Rogerebert.com is highlighting each of the critics this week, and today my number is up. I am digging my avatar. I think that’s the first time I’ve even had an avatar.
Back in 2013, when I first started writing for Ebert, I filled out the Movie Questionnaire (we all did), basically to provide a meet-and-greet for the Ebert readers.
They’ve re-posted it along with all of my reviews for 2015. Unfortunately, I’ve reviewed some real crap this year, but also some really good ones.
I’m so glad Jerry Reed did so much television. There are so many clips out there. Not a lot of guitar-playing in this one, but his persona, his vibe, his clothes, his energy, his maleness, his peacock-ness with his maleness … It’s all so fantastic.
The stories of Jerry Reed being called in from the swamps where he was fishing to play guitar on a couple of Elvis’ songs (in 1967) are legendary. He arrived in the studio, unshaven, a wild man, and Elvis started laughing at the sight of him. Reed then proceeded to take over the session. Elvis was the type of artist who LOVED shit like that (if you were talented, that is). He wanted to be pushed, challenged. Reed pushed, challenged. If you listen to all of the various takes of “Guitar Man,” you can feel how wild it was at first (it’s a Jerry Reed number, not an Elvis number), and then you can hear it slowly coming together. At one point during the session, something about “Guitar Man” reminded Elvis of Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say” so he started throwing in lines from it, and it shocked Jerry Reed (where’d he get THAT?) but Jerry Reed went with it, until it was a full-blown mini-tribute. Reed said later:
It was just a jamming session. I thought I was going to be so damn nervous I couldn’t play, but it was right the opposite. I got pumped, and then Elvis got pumped, and the more he got pumped up, the more I did – it was like a snowball effect. To tell you the truth, I was on cloud nine. And once Elvis got the spirit, things really began to happen. When the guitars and the rhythm sounded right, I guess the guitar lick kind of reminded him of What’d I Say, and he just sort of started testifying at the end. That was how it happened – one of those rare moments in your life you never forget.
Check it out, take 10. Jerry Reed to Elvis: “Sing the living stuffing out of it, El.”
Other numbers they recorded together after the “Guitar Man” session: “Big Boss Man,” “Hi-Heel Sneakers,” “U.S. Male”. Each have a very specific sound, unique in Elvis’ catalog. That’s because of Jerry Reed, for sure, but also what Jerry Reed helped bring out of Elvis. If I had to boil it down, I would say Jerry Reed’s playing, and his wild-man-I-don’t-give-a-fuck energy (there was a MAJOR confrontation during the sessions, involving Jerry Reed and the producers: Jerry Reed would not back down, and everyone stood around watching Jerry Reed resist the pressure. He was an independent guy who could not be bullied) brought out an aggressive male energy in Elvis – which was not too much of a surprise, since aggression like that – sexual aggression – was what Elvis originally brought to the table in the 50s. But this was the late 60s, and Elvis had felt stifled in the movie years. He was coming out of his shell now. Those songs – listen to them – they’re as gritty-sexual as it gets.
I mean, “Hi-Heel Sneakers” is practically indecent.
After the session, after Elvis left the room, Jerry Reed said out loud to everyone there: “Elvis is more beautiful than any woman I have ever seen.” He had held that back for the whole session. It’s like the story of Carl Perkins meeting Elvis for the first time. They shook hands, they said, “I like your work, man” “Yeah, I like yours too”, and it was all very manly and professional and grown-up. Elvis walked away and Carl Perkins turned, again, to Scotty Moore and said, “That’s the best-looking man I’ve ever seen.”
Here’s Take 2 of “Big Boss Man.” Listen to how Jerry Reed has taken over. Usually it’s the producer who “gives notes.” Here, it’s Jerry, telling Elvis – ELVIS – what to do. And Elvis loved it.
And now listen to the final version. You can hear that Elvis has developed his performance, along the lines of Jerry Reed’s original coaching which was: Elvis, sometimes you sound mad or mean: that’s okay. Go with it. Be mad/mean. Listen to how “mad/mean” Elvis sounds in the final version. Hot.
I am seeing it on September 13 and I cannot wait.
I fear I will faint.
I’ve been watching the progression of this extraordinary show over the last year, and hearing the buzz of it shivering through the air. The buzz is now deafening.
Lin Manuel-Miranda is a genius. I mean, I too read Ron Chernow’s magnificent biography of Alexander Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton
Just in case you are unaware of what the hell I am talking about (if you are in New York, you can’t avoid it – it’s Hamilton-Hamilton-Hamilton all the time, which I suppose is appropriate, seeing as he lived here!), here’s a great in-depth piece on T-Magazine about Hamilton. Beautifully written! It brought me to tears.
Recently there came the news that Hamilton was getting bumped off the tenner to be replaced by a woman. Or, at least, he would have to share space with her, whoever she was. People cheered far and wide about how great it was. Yay for the Ladies! I did not join in that chorus. I’m a Hamilton fan from way way back. He should own that tenner. I’ve written more about Alexander Hamilton than I have about Cary Grant, and that’s telling you something.
Hamilton was a great man, who had a talent for pissing people off. Born illegitimate in St. Croix, his father abandoned the family, and his mother was shunned from her own family and “polite” society, due to having children out of wedlock. She was imprisoned for a time. She died when Hamilton was 14, and he then had to make his own way. Rejected by his father, rejected by both sides of his family (he was the child of a “whore”) he stayed with a cousin for a while (who lived in utter squalor), and the cousin committed suicide, Hamilton witnessing the blood-soaked aftermath. He was a child. He went to work as an apprentice in a shipping company and ended up practically running the damn joint. He was 15, 16. He was brilliant at math. He could speak French. He was confident, aggressive even. Early on, a kindly Pastor recognized that this young man was brilliant, and took up a subscription fund to send him to college in the new colonies up north. Originally, Hamilton was going to Princeton, but on his first day there he informed them (he didn’t ask them, he just informed them) that he would like to go at his own pace with his studies (i.e. as quickly as possible). They said, “No.” Hamilton, always in a hurry, ended up going to King’s College (now Columbia), where they let him go as fast as he wanted. He didn’t really graduate though because the Revolution arrived. New York was in the thick of it, and Alexander’s presence began to rise. He was a prolific and brilliant writer. His writing got the attention of General George Washington, who hired Hamilton to be his secretary. Hamilton was Washington’s right-hand-man as well as his voice. He wrote all of Washington’s correspondence. (He would end up being Secretary of the Treasury in Washington’s cabinet. He also wrote Washington’s famous farewell address.)
He died, as we all know, in a duel with Vice President Aaron Burr.
Hamilton was Secretary of the Treasury. Hamilton created the U.S. Bank. Hamilton wrote the lion’s share of the Federalist Papers (although James Madison wrote my favorite, which is Federalist #10), arguing for the Constitution. He walked us through the very first sex scandal, complete with open letter of apology. He was a brilliant writer. He was a lawyer. He married well and was devoted to his family. He was a prodigy. He was vain (he lied about his age). George Washington hand-picked him to be his secretary. He was against mob-rule, and actually stopped a revolutionary riot in New York, sticking up for law and order. Of all of the Founders, he was an abolitionist, straight-up. He created a school for freed slaves in New York, and was on the board of the Manumission Society (which he helped create). In his wretched childhood in the Caribbean, he witnessed the selling of humans up close as a little boy. Unlike many Americans, who would be financially ruined if slavery ended (it was an intractable problem, so intertwined with every aspect of life), he could see no justification for slavery, even economic. (Many of the men who owned slaves knew it was a sin. Let’s not forget that Thomas Jefferson wrote once about slavery: “I tremble for my country when I remember God is just.” He knew.) Hamilton had none of those prejudices or intellecutal/imaginative impediments: he did not think the slaves were incapable of education/accomplishment: give them better opportunities and they would rise. Remove the barriers, and they would be able to compete. It was a no-brainer for Hamilton. After all, hadn’t he emerged from nothing? He saw the Industrial Revolution coming before others did. Land was wealth at that time and most imagined that that situation would continue. He knew it would change and wanted the economy to be ready for it. His independent status, his lack of connection to anything other than his own ambition to do well in the fledgling country, helped him see things in a clearer way. He was unburdened with other attachments. He is one of our most famous and illustrious immigrants. He founded the New York Historical Society. He founded The New York Post. He started the first bank of the United States. He created the first law book for the State of New York. He had no “people,” no money, no nothing. He was a completely self-made man. We are living in Hamilton’s world now, not Jefferson’s, Washington’s, or Adams’. I mean, for better or worse, I suppose, but whatever: He flat out saw farther than other people. Perhaps that was because of his immigrant status. His nasty childhood. As John Adams sneered about him: he was “the bastard brat of a Scotch peddler.” Some person on Twitter was saying why don’t we bump Andrew Jackson off HIS bill instead, and then wrote: – “I mean, Hamilton wasn’t great either …” I wanted to say: “On what do you base this opinion? Please enlighten the class. And be specific.” But I don’t argue with idiots on Twitter. Hamilton was a complex figure, for sure, but also a great one. And a doomed one. He made enemies. He had a self-destructive streak and you read of some of his decisions and think, “Hamilton, WHAT are you doing.” He was a vicious hater. He couldn’t let things go. He burned bridges. He died young. And when he died in such a scandalous way, his reputation was left in the hands of his enemies. They assassinated his character. (Granted, Hamilton gave his enemies a warehouse of ammo in that regard.) And that opinion of Hamilton – that he was scary, dangerous, out of control, another Napoleon (Abigail Adams’ assessment) passed down through the years, 200 years, until our time, until Ron Chernow came along and said, “Hang on a second …”
Richard Brookhiser (whom I met at the Hamilton-founded New York Historical Society during a book-launch party/Hamilton celebration – you see how deep the geekery goes?) also wrote a very good book about Hamilton: Alexander Hamilton, American
But it’s Chernow’s biography that is the one to beat. Any biography that comes after will have to contend with that one.
And now comes Hamilton, An American Musical.
It’s been Hamilton’s “time” for a while now. But this musical just solidifies his stature, and I couldn’t be happier. For him. The man I have referred to as “my dead boyfriend” on more than one occasion. I live near where his duel with Aaron Burr took place. Occasionally I run by his statue. Here’s a picture I took of it (when we still had that hole in the sky in Lower Manhattan).
Already counting the days.
So far, I’m three for three this month at Ebert. Mad Women is awful. And not because it’s “shocking” but because it is bad. These bad movies are wearing me down.
My review of Mad Women is now up at Rogerebert.com.
I re-read Hunter S. Thompson’s classic, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
Here are some fragments I love.
p. 11
“You Samoans are all the same,” I told him. “You have no faith in the essential decency of the white man’s culture. Jesus, just one hour ago we were sitting over there in that stinking baiginio, stone broke and paralyzed for the weekend, when a call comes through from some total stranger in New York, telling me to go to Las Vegas and expenses be damned – and then he sends me over to some office in Beverly Hills where another total stranger gives me $300 raw cash for no reason at all … I tell you, my man, this is the American Dream in action! We’d be fools not to ride this strange torpedo all the way out to the end.”
p. 21
The radio was screaming: “Power to the People – Right On!” John Lennon’s political song, ten years too late. “That poor fool should have stayed where he was,” said my attorney. Punks like that just get in the way when they try to be serious.”
“Speaking of serious,” I said. “I think it’s about time to get into the ether and the cocaine.”
p. 22
“KILL THE BODY AND THE HEAD WILL DIE”
This line appears in my notebook, for some reason. Perhaps some connection to Joe Frazier. Is he still alive? Still able to talk? I watched that fight in Seattle – horribly twisted about four seats down the aisle from the Governor. A very painful experience in every way, a proper end to the sixties. Timothy Leary a prisoner of Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria, Bob Dylan clipping coupons in Greenwich Village, both Kennedys murdered by mutants, Owsley folding napkins on Terminal Island, and finally Cassius/Ali belted incredibly off his pedestal by a human hamburger, a man on the verge of death. Joe Frazier, like Nixon, had finally prevailed for reasons that people like me refused to understand – at least not out loud.
p . 41
Saturday midnight … Memories of this night are extremely hazy. All I have, for guide-pegs, is a pocketful of keno cards and cocktail napkins, all covered with scribbled notes. Here is one: “Get the Ford man, demand a Bronco for race-observation purposes … photos? … Lacerda/call … why not a helicopter? … Get on the phone, lean on the fuckers … heavy yelling.”
Another says: “Sign on Paradise Boulevard – ‘Stopless and Topless’ … bush-league sex compared to L.A.; pasties here – total naked public humping in L.A. … Las Vegas is a society of armed masturbators/gambling is the kicker here/sex is extra/weird trip for high rollers … house-whores for winners, hand jobs for the bad luck crowd.”
p. 45
This is the main advantage of ether: it makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel.
p. 46
The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the Sixth Reich …
Right above the gambling tables the Forty Flying Carazito Brothers are doing a high-wire trapeze act, along with four muzzled Wolverines and the Six Nymphet Sisters from San Diego … so you’re doing on the main floor playing blackjack, and the stakes are getting high when suddenly you chance to look up, and there, right smack above your head is a half-naked fourteen-year-old girl being chased through the air by a snarling wolverine, which is suddenly locked in a death battle with two silver-painted Polacks who come swinging down from opposite balconies and meet in mid-air on the wolverine’s neck …
This madness goes on and on, but nobody seems to notice.
p. 48
“Look over there,” I said. “Two women fucking a polar bear.”
“Please,” he said. “Don’t tell me those things. Not now.”
p. 56
One of the things you learn, after years of dealing with drug people, is that everything is serious.
p. 63
Ignore that nightmare in that bathroom. Just another ugly refugee from the Love Generation, some doom-struck gimp who couldn’t handle the pressure.
p. 66
Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era – the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run … but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of the time and the world. Whatever it meant …
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time – and which never explain, in retrospect, what really happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights – or very early mornings – when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L.L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder’s jacket … booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) … but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that ….
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda … You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning …
And that, I think, was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting – on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave …
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
Magnificent. Fear and Loathing came out in 1971, remember, so those days he discussed were only a couple of years in the rear-view mirror. Not much time at all. But those paragraphs read as though they were written with a decade or two of retrospect and reflection. What he is describing is the very short space between Easy Rider and Two-Lane Blacktop. Easy Rider contains the prophecy of the moment’s end. “We blew it.” A couple of years only until Two-Lane Blacktop and the cultural mood, the culture itself, has been altered entirely. Something burned itself out.
p. 86
I’m a fucking sinner! Venal, mortal, carnal, major, minor – however you want to call it, Lord … I’m guilty.
But do me this one last favor: just give me five more high-speed hours before you bring the hammer down; just let me get rid of this goddamn car and off of this horrible desert.
Which is not really a hell of a lot to ask, Lord, because the final incredible truth is that I am not guilty. All I did was take your gibberish seriously … and you see where it got me? My primitive Christian instincts have made me a criminal.
Creeping through the casino at six in the morning with a suitcase full of grapefruit and “Mint 400” T-shirts, I remember telling myself, over and over again, “You are not guilty.” This is merely a necessary expedient, to avoid a nasty scene. After all, I made no binding agreements; this is an institutional debt – nothing personal. This whole goddamn nightmare is the fault of that stinking, irresponsible magazine. Some fool in New York did this to me. It was his idea, Lord, not mine.
And now look at me: half-crazy with fear, driving 120 miles an hour across Death Valley in some car I never even wanted. You evil bastard! This is your work! You’d better take care of me, Lord … because if you don’t you’re going to have me on your hands.
p. 89
No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride … and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well … maybe chalk it off to forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten. It’s all in Kesey’s Bible …. The Far Side of Reality.
And so much for bad gibberish: not even Kesey can help me now.
p. 95
This is how the world works. All energy flows according to the whims of the Great Magnet. What a fool I was to defy him. He knew. He knew all along. It was He who sacked me in Baker. I had run far enough, so He nailed me … closing off all my escape routes, hassling me first with the CHP and then with this filthy phantom hitchhiker … plunging me into fear and confusion.
Never cross the Great Magnet. I understood this now … and with understand came a sense of almost terminal relief. Yes, I would go back to Vegas. Slip the Kid and confound the CHP by moving East again, instead of West. This would be the shrewdest move of my life. Back to Vegas and sign up for the Drugs and Narcotics conference; me and a thousand pigs. Why not? Move confidently into their midst. Register at the Flamingo and have the White Caddy sent over at once. Do it right; remember Horatio Alger…
p. 103
I tend to sweat heavily in warm climates. My clothes are soaking wet from dawn to dusk. This worried me at first, but when I went to a doctor and described my normal daily intake of booze, drugs and poison he told me to come back when the sweating stopped. That would be the danger point, he said – a sign that my body’s desperately overworked flushing mechanism had broken down completely. “I have great faith in the natural processes,” he said. “But in your case … well … I find no precedent. We’ll just have to wait and see, then work with what’s left.”
p. 143
I suspect we could have done the whole thing on acid … except for some of the people; there were faces and bodies in that group who would have been absolutely unendurable on acid. The sight of a 355-pound police chief from Waco, Texas, necking openly with his 290-pound wife (or whatever woman he had with him) when the lights were turned off for a Dope Film was just barely tolerable on mescaline – which is mainly a sensual/surface drug that exaggerates reality, instead of altering it – but with a head full of acid, the sight of two fantastically obese human beings far gone in a public grope while a thousand cops all around them watched a movie about the “dangers of marijuana” would not be emotionally acceptable. The brain would reject it: The medulla would attempt to close itself off from the signals it was getting from the frontal lobes … and the middle-brain, meanwhile, would be trying desperately to put a different interpretation on the scene, before passing it back to the medulla and the risk of physical action.
Acid is a relatively complex drug, in its effects, while mescaline is pretty simple and straightforward – but in a scene like this, the difference was academic. There was simply no call, at this conference, for anything but a massive consumption of Downers: Reds, Grass and Booze, because the whole program had apparently been set up by people who had been in a Seconal stupor since 1964.
p. 155
The “high side” of Vegas is probably the most closed society west of Sicily – it makes no difference, in terms of the day to day life-style of the place, whether the Man at the Top is Lucky Luciano or Howard Hughes. In an economy where Tom Jones can make $75,000 a week for two shows a night at Caesar’s, the palace guard is indispensable, and they don’t care who signs their paychecks. A gold mine like Vegas breeds its own army, like any other gold mine. Hired muscle tends to accumulate in fast layers around money/power poles … and big money, in Vegas, is synonymous with the Power to protect it.
p. 157
The waitress had the appearance of a very old hooker who had finally found her place in life.
p. 173
The only hope now, I felt, was the possibility that we’d gone to such excess, with our gig, that nobody in a position to bring the hammer down on us could possibly believe it. Particularly not since we’d signed in with the Police Conference. When you bring an act into this town, you want to bring it in heavy. Don’t waste any time with cheap shucks and misdemeanors. Go straight for the jugular. Get right into felonies.
p. 178
But what is sane? Especially here in “our own country” – in this dumbstruck era of Nixon. We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled the Sixties. Uppers are going out of style. This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip. He crashed around America selling “consciousness expansion” without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously. After West Point and the Priesthood, LSD must have seemed entirely logical to him … but there is not much satisfaction in knowing that he blew it very badly for himself, because he took too many others down with him.
Not that they didn’t deserve it: No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create … a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody – or at least some force – is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.
Brutally honest.
p. 191
“You found the American Dream?” he said. “In this town?”
I nodded. “We’re sitting on the main nerve right now,” I said.
p. 202
The big market, these days, is in Downers. Reds and smack – Seconal and heroin – and a hellbroth of bad domestic grass sprayed with everything from arsenic to horse tranquilizers. What sells, today, is whatever Fucks You Up – whatever short-circuits your brain and grounds it out for the longest possible time. The ghetto market has mushroomed into suburbia. The Miltown man has turned, with a vengeance, to skin-popping and even mainlining … and for every ex-speed freak who drifted, for relief, into smack, there are 200 kids who went straight to the needle off Seconal. They never even bothered to try speed.
Uppers are no longer stylish. Methedrine is almost as rare, on the 1971 market, as pure acid or DMT. “Consciousness Expansion” went out with LBJ … and it is worth noting, historically, that downers came in with Nixon.
p. 202
I was so far beyond fatigue that I was beginning to feel nicely adjusted to the idea of permanent hysteria.
And finally, the Grand Pooh-Bah Passage:
p. 179
One of the crucial moments of the Sixties came on that day when the Beatles cast their lot with the Maharishi. It was like Dylan going to the Vatican to kiss the Pope’s ring.
First “gurus.” Then, when that didn’t work, back to Jesus. And now, following Manson’s primitive/instinct lead, a whole new wave of clan-type commune Gods like Mel Lyman, ruler of Avatar, and What’s His Name who runs “Spirit and Flesh.”
Sonny Barger never quite got the hang of it, but he’ll never know how close he was to a king-hell breakthrough. The Angels blew it in 1965, at the Oakland-Berkeley line, when they acted on Barger’s hardhat, con-boss instincts and attacked the front ranks of an anti-war march. This proved to be an historic schism in the then Rising Tide of the Young Movement of the Sixties. It was the first open break between the Greasers and the Longhairs, and the importance of that break can be read in the history of SDS, which eventually destroyed itself in the doomed effort to reconcile the interests of the lower/working class biker/dropout types and the upper/ middle Berkeley/student activities.
Nobody involved in that scene, at the time, could possibly have foreseen the Implications of the Ginsberg/Kesey failure to persuade the Hell’s Angels to join forces with the radical Left from Berkeley. The final split came at Altamont, four years later, but by that time it had long been clear to everybody except a handful of rock industry dopers and the national press. The orgy of violence at Altamont merely dramatized the problem. The realities were already fixed; the illness was understood to be terminal, and the energies of The Movement were long since aggressively dissipated by the rush to self-preservation.
“Rhythm is the international language.” That’s just one quote of many about the importance of rhythm in Dean Hargrove’s Tap World a celebration of the global tap dancing community. Coming in at a brisk 72 minutes, Tap World makes its points efficiently, with no pretensions. The dancing far outweighs the talking. And the pure joy is often infectious.
Produced by tap-dancing sisters Chloe and Maud Arnold (who both appear in the film), Tap World does not take an academic approach, although Constance Valis Hill, tap historian and author of Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History
One dancer in Tap World observes, “Jazz brought a lot of different cultures together. So did tap dancing.”
The dancers featured in Tap World are a diverse bunch, proving the dancer’s point, but all are devoted to maintaining the integrity of tap. “We have to pay homage to the guys who came before us,” says one guy. Alaman Diahjio, an 11-year-old dancer, says, “I see us as dancers and musicians and performers and historians.” Seminal figures like Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Gregory Hines, the Nicholas Brothers, inspire the current-day dancers.
One young guy from New Jersey lost a leg to cancer when he was in college, derailing his dance career. As devastating as that loss was, he says that he thought of “Peg Leg” Bates, a famous one-legged dancer, born in 1907, who made a career out of tapping with his “peg leg.” If Peg Leg could keep on going, so could he.
One dancer traveled to Johannesburg and encountered the African gumboot dance, with its exhilarating blend of stamping feet and rapid clapping, and was stunned by its clear cultural connection to American tap. Developed by the miners who worked the mines in South Africa, not allowed to speak, the stamping and clapping became a way for them to communicate with one another. Through suffering, an artform was born.
The interview structure of Tap World is simple and clear: the film swoops around the world, from New York, to Paris, to Taipei, introducing the tap community in each. Tap dancing isn’t a lucrative career. All of the dancers have to teach to make ends meet. There’s a lack of careerism in the interviews, resulting in people talking in terms of pure passion and love, like the one dancer in Tokyo who works three jobs to support her dancing, saying her love for tap is “higher than a mountain and deeper than the ocean.” The personal stories vary widely, but they all say a similar thing: Other dance forms are about rhythm, but tap is about rhythm and sound, and this is the essential difference, the compelling pull.
Here is where “Tap World” almost reaches profundity. Ultimately what tap is about is communication: communication between dancers on the stage, “talking” to one another through the taps even if they don’t speak the same language. Chloe Arnold, an American tap dancer, taught at a tap academy in Japan, and ended up not needing a translator during the classes. She and her students communicated perfectly through dance. One of the best sections in the film features the ongoing collaboration between Chitresh Das, a 62-year-old master at the Indian classical dance known as Kathak, featuring rapidly tapping bare feet, and Jason Samuels Smith, an American tap dancer. Watching these two dancers, from two totally different backgrounds and cultures, perform together, pushing each other competitively, all in front of an Indian audience roaring their approval is the clearest example of the film’s “pure communication” message.
The dancers’ stories are fine, but the reason to see the film is to see these people dance, to celebrate what they can do. Tap World is filled with dance footage: dancers in studios, in class, in performance. There’s something martial about the sound of all that tapping, an invigorating assault on the senses. As one dancer says in Tap World: you should be able to get the whole story of a tap dance, even if you close your eyes. (At that point the screen goes to black, and the vigorous tapping continues. Just to test the theory.) The closing number of Riverdance sounds like a call to arms. Of course, enjoy the dance itself, but try just listening to it.
In a 2004 review of Om, the show created by Savion Glover – the best tap dancer in the world currently, Joan Acocella, the dance critic for The New Yorker, wrote:
Certain rhythmic patterns that Glover came up with made me think of something visual—a locomotive, a whirlpool—and, of course, they were always audial. But eventually I seemed to enter a kind of pan-sensory spell. Instead of getting sights or sounds or even emotions, I felt I was hanging in the air above them all. This is what Kandinsky and the other mystical-minded artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were looking for, and it’s apparently what Glover is looking for, too.
Tap World catches that vibe a bit, especially in its open-hearted appreciation for the sound of the taps, and what that sound can mean. Tap World takes tap dancing seriously, but the main impression one gets while watching is how much these dancers love and respect tap dancing, and how fully they have devoted themselves to that love. It’s a pleasure to be in their collective presence, even if it’s only for 72 minutes.
Tap World opens tomorrow in U.S. theaters.
Well. THAT was phenomenal.
Never mind the fact that it pours right into my Rocky obsession, but the film is directed by the enormously gifted Ryan Coogler who brought us the harrowing Fruitvale Station. I’m thrilled he’s at the helm. But as I mentioned in my post about the Magic Mike XXL trailer, creating a good trailer is an art in and of itself. It says little about the eventual movie – we’ll have to wait to see it in full to judge for ourselves. But a trailer can evoke, propel, create a need to SEE, generate excitement. The Creed trailer does that. SPOILER: When Stallone suddenly emerges … goosebumps. And I also love how the cuts coincide with the beats in the music. It’s elegant and smooth, but also pops off the screen. Electric. Can’t wait to see it.
I thank my friend Alex for sharing this clip of Kerry Ellis (a wonderful actress and singer) as Nancy in Oliver!, singing “As Long As He Needs Me”. The song is so famous and it has been done by everyone. It’s hard to hear it fresh. But this performance is phenomenal because what she does is she turns the song into a full and intricate story: it’s a whole three-act play in three minutes. And where she starts out is not where she ends up. The performance starts out quiet and exhausted. Her body hurts. She has to sit down. She is beaten, devastated, but holding onto the hope that he needs her. Watch how she stands up, how she struggles to manage it, and then how she has to sit down again. Also listen to her gliding phrasing: the lines blend into one another, sounding almost like a series of exhausted sighs/prayers. This is a woman who is broken. It’s hard to imagine she will be able to pull off the final stunning notes of the song. Where will she find the strength?
But then watch where it goes, and watch where it ends. It seems to change, go to another level, at the line “If you are lonely, then you will know …” Suddenly, she has strength, she moves towards the audience, reaching out to the loneliness in all of us. That gives her the launch-pad for where she goes next. My entire body erupted in goosebumps the first time I watched it through. The audience starts clapping before she even finishes, and I am not surprised by that at all. The performance has been quiet and yearning and effective, and then suddenly – out of seemingly nowhere – the air is filled with electricity, and the power of what she brings explodes out of her, across the stage and into the audience. But that can only happen because of what she has been building upon. The journey happening in front of us is an organic one. She has to start in one place and end up in another, and it has to happen in real-time. She can’t “telegraph” the powerful ending of the song in its opening phrases. The only way to give a performance like this is to really go through the experience.
It’s one of those performances that keeps its calm, its quiet, its focus, with beautiful control, until – and you can almost see it happen – she opens the flood-gates.
I finished Scott Eyman’s magnificent biography of John Wayne (John Wayne: The Life and Legend
There’s more to say but I just want to share one comment from Maureen O’Hara (who wrote her own wonderful memoir (‘Tis Herself: An Autobiography
O’Hara, of course, worked with Wayne a number of times. She swears they never had an affair. Others say they believe they did. Whatever. It’s irrelevant. The fact remains that they were good friends for their entire lives. She also had a great deal of fondness for John Ford, who had a reputation for being a tyrant, and impatient, and all that, but O’Hara tells Eyman:
He was the best, by God … If John Ford walked in the door right now, and said, “Let’s go” I would say “Yes, sir.” I’d jump and be there. In spite of everything. Because he was the best. … And every night you went home saying, “By God, I did a good day’s work today.” You knew it was work you were going to be proud of.
In her memoir, O’Hara describes Ford screaming at her during the filming of one closeup in The Quiet Man, and she lost her temper and screamed back. The cast and crew were stunned, everyone fell silent and quaked in their boots. Ford was stunned. He waited for a second, and then burst into laughter. Everyone relaxed. O’Hara was good friends with Ford also, for the entirety of his life. She gave as good as she got. She was a hot-tempered Irish lady, and both of them were brawlers with Irish roots, and loved her for it.
As Wayne lay dying, the family circled the wagons, restricting access to him. There were just too many people who wanted to visit. Only the beloved few, those closest to him, were allowed to visit and say goodbye. O’Hara was one of them.
Eyman asked O’Hara, a very old lady by now, if she missed John Wayne. Her slightly Howard-Hawks-ian reply made me laugh loud and hard (and I needed it, considering the sadness of those final pages):
Do I miss him? Oh God, yes. There are so many times I’d like to call Duke, or the old boy [Ford] to ask their advice, ask them what they think. But I had a wonderful life with them. Sometimes I wondered what they liked about me, and then I realized I was the only female man left in their lives.
I reviewed A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night for Rogerebert.com, and put it on my Top Movies of the year list.
It weaves some kind of weird spell, with its genre mix of vampire-horror, family-angst-drama, 1950s gearhead/rebel-kids, and Spaghetti Westerns (with lots of Ennio Morricone in the soundtrack, interspersed with Iranian pop songs: maybe the first time that has happened in the history of movie soundtracks?). It’s not just that the film looks so good, although director Ana Lily Amirpour is indeed in love with her images. Somehow her love does not become a fetish. Each gorgeous haunting image serves a purpose and they all slowly accumulate to create a mood of dread. There were some critics who thought she lingered too long on some shots, reveling in her own artistry a bit too much. I can understand that criticism and point of view, but for me – the lingering quality works, and the mood created by those lingering shots is extremely effective. There are images shown in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night that I have never seen before, and that’s saying something, since there is very little that is new under the sun. But a vampire skating down the middle of an empty road, her burqa billowing out behind her? That’s new. A black-and-white Farsi-language vampire film? That’s new.
Aside from the stunning imagery, the film exerts a kind of mysterious emotional power, released through the images, through the placement of figures in the frame and the tension between them. The moments of tenderness (and there are not many) are breath-taking.
And it’s fun to watch a new director, in love with her own creativity and visual power. I really look forward to seeing what she does next.
Here’s a series of shots I love, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. Every shot in the film is beautiful, and well-chosen.
