Even if he didn’t like Jim Jarmusch’s latest film, which I found immensely pleasurable and mesmerizing, I’m glad that Hollywood Reporter‘s Michael Rechtshaffen at least picked up on the fact that Bill Murray, who turns up very late in the film, is “channeling” Dick Cheney when he does. This is by no means a gratuitous detail. Trust a minimalist to make absences as important as presences. None of the characters in this movie is named, all of them are assigned labels in the cast list, and the only label assigned to Murray is “American”. Furthermore, unless I missed something, the European (specifically Spanish) landscape that Jarmusch and his cinematographer Chris Doyle capture so beautifully and variously, in diverse corners of Madrid and Seville, is otherwise utterly devoid of Americans of any kind — a significant statement in itself — until a foul-mouthed Murray makes his belated experience in a bunker, as ill-tempered as the American trade press is already being about this entrancing movie. Prior to that, we’re told repeatedly, in Spanish, by a good many others in the film, that he who tries to be bigger than all the others should go to the cemetery to understand a little bit better what life is: a handful of dust. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (October 21, 1988). — J.R.
BIRD
*** (A must-see)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Written by Joel Oliansky
With Forest Whitaker, Diane Venora, Michael Zelniker, Samuel E. Wright, Keith David, and Damon Whitaker.
CELEBRATING BIRD
** (Worth seeing)
Directed by Gary Giddins and Kendrick Simmons
Written by Gary Giddins.
Two telling documents that we have about Charlie Parker, both from the early 50s:
(1) During a live radio broadcast from Birdland on March 31, 1951, there’s an electrifying moment when Parker leaps into his solo on “A Night in Tunisia,” combining cascading machine-gun volleys of notes — wailing 16th notes and dovetailing triplets — into what sound like two successive melodic somersaults, each one in a separate direction, that miraculously turn the rhythm around with shifting accents — an awesome tumble in midair over four free bars until he triumphantly splashes into the next chorus.
To understand the genius of that moment — a fusion of passionate acrobatics and spontaneous formal patterning — it might help to detect the evidence of rage that one hears just before the number begins. Symphony Sid Torin, an obnoxiously loquacious disc jockey, has been blathering at length about “Round Midnight,” the previous number played by Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Bud Powell, which he has repeatedly called “Round About Midnight.” Read more
Okay. I have to confess that Michael Jackson wasn’t an especially important figure to me, and in that respect it’s theoretically possible that I belong to some cranky minority that isn’t mourning his death around the clock. But even if he were as important to the history of music and art as Charlie Parker or Elvis Presley or Frank Sinatra or Igor Stravinsky, I’d still find the sudden cable news blackout of everything currently happening in the world apart from his death a bit excessive and disturbing, and more than just a little infantile. It’s the same thing that happened in TV-Land when Sinatra and Reagan (two other revered entertainers) croaked, and one can sense a rather sickening feeling of happiness and excitement in the airways, uniting CNN, MSNBC, and, yes, even Fox News on the same euphoric wavelength that declares, in effect, and at long last, Iran doesn’t matter, the whole Middle East doesn’t matter, national health care doesn’t matter, Governor Mark Sanford (who had everyone totally obsessed yesterday) doesn’t matter, Sonia Sotomayor doesn’t matter, global warming doesn’t matter, even Farah Fawcett doesn’t matter, because Michael is dead. What a blessed sense of release is to be found in this seeming collective grief, suddenly recognizing that we no longer have to worry or even think about the rest — or so, at least, assume CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News…. Read more
