the headlines. The film debuted at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and is truly tragic and touching, with interviews and film of nearly all the important people in the singer’s short life..
The singer’s own song lyrices (projected onscreen) and her own interview statements provide us with a murky picture of what may have led to her early death. She described herself as a “happy” child until the age of nine, when her parents separated. Her mother, Janis, was not a disciplinarian (“I wasn’t strong enough to say to her: Stop.”) and her father, Mitch, whom she idolized, was not around to say “no,” having run off with another woman.
Amy’s behavior at age nine when her parents separated seemed to be a classic case of “acting out.” Anything she thought would displease or shock her parents and other adults, she did, whether it was tattoos, piercings, her style of dress or her eventual fatal infatuation with drugs and alcohol.
She came by her love for jazz legitimately, as many of Winehouse’s maternal uncles were professional jazz musicians. Amy’s paternal grandmother, Cynthia, was a singer, who encouraged her to listen to the jazz greats. Amy credits her Nan Cynthia (her father’s mother) as being the strongest woman she ever knew. Her death in 2006, when Amy was 23, is shown as hitting Amy hard at a time when there were other problems in her life.
In one interview (Garry Mulholland of “The Observor”) Amy, when asked about fame, replied, “I don’t think I could handle it. I think I’d go mad.” Indeed, there were some suggestions that she might have been manic depressive and it is well-established that she suffered from bulimia. She was prescribed the anti-depressnat Seroxat after her father moved in with his girlfriend and Amy only saw Mitch Winehouse on weekends.
From that time forward, Amy was a “Wild Child” and often in various degrees of trouble. Although it is not mentioned in the documentary, there were several charges of assault leveled against her at different times, and she even admitted to sometimes hitting her husband, Blake Fielder-Civil.
The entrance of Blake Fielder-Civil into her life seems to have been one of the worst pairings of two troubled people in history. It almost echoes the Sid Vicious (“The Sex Pistols”) murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen. The murder, in this case, was much more insidious, as Fielder-Civil introduced her to the worst of drugs and played fast-and-loose with her emotions, eventually deciding, while imprisoned, to divorce his wife.
Fielder-Civil seemed to have really gotten his hooks into Winehouse, emotionally. Then, he broke up with her to return to a previous girlfriend. Her distress at his departure is seen and felt in her song “Back to Black.” “Now my destructive side has gorwn a mile wide,” Amy sang in one song of the period.
Fielder-Civil reveals to the camera that, at the age of 9, the same age Amy was when her father left, he had attempted suicide. He also admitted to introducing Amy to both heroin and crack cocaine. Amy, herself, is quoted this way: “I write songs because I’m fucked up in the head.”
In the documentary, the relationship of Amy with her father, who is a bit too eager to springboard his own entrepreneurial efforts on his daughter’s success, comes through as a large part of her problem. The men in her life, especially Fielding-Civil, were the final nail(s) in her coffin. One lover, with whom she lived briefly in 2006, Alex Claire, sold his story to the tabloids (as Fielding-Civil did after they were divorced). Amy was betrayed by most in her life but sang, “But to walk away I have no capacity.” She also is heard saying, “I will continue to love you unconditionally until the day my heart fails and I fall down dead.”
Her final “Duets” partner, Tony Bennett, felt that Amy knew she was going to die young and also gave her huge props as a true Jazz singer. They are shown in the studio recording together, and it is obvious that the young girl is nervous at performing with one of her idols. Her record of hits (5 2008 Grammy Awards for “Back to Black” and many, many other British awards) marked her as one of the most influential songwriters of her generation.
A change of managers also appears to have been a change for the worse. Her original manager, Nick Shymensky, became a close friend, starting out with her when he was only 19 and she was 16. She left him to go with Metropolis Music promoter Raye Cosbert, who put her on the road when she was ill and over-booked her for performances when she would, sometimes intentionally, sabotage her performance.
My daughter saw her during one such appearance onstage at Lollapalooza in Chicago and said Amy was “a mess.” It was about the same time that she journeyed to Serbia to appear in front of 50,000 screaming fans but, when called to the stage, refused to sing. We learn in the documentary that she had been carried to a limousine while unconscious from one of her typical late nights of partying and put on a private plane, waking up to find herself on the way to perform in Serbia, when she did not want to go
When asked about the onerous nature of fame, she said, “If I really thought I ws famous, I’d go and top myself, because it’s scary. It’s very scary.” She also says, at one point near the documentary’s end, that she would happily trade her singing talent for the anonymity of being able to walk down the street without being hassled by fans.
After her Nan (Cynthia) died on May 5, 2006, when Amy was 23, things seemed to spiral downward for Amy. She had a seizure on 8/24/2007 in Camden and medical personnel said, “Her body can’t keep up with this. If she has another seizure, she’ll die.” Amy was told to swear off drugs, which she attempted to do.
HowevAmy Winehouse died on July 23, 2011, at age 27. She died 17 years after another famous self-destructive singer,Kurt Cobain, died at the same age, causing some to dub this coincidence “the 27 Club.”
In the documentary “Amy,” directed by Asif Kapadia and produced by James Gay-Rees, Kapadia and Universal Music, home video footage and still photographs, together with interviews of those closest to the singer, combine to produce a compelling and oh-so-sad Oscar-worthy look behind the headlines. The film debuted at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and is truly tragic and touching, with interviews and film of nearly all the important people in the singer’s short life..
The singer’s own song lyrices (projected onscreen) and her own interview statements provide us with a murky picture of what may have led to her early death. She described herself as a “happy” child until the age of nine, when her parents separated. Her mother, Janis, was not a disciplinarian (“I wasn’t strong enough to say to her: Stop.”) and her father, Mitch, whom she idolized, was not around to say “no,” having run off with another woman.
Amy’s behavior at age nine when her parents separated seemed to be a classic case of “acting out.” Anything she thought would displease or shock her parents and other adults, she did, whether it was tattoos, piercings, her style of dress or her eventual fatal infatuation with drugs and alcohol.
She came by her love for jazz legitimately, as many of Winehouse’s maternal uncles were professional jazz musicians. Amy’s paternal grandmother, Cynthia, was a singer, who encouraged her to listen to the jazz greats. Amy credits her Nan Cynthia (her father’s mother) as being the strongest woman she ever knew. Her death in 2006, when Amy was 23, is shown as hitting Amy hard at a time when there were other problems in her life.
In one interview (Garry Mulholland of “The Observor”) Amy, when asked about fame, replied, “I don’t think I could handle it. I think I’d go mad.” Indeed, there were some suggestions that she might have been manic depressive and it is well-established that she suffered from bulimia. She was prescribed the anti-depressnat Seroxat after her father moved in with his girlfriend and Amy only saw Mitch Winehouse on weekends.
From that time forward, Amy was a “Wild Child” and often in various degrees of trouble. Although it is not mentioned in the documentary, there were several charges of assault leveled against her at different times, and she even admitted to sometimes hitting her husband, Blake Fielder-Civil.
The entrance of Blake Fielder-Civil into her life seems to have been one of the worst pairings of two troubled people in history. It almost echoes the Sid Vicious (“The Sex Pistols”) murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen. The murder, in this case, was much more insidious, as Fielder-Civil introduced her to the worst of drugs and played fast-and-loose with her emotions, eventually deciding, while imprisoned, to divorce his wife.
Fielder-Civil seemed to have really gotten his hooks into Winehouse, emotionally. Then, he broke up with her to return to a previous girlfriend. Her distress at his departure is seen and felt in her song “Back to Black.” “Now my destructive side has gorwn a mile wide,” Amy sang in one song of the period.
Fielder-Civil reveals to the camera that, at the age of 9, the same age Amy was when her father left, he had attempted suicide. He also admitted to introducing Amy to both heroin and crack cocaine. Amy, herself, is quoted this way: “I write songs because I’m fucked up in the head.”
In the documentary, the relationship of Amy with her father, who is a bit too eager to springboard his own entrepreneurial efforts on his daughter’s success, comes through as a large part of her problem. The men in her life, especially Fielding-Civil, were the final nail(s) in her coffin. One lover, with whom she lived briefly in 2006, Alex Claire, sold his story to the tabloids (as Fielding-Civil did after they were divorced). Amy was betrayed by most in her life but sang, “But to walk away I have no capacity.” She also is heard saying, “I will continue to love you unconditionally until the day my heart fails and I fall down dead.”
Her final “Duets” partner, Tony Bennett, felt that Amy knew she was going to die young and also gave her huge props as a true Jazz singer. They are shown in the studio recording together, and it is obvious that the young girl is nervous at performing with one of her idols. Her record of hits (5 2008 Grammy Awards for “Back to Black” and many, many other British awards) marked her as one of the most influential songwriters of her generation.
A change of managers also appears to have been a change for the worse. Her original manager, Nick Shymensky, became a close friend, starting out with her when he was only 19 and she was 16. She left him to go with Metropolis Music promoter Raye Cosbert, who put her on the road when she was ill and over-booked her for performances when she would, sometimes intentionally, sabotage her performance.
My daughter saw her during one such appearance onstage at Lollapalooza in Chicago and said Amy was “a mess.” It was about the same time that she journeyed to Serbia to appear in front of 50,000 screaming fans but, when called to the stage, refused to sing. We learn in the documentary that she had been carried to a limousine while unconscious from one of her typical late nights of partying and put on a private plane, waking up to find herself on the way to perform in Serbia, when she did not want to go
When asked about the onerous nature of fame, she said, “If I really thought I ws famous, I’d go and top myself, because it’s scary. It’s very scary.” She also says, at one point near the documentary’s end, that she would happily trade her singing talent for the anonymity of being able to walk down the street without being hassled by fans.
After her Nan (Cynthia) died on May 5, 2006, when Amy was 23, things seemed to spiral downward for Amy. She had a seizure on 8/24/2007 in Camden and medical personnel said, “Her body can’t keep up with this. If she has another seizure, she’ll die.” Amy was told to swear off drugs, which she attempted to do. Amy Winehouse died on July 23, 2011, at age 27. She died 17 years after another famous self-destructive singer,Kurt Cobain, died at the same age, causing some to dub this coincidence “the 27 Club.”
In the documentary “Amy,” directed by Asif Kapadia and produced by James Gay-Rees, Kapadia and Universal Music, home video footage and still photographs, together with interviews of those closest to the singer, combine to produce a compelling and oh-so-sad Oscar-worthy look behind the headlines. The film debuted at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and is truly tragic and touching, with interviews and film of nearly all the important people in the singer’s short life..
The singer’s own song lyrices (projected onscreen) and her own interview statements provide us with a murky picture of what may have led to her early death. She described herself as a “happy” child until the age of nine, when her parents separated. Her mother, Janis, was not a disciplinarian (“I wasn’t strong enough to say to her: Stop.”) and her father, Mitch, whom she idolized, was not around to say “no,” having run off with another woman.
Amy’s behavior at age nine when her parents separated seemed to be a classic case of “acting out.” Anything she thought would displease or shock her parents and other adults, she did, whether it was tattoos, piercings, her style of dress or her eventual fatal infatuation with drugs and alcohol.
She came by her love for jazz legitimately, as many of Winehouse’s maternal uncles were professional jazz musicians. Amy’s paternal grandmother, Cynthia, was a singer, who encouraged her to listen to the jazz greats. Amy credits her Nan Cynthia (her father’s mother) as being the strongest woman she ever knew. Her death in 2006, when Amy was 23, is shown as hitting Amy hard at a time when there were other problems in her life.
In one interview (Garry Mulholland of “The Observor”) Amy, when asked about fame, replied, “I don’t think I could handle it. I think I’d go mad.” Indeed, there were some suggestions that she might have been manic depressive and it is well-established that she suffered from bulimia. She was prescribed the anti-depressnat Seroxat after her father moved in with his girlfriend and Amy only saw Mitch Winehouse on weekends.
From that time forward, Amy was a “Wild Child” and often in various degrees of trouble. Although it is not mentioned in the documentary, there were several charges of assault leveled against her at different times, and she even admitted to sometimes hitting her husband, Blake Fielder-Civil.
The entrance of Blake Fielder-Civil into her life seems to have been one of the worst pairings of two troubled people in history. It almost echoes the Sid Vicious (“The Sex Pistols”) murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen. The murder, in this case, was much more insidious, as Fielder-Civil introduced her to the worst of drugs and played fast-and-loose with her emotions, eventually deciding, while imprisoned, to divorce his wife.
Fielder-Civil seemed to have really gotten his hooks into Winehouse, emotionally. Then, he broke up with her to return to a previous girlfriend. Her distress at his departure is seen and felt in her song “Back to Black.” “Now my destructive side has gorwn a mile wide,” Amy sang in one song of the period.
Fielder-Civil reveals to the camera that, at the age of 9, the same age Amy was when her father left, he had attempted suicide. He also admitted to introducing Amy to both heroin and crack cocaine. Amy, herself, is quoted this way: “I write songs because I’m fucked up in the head.”
In the documentary, the relationship of Amy with her father, who is a bit too eager to springboard his own entrepreneurial efforts on his daughter’s success, comes through as a large part of her problem. The men in her life, especially Fielding-Civil, were the final nail(s) in her coffin. One lover, with whom she lived briefly in 2006, Alex Claire, sold his story to the tabloids (as Fielding-Civil did after they were divorced). Amy was betrayed by most in her life but sang, “But to walk away I have no capacity.” She also is heard saying, “I will continue to love you unconditionally until the day my heart fails and I fall down dead.”
Her final “Duets” partner, Tony Bennett, felt that Amy knew she was going to die young and also gave her huge props as a true Jazz singer. They are shown in the studio recording together, and it is obvious that the young girl is nervous at performing with one of her idols. Her record of hits (5 2008 Grammy Awards for “Back to Black” and many, many other British awards) marked her as one of the most influential songwriters of her generation.
A change of managers also appears to have been a change for the worse. Her original manager, Nick Shymensky, became a close friend, starting out with her when he was only 19 and she was 16. She left him to go with Metropolis Music promoter Raye Cosbert, who put her on the road when she was ill and over-booked her for performances when she would, sometimes intentionally, sabotage her performance.
My daughter saw her during one such appearance onstage at Lollapalooza in Chicago and said Amy was “a mess.” It was about the same time that she journeyed to Serbia to appear in front of 50,000 screaming fans but, when called to the stage, refused to sing. We learn in the documentary that she had been carried to a limousine while unconscious from one of her typical late nights of partying and put on a private plane, waking up to find herself on the way to perform in Serbia, when she did not want to go
When asked about the onerous nature of fame, she said, “If I really thought I ws famous, I’d go and top myself, because it’s scary. It’s very scary.” She also says, at one point near the documentary’s end, that she would happily trade her singing talent for the anonymity of being able to walk down the street without being hassled by fans.
After her Nan (Cynthia) died on May 5, 2006, when Amy was 23, things seemed to spiral downward for Amy. She had a seizure on 8/24/2007 in Camden and medical personnel said, “Her body can’t keep up with this. If she has another seizure, she’ll die.” Amy was told to swear off drugs, which she attempted to do. Amy Winehouse died on July 23, 2011, at age 27. She died 17 years after another famous self-destructive singer,Kurt Cobain, died at the same age, causing some to dub this coincidence “the 27 Club.”
In the documentary “Amy,” directed by Asif Kapadia and produced by James Gay-Rees, Kapadia and Universal Music, home video footage and still photographs, together with interviews of those closest to the singer, combine to produce a compelling and oh-so-sad Oscar-worthy look behind the headlines. The film debuted at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and is truly tragic and touching, with interviews and film of nearly all the important people in the singer’s short life..
The singer’s own song lyrices (projected onscreen) and her own interview statements provide us with a murky picture of what may have led to her early death. She described herself as a “happy” child until the age of nine, when her parents separated. Her mother, Janis, was not a disciplinarian (“I wasn’t strong enough to say to her: Stop.”) and her father, Mitch, whom she idolized, was not around to say “no,” having run off with another woman.
Amy’s behavior at age nine when her parents separated seemed to be a classic case of “acting out.” Anything she thought would displease or shock her parents and other adults, she did, whether it was tattoos, piercings, her style of dress or her eventual fatal infatuation with drugs and alcohol.
She came by her love for jazz legitimately, as many of Winehouse’s maternal uncles were professional jazz musicians. Amy’s paternal grandmother, Cynthia, was a singer, who encouraged her to listen to the jazz greats. Amy credits her Nan Cynthia (her father’s mother) as being the strongest woman she ever knew. Her death in 2006, when Amy was 23, is shown as hitting Amy hard at a time when there were other problems in her life.
In one interview (Garry Mulholland of “The Observor”) Amy, when asked about fame, replied, “I don’t think I could handle it. I think I’d go mad.” Indeed, there were some suggestions that she might have been manic depressive and it is well-established that she suffered from bulimia. She was prescribed the anti-depressnat Seroxat after her father moved in with his girlfriend and Amy only saw Mitch Winehouse on weekends.
From that time forward, Amy was a “Wild Child” and often in various degrees of trouble. Although it is not mentioned in the documentary, there were several charges of assault leveled against her at different times, and she even admitted to sometimes hitting her husband, Blake Fielder-Civil.
The entrance of Blake Fielder-Civil into her life seems to have been one of the worst pairings of two troubled people in history. It almost echoes the Sid Vicious (“The Sex Pistols”) murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen. The murder, in this case, was much more insidious, as Fielder-Civil introduced her to the worst of drugs and played fast-and-loose with her emotions, eventually deciding, while imprisoned, to divorce his wife.
Fielder-Civil seemed to have really gotten his hooks into Winehouse, emotionally. Then, he broke up with her to return to a previous girlfriend. Her distress at his departure is seen and felt in her song “Back to Black.” “Now my destructive side has gorwn a mile wide,” Amy sang in one song of the period.
Fielder-Civil reveals to the camera that, at the age of 9, the same age Amy was when her father left, he had attempted suicide. He also admitted to introducing Amy to both heroin and crack cocaine. Amy, herself, is quoted this way: “I write songs because I’m fucked up in the head.”
In the documentary, the relationship of Amy with her father, who is a bit too eager to springboard his own entrepreneurial efforts on his daughter’s success, comes through as a large part of her problem. The men in her life, especially Fielding-Civil, were the final nail(s) in her coffin. One lover, with whom she lived briefly in 2006, Alex Claire, sold his story to the tabloids (as Fielding-Civil did after they were divorced). Amy was betrayed by most in her life but sang, “But to walk away I have no capacity.” She also is heard saying, “I will continue to love you unconditionally until the day my heart fails and I fall down dead.”
Her final “Duets” partner, Tony Bennett, felt that Amy knew she was going to die young and also gave her huge props as a true Jazz singer. They are shown in the studio recording together, and it is obvious that the young girl is nervous at performing with one of her idols. Her record of hits (5 2008 Grammy Awards for “Back to Black” and many, many other British awards) marked her as one of the most influential songwriters of her generation.
A change of managers also appears to have been a change for the worse. Her original manager, Nick Shymensky, became a close friend, starting out with her when he was only 19 and she was 16. She left him to go with Metropolis Music promoter Raye Cosbert, who put her on the road when she was ill and over-booked her for performances when she would, sometimes intentionally, sabotage her performance.
My daughter saw her during one such appearance onstage at Lollapalooza in Chicago and said Amy was “a mess.” It was about the same time that she journeyed to Serbia to appear in front of 50,000 screaming fans but, when called to the stage, refused to sing. We learn in the documentary that she had been carried to a limousine while unconscious from one of her typical late nights of partying and put on a private plane, waking up to find herself on the way to perform in Serbia, when she did not want to go
When asked about the onerous nature of fame, she said, “If I really thought I ws famous, I’d go and top myself, because it’s scary. It’s very scary.” She also says, at one point near the documentary’s end, that she would happily trade her singing talent for the anonymity of being able to walk down the street without being hassled by fans.
After her Nan (Cynthia) died on May 5, 2006, when Amy was 23, things seemed to spiral downward for Amy. She had a seizure on 8/24/2007 in Camden and medical personnel said, “Her body can’t keep up with this. If she has another seizure, she’ll die.” Amy was told to swear off drugs, which she attempted to do.
HowAmy Winehouse died on July 23, 2011, at age 27. She died 17 years after another famous self-destructive singer,Kurt Cobain, died at the same age, causing some to dub this coincidence “the 27 Club.”
In the documentary “Amy,” directed by Asif Kapadia and produced by James Gay-Rees, Kapadia and Universal Music, home video footage and still photographs, together with interviews of those closest to the singer, combine to produce a compelling and oh-so-sad Oscar-worthy look behind the headlines. The film debuted at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and is truly tragic and touching, with interviews and film of nearly all the important people in the singer’s short life..
The singer’s own song lyrices (projected onscreen) and her own interview statements provide us with a murky picture of what may have led to her early death. She described herself as a “happy” child until the age of nine, when her parents separated. Her mother, Janis, was not a disciplinarian (“I wasn’t strong enough to say to her: Stop.”) and her father, Mitch, whom she idolized, was not around to say “no,” having run off with another woman.
Amy’s behavior at age nine when her parents separated seemed to be a classic case of “acting out.” Anything she thought would displease or shock her parents and other adults, she did, whether it was tattoos, piercings, her style of dress or her eventual fatal infatuation with drugs and alcohol.
She came by her love for jazz legitimately, as many of Winehouse’s maternal uncles were professional jazz musicians. Amy’s paternal grandmother, Cynthia, was a singer, who encouraged her to listen to the jazz greats. Amy credits her Nan Cynthia (her father’s mother) as being the strongest woman she ever knew. Her death in 2006, when Amy was 23, is shown as hitting Amy hard at a time when there were other problems in her life.
In one interview (Garry Mulholland of “The Observor”) Amy, when asked about fame, replied, “I don’t think I could handle it. I think I’d go mad.” Indeed, there were some suggestions that she might have been manic depressive and it is well-established that she suffered from bulimia. She was prescribed the anti-depressnat Seroxat after her father moved in with his girlfriend and Amy only saw Mitch Winehouse on weekends.
From that time forward, Amy was a “Wild Child” and often in various degrees of trouble. Although it is not mentioned in the documentary, there were several charges of assault leveled against her at different times, and she even admitted to sometimes hitting her husband, Blake Fielder-Civil.
The entrance of Blake Fielder-Civil into her life seems to have been one of the worst pairings of two troubled people in history. It almost echoes the Sid Vicious (“The Sex Pistols”) murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen. The murder, in this case, was much more insidious, as Fielder-Civil introduced her to the worst of drugs and played fast-and-loose with her emotions, eventually deciding, while imprisoned, to divorce his wife.
Fielder-Civil seemed to have really gotten his hooks into Winehouse, emotionally. Then, he broke up with her to return to a previous girlfriend. Her distress at his departure is seen and felt in her song “Back to Black.” “Now my destructive side has gorwn a mile wide,” Amy sang in one song of the period.
Fielder-Civil reveals to the camera that, at the age of 9, the same age Amy was when her father left, he had attempted suicide. He also admitted to introducing Amy to both heroin and crack cocaine. Amy, herself, is quoted this way: “I write songs because I’m fucked up in the head.”
In the documentary, the relationship of Amy with her father, who is a bit too eager to springboard his own entrepreneurial efforts on his daughter’s success, comes through as a large part of her problem. The men in her life, especially Fielding-Civil, were the final nail(s) in her coffin. One lover, with whom she lived briefly in 2006, Alex Claire, sold his story to the tabloids (as Fielding-Civil did after they were divorced). Amy was betrayed by most in her life but sang, “But to walk away I have no capacity.” She also is heard saying, “I will continue to love you unconditionally until the day my heart fails and I fall down dead.”
Her final “Duets” partner, Tony Bennett, felt that Amy knew she was going to die young and also gave her huge props as a true Jazz singer. They are shown in the studio recording together, and it is obvious that the young girl is nervous at performing with one of her idols. Her record of hits (5 2008 Grammy Awards for “Back to Black” and many, many other British awards) marked her as one of the most influential songwriters of her generation.
A change of managers also appears to have been a change for the worse. Her original manager, Nick Shymensky, became a close friend, starting out with her when he was only 19 and she was 16. She left him to go with Metropolis Music promoter Raye Cosbert, who put her on the road when she was ill and over-booked her for performances when she would, sometimes intentionally, sabotage her performance.
My daughter saw her during one such appearance onstage at Lollapalooza in Chicago and said Amy was “a mess.” It was about the same time that she journeyed to Serbia to appear in front of 50,000 screaming fans but, when called to the stage, refused to sing. We learn in the documentary that she had been carried to a limousine while unconscious from one of her typical late nights of partying and put on a private plane, waking up to find herself on the way to perform in Serbia, when she did not want to go
When asked about the onerous nature of fame, she said, “If I really thought I ws famous, I’d go and top myself, because it’s scary. It’s very scary.” She also says, at one point near the documentary’s end, that she would happily trade her singing talent for the anonymity of being able to walk down the street without being hassled by fans.
After her Nan (Cynthia) died on May 5, 2006, when Amy was 23, things seemed to spiral downward for Amy. She had a seizure on 8/24/2007 in Camden and medical personnel said, “Her body can’t keep up with this. If she has another seizure, she’ll die.” Amy was told to swear off drugs, which she attempted to do.
However, when she was “offAmy Winehouse died on July 23, 2011, at age 27. She died 17 years after another famous self-destructive singer,Kurt Cobain, died at the same age, causing some to dub this coincidence “the 27 Club.”
In the documentary “Amy,” directed by Asif Kapadia and produced by James Gay-Rees, Kapadia and Universal Music, home video footage and still photographs, together with interviews of those closest to the singer, combine to produce a compelling and oh-so-sad Oscar-worthy look behind the headlines. The film debuted at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and is truly tragic and touching, with interviews and film of nearly all the important people in the singer’s short life..
The singer’s own song lyrices (projected onscreen) and her own interview statements provide us with a murky picture of what may have led to her early death. She described herself as a “happy” child until the age of nine, when her parents separated. Her mother, Janis, was not a disciplinarian (“I wasn’t strong enough to say to her: Stop.”) and her father, Mitch, whom she idolized, was not around to say “no,” having run off with another woman.
Amy’s behavior at age nine when her parents separated seemed to be a classic case of “acting out.” Anything she thought would displease or shock her parents and other adults, she did, whether it was tattoos, piercings, her style of dress or her eventual fatal infatuation with drugs and alcohol.
She came by her love for jazz legitimately, as many of Winehouse’s maternal uncles were professional jazz musicians. Amy’s paternal grandmother, Cynthia, was a singer, who encouraged her to listen to the jazz greats. Amy credits her Nan Cynthia (her father’s mother) as being the strongest woman she ever knew. Her death in 2006, when Amy was 23, is shown as hitting Amy hard at a time when there were other problems in her life.
In one interview (Garry Mulholland of “The Observor”) Amy, when asked about fame, replied, “I don’t think I could handle it. I think I’d go mad.” Indeed, there were some suggestions that she might have been manic depressive and it is well-established that she suffered from bulimia. She was prescribed the anti-depressnat Seroxat after her father moved in with his girlfriend and Amy only saw Mitch Winehouse on weekends.
From that time forward, Amy was a “Wild Child” and often in various degrees of trouble. Although it is not mentioned in the documentary, there were several charges of assault leveled against her at different times, and she even admitted to sometimes hitting her husband, Blake Fielder-Civil.Amyhe entrance of Blake Fielder-Civil into her life seems to have been one of the worst pairings of two troubled people in history. It almost echoes the Sid Vicious (“The Sex Pistols”) murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen. The murder, in this case, was much more insidious, as Fielder-Civil introduced her to the worst of drugs and played fast-and-loose with her emotions, eventually deciding, while imprisoned, to divorce his wife.
Fielder-Civil seemed to have really gotten his hooks into Winehouse, emotionally. Then, he broke up with her to return to a previous girlfriend. Her distress at his departure is seen and felt in her song “Back to Black.” “Now my destructive side has gorwn a mile wide,” Amy sang in one song of the period.
Fielder-Civil reveals to the camera that, at the age of 9, the same age Amy was when her father left, he had attempted suicide. He also admitted to introducing Amy to both heroin and crack cocaine. Amy, herself, is quoted this way: “I write songs because I’m fucked up in the head.”
mentary, the relationship of Amy with her father, who is a bit too eager to springboard his own entrepreneurial efforts on his daughter’s success, comes through as a large part of her problem. The men in her life, especially Fielding-Civil, were the final nail(s) in her coffin. One lover, with whom she lived briefly in 2006, Alex Claire, sold his story to the tabloids (as Fielding-Civil did after they were divorced). Amy was betrayed by most in her life but sang, “But to walk away I have no capacity.” She also is heard saying, “I will continue to love you unconditionally until the day my heart fails and I fall down dead.”
Her final “Duets” partner, Tony Bennett, felt that Amy knew she was going to die young and also gave her huge props as a true Jazz singer. They are shown in the studio recording together, and it is obvious that the young girl is nervous at performing with one of her idols. Her record of hits (5 2008 Grammy Awards for “Back to Black” and many, many other British awards) marked her as one of the most influential songwriters of her generation.
A change of managers also appears to have been a change for the worse. Her original manager, Nick Shymensky, became a close fht
tps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbI–2ATHc4riend, starting out with her when he was only 19 and she was 16. She left him to go with Metropolis Music promoter Raye Cosbert, who put her on the road when she was ill and over-booked her for performances when she would, sometimes intentionally, sabotage her performance.
My daughter saw her during one such appearance onstage at Lollapalooza in Chicago and said Amy was “a mess.” It was about the same time that she journeyed to Serbia to appear in front of 50,000 screaming fans but, when called to the stage, refused to sing. We learn in the documentary that she had been carried to a limousine while unconscious from one of her typical late nights of partying and put on a private plane, waking up to find herself on the way to perform in Serbia, when she did not want to go
When asked about the onerous nature of fame, she said, “If I really thought I ws famous, I’d go and top myself, because it’s scary. It’s very scary.” She also says, at one point near the documentary’s end, that she would happily trade her singing talent for the anonymity of being able to walk down the street without being hassled by fans.
http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbI–2ATHc4 After her Nan (Cynthia) died on May 5, 2006, when Amy was 23, things seemed to spiral downward for Amy. She had a seizure on 8/24/2007 in Camden and medical personnel said, “Her body can’t keep up with this. If she has another seizure, she’ll die.” Amy was told to swear off drugs, which she attempted to do.
However, when she was “off” drugs, she drank heavily and, in fact, it was alcohol poisoning that ultimately killed her. She started doing crack cocaine in June of 2007 with Fielding-Civil. In November of 2007, Blake Fielder-Civil was arrested for drug use and assault charges and sentenced to time in H.M. Prison in Pentonville, London. This also caused the diva much emotional stress and she told her manager, “Love is in some ways killing me, Raye Raye.” (“Love is a losing game, and now the final flame.”)
Her bodyguard said, “This is someone who wants to disappear.” Amy began to unravel in public. She couldn’t escape fame. As her bodyguard said, “She needed someone to say no. She just needed support.”
“I cheated myself, like I knew I would, I told you—I’m trouble—you know that I’m no good.”
Ultimately, as Amy predicted, “My odds are stacked. I go to black.”
” drugs, she drank heavily and, in fact, it was alcohol poisoning that ultimately killed her. She started doing crack cocaine in June of 2007 with Fielding-Civil. In November of 2007, Blake Fielder-Civil was arrested for drug use and assault charges and sentenced to time in H.M. Prison in Pentonville, London. This also caused the diva much emotional stress and she told her manager, “Love is in some ways killing me, Raye Raye.” (“Love is a losing game, and now the final flame.”)
Her bodyguard said, “This is someone who wants to disappear.” Amy began to unravel in public. She couldn’t escape fame. As her bodyguard said, “She needed someone to say no. She just needed support.”
“I cheated myself, like I knew I would, I told you—I’m trouble—you know that I’m no good.”
Ultimately, as Amy predicted, “My odds are stacked. I go to black.” ever, when she was “off” drugs, she drank heavily and, in fact, it was alcohol poisoning that ultimately killed her. She started doing crack cocaine in June of 2007 with Fielding-Civil. In November of 2007, Blake Fielder-Civil was arrested for drug use and assault charges and sentenced to time in H.M. Prison in Pentonville, London. This also caused the diva much emotional stress and she told her manager, “Love is in some ways killing me, Raye Raye.” (“Love is a losing game, and now the final flame.”)
Her bodyguard said, “This is someone who wants to disappear.” Amy began to unravel in public. She couldn’t escape fame. As her bodyguard said, “She needed someone to say no. She just needed support.”
“I cheated myself, like I knew I would, I told you—I’m trouble—you know that I’m no good.”
Ultimately, as Amy predicted, “My odds are stacked. I go to black.”
However, when she was “off” drugs, she drank heavily and, in fact, it was alcohol poisoning that ultimately killed her. She started doing crack cocaine in June of 2007 with Fielding-Civil. In November of 2007, Blake Fielder-Civil was arrested for drug use and assault charges and sentenced to time in H.M. Prison in Pentonville, London. This also caused the diva much emotional stress and she told her manager, “Love is in some ways killing me, Raye Raye.” (“Love is a losing game, and now the final flame.”)
Her bodyguard said, “This is someone who wants to disappear.” Amy began to unravel in public. She couldn’t escape fame. As her bodyguard said, “She needed someone to say no. She just needed support.”
“I cheated myself, like I knew I would, I told you—I’m trouble—you know that I’m no good.”
Ultimately, as Amy predicted, “My odds are stacked. I go to black.”
However, when she was “off” drugs, she drank heavily and, in fact, it was alcohol poisoning that ultimately killed her. She started doing crack cocaine in June of 2007 with Fielding-Civil. In November of 2007, Blake Fielder-Civil was arrested for drug use and assault charges and sentenced to time in H.M. Prison in Pentonville, London. This also caused the diva much emotional stress and she told her manager, “Love is in some ways killing me, Raye Raye.” (“Love is a losing game, and now the final flame.”)
Her bodyguard said, “This is someone who wants to disappear.” Amy began to unravel in public. She couldn’t escape fame. As her bodyguard said, “She needed someone to say no. She just needed support.”
“I cheated myself, like I knew I would, I told you—I’m trouble—you know that I’m no good.”
Ultimately, as Amy predicted, “My odds are stacked. I go to black.” er, when she was “off” drugs, she drank heavily and, in fact, it was alcohol poisoning that ultimately killed her. She started doing crack cocaine in June of 2007 with Fielding-Civil. In November of 2007, Blake Fielder-Civil was arrested for drug use and assault charges and sentenced to time in H.M. Prison in Pentonville, London. This also caused the diva much emotional stress and she told her manager, “Love is in some ways killing me, Raye Raye.” (“Love is a losing game, and now the final flame.”)
Her bodyguard said, “This is someone who wants to disappear.” Amy began to unravel in public. She couldn’t escape fame. As her bodyguard said, “She needed someone to say no. She just needed support.”
“I cheated myself, like I knew I would, I told you—I’m trouble—you know that I’m no good.”
Ultimately, as Amy predicted, “My odds are stacked. I go to black.”
Sept. 21, 2015 Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, who gave us “An Inconvenient Truth” about climate change and “Waiting for Superman” (about our public schools) appeared at the Chicago AMC Theater on Monday, September 21st, to speak about his latest documentary on Malala Yousafzai, the teen-aged winner of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize.
Then fifteen years old, Malala was singled out by the Taliban in Pakistan, along with her father, for advocating for the education of girls in the country and the world. The Taliban shooter entered a bus on which Malala and her fellow classmates were riding on October 9th, 2012, called her out by name, and shot her in the left side of her forehead. The attack sparked an outcry from supporters around the world and she was air lifted to Birmingham, England, at the expense of the Pakistani government, where she underwent months in the hospital, recuperating from her injuries.
A crucial nerve that had been cut by the bullet’s trajectory was surgically restored by surgeons at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, re-establishing 90% function (surgeons had hoped for 80%) and a cochlear implant in her left ear attempted unsuccessfully to save Malala’s hearing in her left ear.
Since fleeing Pakistan, the entire Yousafzai family has been unable to return to Pakistan’s Swat Valley and has remained in Birmingham, England where her father Zia and her two brothers and her mother also struggle to assimilate to this new land. The Malala Fund, which has sprung up around her, invests in, advocates for and amplifies the voices of adolescent girls globally, urging education as a way to change the world. As Malala put it: “One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world.”
Although, originally, Malala was speaking to the world via the BBC, undercover, with a pseudonym (Gul Makal), she eventually stepped from the shadows to speak publicly, saying, “There’s a moment when you have to choose whether to be silent or to stand up.”
The film is part standard documentary, part animated movie, as filmmaker Guggenheim explains that the original Malala was a warrior female not unlike Joan of Arc who led her male troops to victory in a battle that took place in 1880. She was given her first name Malala (meaning “grief-stricken”) after Malalai of Maiwand, a famous Pashtun poetess and warrior woman from southern Afghanistan.
Filmmake Guggenheim used the story of the original Malala as a launching point and a touchstone for his documentary that both traces Malala’s past, documents her present, and speculates on her future. It is quite clear from the film that Malala’s activist outspoken ways come from grooming by her father, Zia, also an outspoken activist for education who owned and ran a string of schools in his native land (and still wishes he did.)
Following the showing of the film, these questions were asked of filmmaker Guggenheim:
Q1) “What made you want to do this film?”
A1) “Maybe it’s because I have 2 daughters of my own, but I received a phone call asking me if I’d consider doing this documentary and it started there. Education is liberation, your ladder up. I hope that message resonates as much with the citizens of Chicago as it does with the citizens of Pakistan.”
Q2) “Does Malala have any anger towards those who shot her?”
A2) “Sometimes you meet people who have a public life and they are different privately. One of the things I find extraordinary is that Malala is the same. She expresses, in the film, that she is not angry about the shooting. She said, ‘It was not a person who shot me; it was an ideology. They were not about faith. They were about power.’ In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, she worried about the mothers of the boys who shot her. Malala’s family is so full of joy and they live their lives without bitterness.”
Q3) “Tell us about the beginning of this remarkable film?”
A3) “Walter Parks and Laurie Mcdonald got the rights to Malala’s story. They called me. I spent 3 or 4 days reading about the story and realized it had many more dimensions. It was about her relationship with her father, which is special. She was actually named after a girl who spoke out (Malala) and was killed for speaking out.
Q4) “Have you spent much time touring with Malala for the film?”
A4) “She Skyped in. She doesn’t like missing school (unlike my children). When she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, she went back to her class to finish her Physics lesson. At Telluride, her family told me that the act of making the movie was a form of therapy. I met them all when she was 5 or 6 months into recovery. She really feels she’s a spokesman for the 66 million girls who are being denied an education.”
Q5) “What sort of misinformation about her exists?”
A5) “Gossip. People in Pakistan refer to it as gossip. A very strong part of the population in Pakistan loves her and wants her to come back home. However, the Taliban has still vowed to kill her. Some of the hatred is backlash against the West.”
Q6) “How did you come up with the idea of the use of animation and illustrations for parts of the documentary?”
A6) “The animation came from problems portraying the Battle of Maiwand, which took place in 1880. Malala is a national folk hero of Afghanistan who rallied local Pashtun fighters against the British troops at the 1880 Battle of Maiwand. She fought alongside Ayub Khan and was responsible for the Afghan victory at the Battle of Maiwand on 27 July 1880, during the Second Anglo-Afghan War. She is also known as “The Afghan Jeanne D’Arc.” We called up Abu Dhabi (which helped finance the film) and asked for more money to animate the movie. The imagery is often scary, repetitive and dark. I wanted to capture that. It was hand-drawn in my office using computers and is like a storybook.”
Q7) “Were there any restrictions placed on you as the filmmaker as to how you could portray Malala?”
A7) “No, but I always show the films I make to people like Al Gore for ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’ There were a few notes given us about how Islam is portrayed. They asked for some clarification in the subtitles. They wanted it to be presented better and their suggestions were improvements.”
Q8) “What is Malala’s favorite subject in school? And will she be going on to college?”
A8) “Physics, which they call Maths. She is going to college and has done very well on her exams. Originally, Malala wanted to be a doctor, but her father’s influence has convinced her that she should become a politician.”
Q9) “How did she keep from being scarred by the shooting?”
A9) “Malala has a big scar running along her neck. Her smile is not 100% returned to normal. Her mother refers to her birthdays as being born again and recently told her Happy Third Birthday. Malala feels a tremendous amount of responsibility for young adolescent girls everywhere and has visited Kenya, Nigeria and, on her 18th birthday, wanted to go to the refugee camps where the Syrian refugees are pouring across the borders into various European countries.”
Q10) “How has film managed to change the national and international conversation?”
A10) “Films that move people can move people to action. It is a very broad message. Malala is speaking at the United Nations next week about re-education for girls. African villages where girls are educated are different and do better in every way, including economically. It starts with theaters like this where people come together, hear an important story, and go home and talk about it. The film will open in 190 countries through Fox/Searchlight, ultimately.”
Q11) (From a woman wearing a burkha): “Do you think any part of your identity caused a challenge to making the documentary?”
A11) “I understand what you are saying. Would she react differently to someone like you? Instead, she got me: a half Episcopalian, half Jewish filmmaker with long hair. This is a true anecdote: when we had been working a while, Malala’s father came to me, touched my hair, and asked if it was real or not. (laughter) I think they thought I was some sort of alien, with my shoulder-length locks. Malala’s situation is interesting because, in our society, everyone is telling their own story all the time on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. They needed help to tell this story. When I walked in, they wanted to tell their story. The first three hours alone with just Malala and a microphone she told her story. Part of my job is to pull people out. I asked her about her suffering, but she did not give a complete answer in the film.”
Q12) “Is there any one thing that occurred during filming that made you change your opinions?”
A12) “I sat around their kitchen table and it was just like mine, but there was so much joy. They are a tight-knit family. We give lip service in our culture to the concept that ‘girls are equal.’ We say it, but her father acted on it, even putting Malala on the chart of the family tree, as we saw in the film. It’s not just saying that people are equal; it’s believing it and acting on it.”
Q13) “How did a young schoolgirl who started blogging anonymously at eleven and was shot at fifteen find the strength to do what she has done?”
A13) “Malala is a tough and focused person. She gets her sense of mission and her passion from her father. She gets her strength from her mother. She sat with Goodluck Jonathan and told him he must do more to get back the girls kidnapped by Boko Harum. She sat with President Obama and quizzed him about drone strikes in her country. Malala will go to college (an earlier question) and her presence has sparked a nationwide and worldwide movement at Malala.org. The Malala Fund is advocating for girls around the world, a nonprofit devoted to working to empower adolescent girls globally through gaining for them a quality secondary education.”
Amy Winehouse died on July 23, 2011, at age 27. She died 17 years after another famous self-destructive lead singer, Kurt Cobain, killed himself, causing some to dub this coincidence “the 27 Club.”
In a new documentary, “Amy” that premiered in England on July 3rd and in the United States on July 10th, directed by Asif Kapadia and produced by James Gay-Rees and Universal Music, we learn “the story behind the music” from home video footage and interviews with those who knew Amy best—including Amy, herself. It is a compelling and oh-so-sad look at one of–if not THE—greatest songwriter of her generation. The film debuted at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.
The singer’s own song lyrics, projected onscreen, and her own interview statements, provide us with a murky picture of what led to her premature death. She described herself as a happy child until the age of 9, when her parents separated (her father, Mitch, moved in with his girlfriend). Amy continued to live with her mother, Janis, and to visit her father and his girlfriend on weekends, but Janis, by her own admission, was not a disciplinarian. (“I wasn’t strong enough to say to her: Stop!”) Amy’s father, Mitch, whom she idolized, was not around to say “no” and her behavior from age 9 on seems to be a classic case of “acting out.” Anything she thought would displease or shock her parents or other adults, she did—whether it was tattoos, piercings, her hair, her style of dress, her make-up, her promiscuity, or her eventual fatal infatuation with drugs and alcohol.
Amy came by her love for jazz legitimately, as many of Winehouse’s maternal uncles were professional jazz musicians and she was encouraged to listen to the greats. Amy’s paternal grandmother, Cynthia, was a singer, and Amy calls her “the strongest woman I ever knew.” Her Nan’s death in 2006, when Amy was 23, hit Amy hard, at a time when other problems were rapidly building in her complicated life.
In one interview by Garry Mulholland of “The Observor” Amy, when asked about fame, replies, “I don’t think I could handle it. I think I’d go mad.” Indeed, there were suggestions that she may have been manic depressive and she suffered from bulimia. She was prescribed the anti-depressant Seroxat after her father left home, when quite young.
From the time Mitch left, Amy was a “Wild Child” and in various sorts of trouble. Although it is not mentioned in the documentary, there were several charges of assault leveled against her. Even Amy admitted to sometimes hitting husband Blake Fielder-Civil, and one of her songs suggests that “You should be stronger than the woman.”
The entrance of Blake Fielder-Civil into her life seems to have been one of the worst pairings of two troubled people in history. It echoes the Sid Vicious (the Sex Pistols) murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen. The murder, in this case, was much more insidious, as Fielder-Civil introduced Amy to the worst of the drugs she experimented with and played fast-and-loose with her heart, breaking up with her to return to a former girlfriend ( inspiring “Back to Black”) and deciding, while in prison on drug and assault charges, to divorce her. Amy was betrayed by almost ever significant male figure in her life in one way or another.
After Fielder-Civil left her, briefly, to return to his previous girlfriend, Amy wrote, “Now my destructive side has grown a mile wide.” Fielder-Civil reveals to the camera that, at the age of 9, [the same age as Amy when her father deserted her], he had attempted suicide. Amy is quoted repeatedly saying, “I write songs because I’m fucked up in the head.”
Amy’s father Mitch seems a bit too eager to profit from his daughter’s popularityand to springboard his own entrepreneurial efforts, sponging off her fame and fortune. The film makes a point of confirming that her father DID say she didn’t need to go to rehab, and the narrator obviously feels it was one of Amy’s last chances to turn her life around.
Amy’s final “Duets” partner, Tony Bennett, is interviewed and says that Amy sensed that she was going to die young; he also gave her huge props as a true Jazz singer. They are shown in the recording studio working together. It is obvious that Amy is nervous at performing with one of her idols. Her record of 5 2008 Grammy Awards for “Back to Black” and many other British music awards cements her influence as one of the most important songwriters of her generation. (Amy had to perform via video; she was not allowed to leave the country and enter the U.S. because of drug use charges.)
A change of managers also appears to have been a change for the worse. Her original manager, Nick Shymensky, became a close friend, starting with her when he was only 19 and she was 16. Amy left him to go with Metropolis Music promoter Raye Cosbert, who put her on the road when she was ill and overbooked her for performances when Amy would, sometimes intentionally, sabotage her performance, as when she was forced to travel to Serbia to sing. It is related in the documentary that Amy was physically carried to a limo, unconscious from a night of hard partying, and put on a private plane to take her to the concert, where she subsequently refused to sing when called to the stage. [My daughter saw her during a Lollapalooza performance during this period and said she was “a mess.”] On the bright side, she had a great working relationship with record producer Salaam Remi, with whom she shared the Grammy for “Back to Black.”
When asked about the onerous nature of fame, [for which she was ill-prepared], Amy said, “If I really thought I was famous, I’d go and top myself, because it’s scary. It’s very scary.” She also says, at one point near the end of the film that she would happily trade her singing talent for the anonymity of being able to walk down the street without being hassled by fans.
After Amy’s Grandmother Cynthia (Nan) died on May 5, 2006, when Amy was 22, things seemed to spiral downward for the singer. She had a seizure on August 24, 2007 in Camden and medical personnel said, “Her body can’t keep up with this. If she has another seizure, she’ll die.” Amy was told to swear off drugs, which she attempted to do and, apparently, had done at the time of her death. Her lung capacity was at only 70% (Mitch told the press she had signs of early emphysema) and her heartbeat was irregular.
However, when Amy was “off” drugs, she substituted abuse of alcohol,drinking heavily. In fact, it was alcohol poisoning that ultimately killed her, combined with the effects of years of drug abuse and bulimia. The film states that the level of alcohol in her system at the time of her death was “45 times the drunk driving limits,” although another source listed it as 416 mg. per 100 ml (0.416%), which is 5 times the legal drunk driving limit.
Her bodyguard at the time said, “This is someone who wants to disappear.” Amy began to unravel in public. She couldn’t escape her fame. As her bodyguard put it, “She needed someone to say no. She just needed support.”
“I cheated myself, like I knew I would. I told you—I’m trouble—you know that I’m no good.” With two of her romantic interests (Alex Claire and her former husband Blake Fielder-Civil) having sold their stories to British tabloids, the feeling is that everyone, including dear old dad, wanted to ride the gravy train as long as possible. This is a must-see documentary, if only for the wonderful music (original score other than Amy’s songs provided by Antonio Pinto). It is useful as a cautionary tale, if nothing else, and I can’t believe it won’t garner Oscar nods, come spring.
Ultimately, as Amy predicted in song, “My odds are stacked. I go to black.”
“San Andreas,” the film about San Francisco and a lot of the rest of California falling apart during a 9.6 “largest-in-recorded-history” earthquake, makes you want to move away from the Bay area if you live there. [Full disclosure: I once went through a small earthquake while a student at Berkeley. It was a weird feeling to find that the ground under your feet was moving. I remember bracing myself in a doorway until the shaking of the very earth beneath my feet stopped.]
“San Andreas” is a film in the grand tradition of such disaster films as “Earthquake” and “Towering Inferno.” I once took a busload of students to the Cinema Showcase in Milan to see both of those on a double bill; it was dubbed the “Shake & Bake Special.”
I also just saw “Mad Max: Fury Road” (Charlize Theron, Tom Hardy) and I can reliably report that each film reduces the script to almost no lines of dialogue while non-stop action (some of it implausible) is run by the audience. It’s almost as though Hollywood believes that the attention span of the average theater-goer these days is that of the average gnat and has decided to cater to an audience (usually younger) that can barely concentrate on anything for more than 5 minutes. (And certainly not without getting out their cell phones to text something to someone.)
“Mad Max” may get the edge for having the craziest set design, but the C.G. (computer graphics) team that has simulated a record-shattering earthquake followed by a “Perfect Storm” like tsunami, gets points for visually stunning us with those images. I wrote down some of the names of the special effects whizzes who helped make this earthquake movie and, after I had listed hy drau lx, Method Studios, CineSite, Atomic Fiction, Soho VFX, and Image Engine, I was surprised to learn that most of the film was shot in Australia. (Abbey Road studios is also given credit for the score and British Columbia gets a shout-out.)
For acting, I’d have to give the nod to “San Andreas'” crew, as the rationale for anything that happened in “Mad Max: Fury Road” was lost in the incomprehensibly thick accents of the first 30 minutes and the total craziness of the entire concept. At least in “San Andreas” we understand that, like Brad Pitt in “World War Z,” The Rock wants, most of all, to save his family from a natural disaster.
To that end, we learn that The Rock knows how to hot-wire a car, drive a mean speedboat, pilot both a helicopter and a regular airplane, parachute from a plane he is abandoning in the air, swim quite capably when required, and can also bring people back from the dead. I was going to say “Leap tall buildings in a single bound” but that’s a different hero.
When my husband and I were in Las Vegas recently, listening to a time share presentation, the attractive young girl who led us through the Hilton shared with us the information that her husband is “The Rock’s” stunt double (and she did some stunt work in film, as well). If this is true, that man certainly got a workout in “San Andreas,” which is loaded with stunts and CG effects.
Dr. Lawrence Graver, the scientist at California Institute of Technology who has been warning about a major earthquake event for years, is played by the always-convincing Paul Giametti. Carla Giugino (“Night at the Museum”) who plays the Rock’s about-to-be ex-wife is fine in her part. The twenty-ish daughter, played by Alexandra Daddario, is good—although she looks NOTHING like either one of the actors playing her parents. The annoying British brothers could have been crushed under a car in the parking garage who help the damsel in constant distress could have been crushed in the parking garage with no noticeable loss to the movie—especially the actor playing Ben Taylor (Hugo Johnstone-Burt), British accent and all. His younger brother, Ollie (Art Parkinson), is no less annoying, but the family dynamic that drives Dwayne Johnson’s heroic rescue attempts will keep you rooting for the home team (pun intended).
I would have cast Ioan Gruffudd (who plays mogul Daniel Riddick) as the love interest for the well-stacked Alexandra, but he is relegated to looking good (great hair!) in his private plane and his huge buildings (“The Gate”), right up until he turns into a cowardly cad. (I did wonder: how did the character played by Carla Gugino ever meet a millionaire mogul like Daniel Riddick? Young unmarried girls want to know!) At first, I honestly thought that Daniel Riddick was going for help for the hapless Alexandra. Later, he is portrayed as a cad, over and over, to the point of outright laughter, almost. To say he is not missed when his character arc ends is putting it mildly.
Two other actresses in the cast deserve mention.Archie Punjabi, who has capably played the investigator character Kalinda on “The Good Wife” until recently, turns up as a TV newswoman named Serena. The role of Daniel Riddick’s ex-wife Susan is played by singer/actress Kylie Minogue, who takes the wrong staircase in her attempts to escape the catastrophe when it strikes.
This New Line/Village Roadshow/Ratpac-Dune Entertainment offering was as entertaining as “Mad Max: Fury Road,” although you have to give a nod to the “real” stunts that were pulled off in the latter. Even though I took Earth Science in college and learned about upthrusting and down faulting, I have no idea if the statistics and historic facts cited in the movie are true or false. Is it true that the worst earthquake in history was a 9.5 in Valdiva off the coast of Chile that lasted for eleven minutes? Is there even a place called “Valdiva”? Did the earthquake in Anchorage, Alaska in 1964 really measure 9.1 on the Richter Scale? Did a tsunami really level Hilo, Hawaii, 8,000 miles away from a big earthquake? Was that big previous earthquake really the equivalent of 10 million atom bombs? Is Iran capable of leashing this earthquake power?
I kept remembering Naomi Watts in her 2012 tsunami movie “The Impossible,” for which she earned an Academy Award nomination. I remembered how her exposure to the water in the Thailand tsunami made her cuts and scrapes horribly infected, whereas Ben Taylor (Hugo Johnstone-Burt) has a large piece of glass stuck in his upper thigh (which would probably have severed the femoral artery and killed him) but walks around and swims around as though it is merely a twisted ankle with no noticeable long-term problems.
I know none of these answers, but would refer you to Carlton Cuse, the unknown director who also co-wrote the script.
Meanwhile, here are a couple of observations: the opening sequence is a testimony as to why young people should not text and drive. The young girl in the car is listening to Taylor Swift when she texts and crashes. It’s an object lesson. (“Let that be a lesson to you!”)
Lines that I enjoyed: When the question is asked “Who should we call?” as the crack earthquake-tracking team at Cal Tech is realizing the severity and seriousness of the situation, my spouse leaned over and said, “Ghostbusters!”
When “The Rock” and his lady land in whatever the name of the baseball park is in San Francisco (I’m so old that it was Candlestick, when I attended a game at that San Francisco ballpark in 1965), they parachute in, land on the playing field, and The Rock says, “It’s been a while since I got you to second base.”
I’d say that if you are so hyped up on video game action that you are one silly millimeter away from being diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (with hyperactivity), you will enjoy both “San Andreas” AND “Mad Max: Fury Road” but I have to warn you that I nearly went deaf in Chicago from the volume of the soundtrack at the Icon on Roosevelt Road. I’ve also been warned NOT to bother with 3D
Two new movies opened this weekend, “Aloha” and “San Andreas.” Naturally, I had to take them both in immediately. The fact that someone named Roger Moore (Tribune News Service) had seriously trashed the new Cameron Crowe flick in the local paper did not deter me after I saw the trailer (which I have posted below.) It should not deter you, either, if you are a Bradley Cooper fan.
Let me start out by saying I won’t be paying much attention to Roger Moore’s reviews, in the future, just as I did not pay much attention to Siskel’s, but found myself more in tune with Ebert’s. Moore even ended his scathing critical piece by saying “This feels like goodbye, at least to his major studio film career.” [He was referencing Cameron Crowe, the writer/director, who helmed such classics as “Say Anything,” “Jerry Maguire,” and “Almost Famous.”]
Yes, Crowe had as many misses as hits. “We Bought A Zoo” (Matt Damon), “Vanilla Sky” (Tom Cruise), and “Elizabethtown” were not good. That I do acknowledge. I also agree that the hymn to the Hawaiian culture embedded in the film was a bit much when you’re watching the film in the Heartland.(Davenport, IA).
However, after we agree on the annoying nature of the constant pushing of the myths and legends of old Hawaii (Crowe has settled there) and the reverential playing of old Hawaiian songs by old Hawaiians, you have to look at the cast: Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams, Bill Murray, Alec Baldwin, John Krasinski (“The Office”), Danny McBride and the young boy from “St. Vincent,” Jaeden Lieberher—well, with a cast like that and an Oscar-nominated writer-director who brought us some great films (and some not-so-great films), I’m in. I also watched the director of “St. Vincent” explain that Murray ended up in the movie because he bonded so thoroughly with young Jaeden, his co-star, that Jaeden talked him into taking a part in the film so they could do fun things in Hawaii. (In that respect, I have to give Roger Moore his due when he writes: “The film buff Hawiian resident Crowe has, in essence, made his ‘Donovan’s Reef,’ a movie John Ford and John Wayne did to celebrate Ford’s Word War II service in the Pacific, and to get a studio to pay for long tropical vacations for the cast and crew.” On that last point, Moore shoots and scores—at least in Murray’s case.
Contrary to Moore’s complaints, the movie has some truly amusing and romantic moments. Yes, there is some hamming it up (Alec Baldwin, Emma Stone and Bill Murray, I’m looking at you) but it also has an attractive, talented, likable cast that can turn ham into filet mignon if needs be.
Bradley Cooper plays a one-time Air Force space program officer, who was wounded in Afghanistan, semi-disgraced there (he took $100,000), and has bailed on the military to go to work for one of the new breed of space entrepreneurs (Bill Murray) who are supposed to be able to launch rockets as well as NASA did in its hey-day. The romance comes in the form of an old girlfriend (Rachel McAdams from “The Notebook”) who Cooper has not seen for 13 years, and a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed young eager beaver who is described as one of Hillary Clinton’s “Stars”, Emma Stone as Captain Ng. Captain Ng continues to tell us that she is part Hawaiian, which does not show in her lineage at all, but nevermind about that. Her vast knowledge of Hawaiian myths, legends and customs, coupled with her natural charm, are going to make her an invaluable asset to Bradley Cooper’s character, Brian Gilchrist, who has been sent to Hawaii to do a “gate-blessing,” which is a little like asking Beyonce to play the local Holiday Inn. We do get the impression, as the plot moves us along, that war hero Gilchrist (Cooper) also has a previous friendly relationship with the President of the Sovereign Nation of Hawaii, Dennis Bumpy Kanahele, who plays himself.
Yes, we know that the eager beaver (Emma Stone) is, at some point, probably going to end up as Cooper’s love interest, and, yes, it does seem a bit abrupt when she does. More critically, Emma Stone is almost unbearably eager and hard-to-take in her interpretation of Captain Ng. We just know that when she lets her hair down and quits wearing that unattractive bun, Cooper is going to find her irresistible, but we are still curious about whether the lure of his old love (Rachel McAdams) is going to win out. The two have a lot of shared history, some of it not-so-romantic, and all of it contributing to problems in her current marriage (with 2 kids) to “Woody” (John Krasinksi).
I enjoyed Krasinski’s portrayal of a typical Clint Eastwood male who doesn’t speak to his wife, and the children (a teen-aged daughter and the young son who played Bill Murray’s next-door neighbor in “St. Vincent”) were well-cast. Alec Baldwin may have gone a tad nuclear in his rants, but Danny McBride (as “Fingers”) is good and there were some truly funny lines (one of them seen in the clip below).
No, it’s not “Say Anything” or “Almost Famous,” and, yes, Cameron Crowe is a bit reverential about his adopted home (Hawaii), but the movie was enjoyable and entertaining and proves why Bradley Cooper was nominated for an Oscar for “American Sniper.”
And now I will speak of “San Andreas” after I sign off on this rebuttal piece. Don’t pay that much attention to Roger Moore’s total trashing of the entire film. It’s still better than sitting through another Super Hero knock-off.
Rahm Emanuel, locked in an unexpectedly close race for Mayor of Chicago, might want to take in a showing of Neill Blomkamp’s new film “Chappie,” which suggests that robots could effectively police a crime-riddled city. Chicago—indeed, all of Illinois—is broke. We have “smash and grab” gangs pulling robberies on Michigan Avenue’s Miracle Mile. The South Loop is not safe after 7 p.m.— ( a woman waiting for the red line at 1:15 p.m. got mugged a couple days ago.) Despite Emanuel’s front-page “Time” spread some months ago (“Chicago Bull”), there seems to be no way to get the gangs—or, for that matter, the recalcitrant teachers—under control. So check out the idea of robot cops, Rahm!
We are told in the first few moments of the film that the robotic police officers (known as “Scouts”) have prevented 300 murders or violent incidents in Johannesburg (South Africa) on a daily basis. Given the fact that thugs have been stealing women’s pocketbooks in broad daylight just one street over from Michigan Avenue, as the ladies wait for their morning bus ride to work, a robotic policeman doesn’t sound like such a bad idea. And say what you will about the fact that robots as cops aren’t exactly a revolutionary concept, the robots in “Chappie” are truly amazing, special effects-wise.
Back in 2004, Blomkamp made a 1.5 minute film called “Tetra Vaal” that posited a robotic police force for 3rd world countries. In his second film, “Elysium,” such a robotic police force existed. The thuggish police robots in “Elysium” were trying to keep all the Worker Bees on Earth while the wealthy folk, led by Jodie Foster, lived on a completely different plane above them. It was, if you will, a story about the “haves” and the “have nots” The dwellers on Earth were like Occupiers, and the rich folk were up above swimming in their pools and curing all their diseases with superior medical technology.
Reviewers were not kind to Matt Damon’s star turn in “Elysium,” but almost everyone loved Blomkamp’s first film, “District 9,” in which Sharlto Copley (the voice of Chappie) slowly turned into a horrible creature and we all cringed as it occurred. Me? I liked both movies, and I liked this one, too. Blomkamp’s films show me a part of the planet I will probably never get to visit, and he grapples with real-life Big Issues without being preachy. He has a keen eye for the sets and special effects, and the music by Hans Zimmer was also good. Add it all up, complete with some tear-jerker moments rooting for the childlike robot being bullied by the bad guys, and he had me at “I am Chappie.”
I found the special effects of this film to be amazing, with Image Engine of Canada and New Zealand’s Oscar-winning Wetta Workshop collaborating. The motion capture performance is much superior to normal CG work; Blomkamp spent 6 months working with F/X technicians to create 3-D models that could mimic human mobility down to our real-life double-jointed knees.
The echoes of bigger themes, [much like “Elysium’s” attempt to deal with class warfare], in this case is voiced by the child-like robot who says, to Dev Patel playing the programmer (Deon Wilson) who built him [and has identified himself as the robot’s Maker], “My Maker wouldn’t make me just to die. Why did you just make me so I could die? I don’t want to die.” I could certainly relate to that, and so could Logan in “Logan’s Run,” now celebrating close to its 40th year on film.
Chappie was damaged while on line as Robot 22 and was scheduled to be scrapped, since his battery cannot be replaced, because it is now fused within his metal frame. Deon takes him out of the factory to work on creating a superior robot that can actually think and feel—a robot with human consciousness.
Of course, there is always a “bad guy” who views anything new and different as a threat and wants to destroy it without any effort to get to understand it. In this case, that individual is Hugh Jackman as Vincent Moore. Jackman’s character is not only jealous of the success of Dev Patel’s (Deon Wilson) scouts, he a bullying jerk. Half the time, his Aussie accent and expressions were as foreign as the thick accents of the South African thugs. Who has heard the expression, “You made me as cross as a frog in a sock?” Another Jackman line: “The whole thing is going tits up” I had heard—but not recently. I think you can see that, between the South African accents and setting and Jackman’s odd expressions, explanations are needed for a mere Midwesterner. And who “shadows” someone while driving a bright red truck?
It was easy to understand why Jackman is jealous that his large, ungainly, awkward prototype “Moose” (think Transformers) is not as big a success with the publicly traded weapons industry. When police administrators come for a demonstration, they actually say, “We don’t want this. It’s expensive, big and ugly.” Plus, Vincent’s funding keeps getting cut by Corporate CEO Sigourney Weaver as Michelle Bradley (who has a bit part about as wasted as her other sci fi venture as the Director in “The Cabin in the Woods.”)But Moose is Vincent Moore’s baby, so of course he is going to do everything in his power to undermine Deon Wilson’s (Dev Patel’s) work, even if it means bring total chaos to the city and destroying most of the fleet of hundreds of robot policemen.
The sub-plot and actors were fine by me, Boss, but some reviewers are crying crocodile tears about the casting of non-actors Yolandi Vi$$er and Ninja (real names: Anri du Tort and Watkin Tudor Jones) as “Mommy” and “Daddy” to Chappie. They are career criminals who badly need Chappie to help them earn $20 million in just one week, which has to do with a drug deal gone wrong and their need to repay the Boss Man, Hippo
.In real life, Yolandi and Ninja are vocalists in Die Antwood, a South African rap-rave group singing Zef, and appeared at Coachella.
The 30-year-old blonde Yolandi raps about working class white South Africans, (especially those in Cape Town), and has a child with her former partner, Ninja. In the film, the usually idle Yolandi has the Big Bright Idea of kidnapping Dev Patel, Chappie’s programmer, and getting him to work with them in turning Chappie into “the illest gangster on the block” but the criminals initially think “You gave me a retarded robot.” In fact, “Daddy” takes poor Chappie out into the world before he has become acclimated to it. Nor does Chappie have the worldly experience to understand what is happening or to protect himself. It Is a bit like throwing your small child into ten feet of water and urging him to “sink or swim.” Bad things happen.
In those heart-tugging scenes, I was reminded of Frankenstein’s Monster, who was mercilessly hunted by the townsfolk, or any other film about intelligent life visiting earth (“The Day the Earth Stood Still”) where there is always someone who wants to destroy what they cannot initially understand. Chappie survives and manages to find his way back to “Mommy” and the dilapidated abandoned factory where Yolandi apparently sits around all day smoking (she is seldom shown doing anything but waiting there, alone, for the others to return.)
Another philosophical discussion is about “being different.” It is raised by Chappie’s love of a book about a black sheep. There is also the discussion of life after death, which is discussed as “going to the next place.” You just know that some of Johnny Depp’s “Transcendence” mumbo-jumbo is going to work its way into the plot sooner or later—which is too bad, given how bad that film turned out to be.
In the meantime, however, you have a lot of shoot-‘em-out scenes and some interesting moralizing about whether it is right to engage in criminal behavior. (Chappie only does so when he is tricked into it by “Daddy.” I did begin to wonder if Daddy was right when he said that he had been given a retarded robot, because Chappie doesn’t seem to catch on very quickly to the basic dishonesty of the lead criminal). This group convinced me they could easily be underworld figures dealing drugs, among other crimes, and Yolandi has an interesting blonde, futuristic look, aided by a really unusual haircut.
I often wondered how Deon Wilson ( Dev Patel) could drop out of work so quickly, jump into company-owned vans, and rush off to work on his robot creation. It never worked that way for me in my jobs. Or how he could enter restricted areas after hours at the factory whenever he wished with little or no trouble. I finally decided that this weapons facility had the worst security in the world.
I almost needed sub-titles to be able to understand what Brandon Auret as ‘Hippo,” the rival head of another gang, was saying. It also seemed that the Moose, when that machine is finally pressed into service to keep the peace, was the chief weapon of “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.” Old Hippo the mob boss had way more lives than the 9 lives of most cats, and the heroic self-sacrificing of “Daddy” at a crucial moment late in the film seemed out of character for him, given what a sleazeball he was before that.
But, on the way to the finale of this 2-hour movie, I was thoroughly entertained by the multi-dimensional machine star, the fights, the office politics, and the moralizing about God and life and life after death and being different and child-rearing practices, among other sundry sub-topics. The film was very entertaining and I look forward to Blomkamp taking over the reboot of the “Alien” franchise as has been rumored is to occur.
The Oscar season is (finally) over for another year and, for all of you who had neither the time nor the inclination to (a) read the book on which a film was based or (b) watch the movie when it came out, I am going to fill you in on the “differences” from written word to visual image for some of the Big Ones This Year. In some cases, I’ll be primarily mentioning some of the controversies that erupted and probably killed the film’s chances for a coveted gold statue, prior to the awarding of the Best Film of the Year honors to “Birdman.” “Birdman” will not appear anywhere on this list because it was original material developed for the screen and not adapted from a novel.
There is at least one notable exception this year that I thought should have appeared as a Best Picture nominee and should have earned Chicago’s own Gillian Flynn a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination, and that was “Gone Girl.” I’m including that film and “Unbroken” and “Inherent Vice,” all films which did have some play at Oscar-time, but were not up for Best Picture (they were nominated in somesmaller categories). I’m also bummed that “The Drop” didn’t get anything, and I admit that I liked the soapy “The Fault In Our Stars,” which will probably win some MTV awards coming up soon.
Here are the films, in alphabetical order: “American Sniper;” “Foxcatcher;” “Gone Girl;” “Inherent Vice;” “Selma;” “Still Alice;” “The Imitation Game;” “The Theory of Everything;” “Unbroken” and “Wild.”
1) “American Sniper:” The 2012 memoir that Chris Kyle wrote with Scott McEwen and Jim DeFelice was a nonfiction hit about a Navy SEAL who was lauded as the deadliest sniper in U.S. military history during his 4 tours of duty in Iraq. Movie: Adapted by Jason Hall and directed by Clint Eastwood, it starred Bradley Cooper, who gained 30 or 40 pounds to more closely resemble Chris Kyle, and Sienna Miller as his wife. It was nominated for Best Picture honors and Cooper also got a nod. Differences/Similarities: As in the book, the film opens in 2003. It details Kyle’s first kill as a sniper, but the decision to shoot is his, not an order from a higher-up. The intitial target is a woman, not a small boy. After Kyle was killed at a shooting range in 2013 in Texas, conversations with Kyle’s widow, Taya (Miller) led screenwritr Hall to add more emotional content based on her collaboration. The film implies that Hall was 30 upon becoming a SEAL; he was actually not quite 25 in 1999. Initially, the Navy rejected him because of a pin in hs arm, which is not mentioned.
2) “Foxcatcher:” The movie is based on the story of the wrestling Schulz brothers, one of whom is murdered by the wealthy DuPont heir portrayed by Steve Carrell in a very different turn from such films as “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.” Carrell’s make-up and dental prosthesis were even Oscar-nominated, losing to “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” Mark Ruffalo also scored a nomination as the murdered Schulz brother, but lost to Eddie Redmayne. Director Bennett Miller crafted a lengthy film that could have used some judicious editing, but the Big Buzz come Oscar time was the Twitter outburst of the surviving Schulz brother (played by Channing Tatum in a real tour de force performance), who objected to the homo-erotic subtext he felt Miller had included in the film and denounced him for “promises made,but broken.” This definitely was not good timing during a run-up to the Oscars.
3) “Gone Girl:” I’m reading this one right now, but I am aware that the 2012 novel by Gillian Flynn about a young woman who mysteriously disappears, putting her husband (Ben Affleck) under scrutiny as the prime suspect, had differences because my husband read it first and clued me in. David Fincher (of Gwynneth Paltrow’s head in a box in “7”) kept the rapid pace of the book and most of the book’s twists and turns were retained, probably because the author, herself, was writing the adaptation. So, what was added or eliminated? There is less detail in the film about Amy’s bizarre upbringing as “Amazing Amy.” A trip to Hannibal, Missouri, is eliminated. There is no ugly break-up scene between Nick and his mistress. Nick’s father is given a much smaller role in the film than in the book and Amy’s parents are background figures. Some characters didn’t make the cut at all, like an alleged stalker of Amy’s, the mother of boyfriend Desi (Neil Patrick Harris) and Rebecca, the blogger. Nick’s violent and obsessive tendencies are downplayed in the film version and the couple do not pen dueling memoirs, as they did in the book. Another critic mentioned that the family cat seemed to get more play on film. I adapted my science fiction novel “Out of Time” for the screen and won an award from “Writer’s Digest” for it, and, therefore, was duly impressed with Flynn’s screenwriter’s adaptation.
4) “Inherent Vice:” This 2009 novel by Thomas Pynchon is set in 1970 Los Angeles and Doc Sportello is searching for ex-flame Shasta’s married boyfriend, who is a billionaire real estate mogul. The book was adapted and directed by Paul Thomas Anderon and stars Joaquin Phoenix in another of his bizarre roles (“Remember ‘The Master’?) The psychedelic stylings of Sportello (Phoenix) remain. Plot is not really Anderson’s biggest concern, apparently, but remaining faithful to the tone and characters of the book is. Tariq Khalil is a character who loses in the adaptation, while Fabian Fazzo, Fritz Drybeam and Doc’s parents are cut from the film entirely. In fact, Anderson created an entirely new ending for the movie, which I will not reveal, in case you haven’t seen it.
5) “Selma:” This bio-pic remained faithful to most of the key points of the MLK march, but certain characters were combined and, according to key workers in LBJ’s administration, the entire conflict set up between King and Johnson over the timing of the march was bogus. While there is an allusion to Martin Luther King’s alleged trysts with other women, that particular character point was glossed over in one brief scene with wife Coretta where MLK more-or-less admits to extramarital dalliances, but says they meant nothing. It was fairly common knowledge at the time that J. Edgar Hoover had bugged King and had evidence of some of these shenanigans, but the film wants to rise above such seamy topics, just as, during JFK’s time in the White House, little was said or written about the president’s own character failings in that area. (Ah, the times, how they have changed!) There is no question that British actor David Oyelowo evokes King passionately and Carmen Ejogo as his wife was also very good. Ava DuVernay was supposed to become the first African-American female director to be nominated for an Oscar for the Paul Webb-written film, but that didn’t happen and many offended parties were boycotting the Oscar ceremony because of it—although the memory of “Twelve Years A Slave” winning as Best Picture the prior year surely faded fast.
6) “Still Alice,” which I saw in Des Moines the night before the Oscar ceremony, was as big a downer as one would anticipate from the important subject matter of early Alzheimer’s onset in a highly intelligent woman who is a college professor. Julianne Moore played the lead in the 2007 novel by Lisa Genova that was adapted and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland. Similarities/differences: The film is set in New York City, rather than in Boston. Professor Alice Howland (Moore) teaches at Columbia in the film. Her husband John’s (Alec Baldwin) new job opportunity is presented as being at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. In the book it was in New York. I remember thinking, as we watched the film, “Moving to be near the Mayo Clinic would be the best thing to do in her situation.” In the book, Alice writes her future self a letter on her computer, but in the movie it’s a video. The key relationships remain the same, with Lydia (Kristen Stewart), her rebellious actress daughter, given the most screen time. A patient support group bit the dust and so did the graduation ceremony of one of Alice’s students in the book.
7) “The Imitation Game,” based on the book “Alan Turing: The Enigma” is a 1983 biography by Andrew Hodges. Hodges revised the book in 2000, adding more than 200 pages after classified information was released in the 1990’s and my niece, Emma, a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology in computer science, told me they had to study Turing in her classes. The movie was adapted by Graham Moore and directed by Morton Tyldum into a script that actually works in the same way that “The King’s Speech” worked. Benedict Cumberbatch gave one of the very best performances of the year and of his career and Keira Knightley as Joan Clarke, the only woman to work with the puzzle-solvers at Bletchley Park, supported nicely. Similarities/differenes: The movie leaves out Turing’s main collaborator in breaking the Nazi code, Enigma: Gordon Welchman. Joan Clarke (Knightley) did not secure her place by figuring out a crossword puzzle, but it is true that she and Turing were briefly engaged. Turing did fall in love with a boyhood schoolmate named Christopher Morcom, but it is not true that he then named the fledgling computer Christopher. Two pivotal figures in the film—Stewart Menzies (Mark Strong) and John Cairncross (Allen Leech) are not mentioned in the book at all. Detective Nock who arrests Turing on charges of homosexual behavior in the film is invented and does not appear in the book.
8) “The Theory of Everything:” The book was “Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen,” a 2008 memoir by Jane Hawking, which followed on the heels of a harsher 1999 book by Wife Number One entitled “Music to Move the Stars: A Life with Stephen.” Adapted by Anthony McCarten and directed by James Marsh, the film scored an Oscar for Eddie Redmayne, and deservedly so, but Felicity Jones , who was also nominated, gave one of the strongest female performances of the year. If she weren’t so young, I think she would have (and possibly should have) won. There were so many in the list(s) above who were shortchanged, including Channing Tatum for his role in “Foxcatcher” (also playing against type) and, in “Whiplash,” Miles Teller, whose role as the young drummer was every bit as good as Oscar-winning J.K. Simmons’ Mr. Fletcher. Similarities/Differences: The courtship of Stephen and Jane is streamlined in the film. The two began dating after his diagnosis, but in the movie they are engaged. His personality is portrayed as less abrasive in the film as opposed to the book. The couple’s views on religion are played out as banter. The role of the 2nd Mrs. Hawkings—who was his nurse—is reduced, but the dramatic tracheotomy scene is given more screentime and the circumstances of it are changed from the book.
9) “Unbroken:”: Angelina Jolie’s directorial adaptation of “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption” is from a 2010 biography by Laura Hillenbrand that was a best-seller for over 3 years. It chronicles the real-life adventures of Italian immigrant Louie Zamperini, who had a troubled childhood but went on to become an Olympian, survived more days at sea than nearly anyone (47) and was a prisoner of war after being shot down (he was a bombadier in WWII). Joel and Ethan Coen adapted the screenplay with help from Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson and newcomer Jack O’Connell played Louie. Similarities/Differences: The movie focused on the 47 days adrift at sea and the nearly 2 years in a Japanese prison camp with a sadistic guard nicknamed “the Bird.” The book went on to outline how Zamperini failed to qualify for the 1948 Olympics, battled to overcome both PTSD and alcoholism, and became a born-again Christian. Most of that after-the-war stuff did not make the cut.
For me, watching the film, I thoroughly enjoyed the aerial scenes (Oscar nominations for those) and the drifting at sea part, but the “let’s beat Louie up again” part in the Japanese POW camp became a bit too repetitively sadistic for me. It’s why I quit watching “The Walking Dead,” so call me an emotional softie, but I did think that Angelina showed us something with this one, whereas her directing of the story of the beheading of American journalist Daniel Pearl, (where she both directed and played his wife, Marianne,) was notable only for one fine scene where she breaks down in tears when alone. I read that Angelina was heavily influenced by the storytelling technique of Clint Eastwood, who believes in getting it done. (“The real baby is sick? Grab the doll, Bradley!”) If this film is any indication, Jolie has improved markedly since her first film. Then again, with collaborators like the Coen Brothers and Richard LaGravenese (who appeared at the Chicago Film Festival with his all-musical movie “The Last Five Years” which, like the “Cop Rock” TV show that Steven Bochco tried years ago, had NO spoken dialogue and all the dialogue was sung (Emma Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan did the honors), who can go wrong? LaGravenese, who has worked as actor, director, producer, writer and all-purpose go-to guy with 20 credits for writing, 7 for directing, 5 for producing and 2 as an actor, announced to all of us in the crowd at the AMC Theater in Chicago that it was projects like his all-singing-no-dialogue musical that kept him going, creatively. However, it is probably writing for films like “Unbroken” that keeps him solvent.
10) “Wild:” This trek across the Pacific Crest Trail, adapted from the 2012 Cheryl Strayed memoir “Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail” was about as interesting as you would expect a movie about a woman out hiking to be. Ms. Strayed hiked 1,100 miles after her mother’s death when grief, drugs and sex derailed her life. She trudged along through California and Oregon. The book was adapted by Nick Hornby and the film was directed by Jean-Marc Vallee with Reese Witherspoon providing the star power, for which she won an Oscar nomination. Similarities/differences: The opening and closing scenes are the same as the book’s. Mostly, the movie sticks to the book, while consolidating a few characters. Strayed spends more time hiking with others in the book. Only Bobbie, Cheryl’s mother (well played by Laura Dern, who also played Shailene Woodley’s mother in “The Fault In Our Stars” earlier this year) is really highlighted, with some mention of her younger brother, Leif (Keene McRae). Her stepfather Eddie and her older sister Karen were cut entirely from the film BUT, the filmmakers—perhaps realizing they had a real snoozer on their hands here (I kept checking my watch to see how much longer before this thing was over)—added a scene in an alley where Strayed has sex with two men. (!) The long-suffering ex-husband of the film should get a medal and you would have to beat me with a stick to make me watch this movie again, while I DID just go see “Whiplash,” “The Imitation Game,” “The Theory of Everything” and “American Sniper” over. My spouse does not get to see things in September and October at film festival gatherings as a member of the press, and I go to see them when they are in general release, if merited.
If you like hiking and movies where they tease you that “Ooooh. Something might happen in this movie NOW—and then it doesn’t !”, then you’ll enjoy “Wild.” If you are planning to hike across a desert some time soon and want to know the correct way to blow up a tent or other technical matters of that sort, by all means, go and take notes. If you were hoping for excitement and/or something actually happening other than a self-indulgent narcissistic film about “finding one’s self” (I’ve lost 2 parents, too; it didn’t drive me to drugs, excessive sex or hiking through a desert, but maybe I should consider it; I did consider the drinking part after sitting through this) then this is the film for you.
