BEFORE: In addition to fighting with my neighbors over improper snow shoveling techniques, I've been fighting a cold, so I'm housebound for two reasons. Today I started fighting back with vitamin C, ramen soup, a hot shower and DewQuil (my patent-pending combination of DayQuil and Mountain Dew). But having a cold means that I can't sleep lying down because that will make me cough, so I have to sleep sitting up - and sitting up, I've noticed, means that I have longer and more vivid dreams.
Last night I dreamt that I was back in high-school chorus, and after showing up for a joint concert with the neighboring town, I learned that I was the only bass singer among the two choruses, and that meant I had to perform a solo on a song that I had never seen before - I'd have to sight-read it, and it was in Italian, and the concert was starting in just a few minutes. All the anxieties of live performing, rolled up in a convenient dream package. I started out poorly, but after a few bars I got a handle on the solo, and was feeling rather exhilarated that it was going so well. But then the notes went very high, way off of the bass clef, and I just couldn't handle it. Immediately after, the piano player, who was also my mother, explained how I should have picked up the piece right away, because the first few notes had the same intervals as the song "Do You Love Me?" from the musical "Fiddler on the Roof", and she kept on pointing out my shortcomings, even though the chorus had moved on to the next song, and I was begging her to be quiet.
So yeah, there's a lot to unravel there, but I know where a lot of these elements came from - I did a lot of singing and community theater during high school, and there weren't many good bass singers in my town. After my voice dropped I had an opportunity to stand out with some success in the barbershop quartet in the play "The Music Man". But then I lost the lead in "Fiddler on the Roof" (directed by my mother) after a ringer showed up and had an amazing audition for Tevye. I had to admit he deserved the role over me, and decided that I could settle for making my mark in that play as Lazar Wolfe, the butcher. My mother worked for over 40 years as a music teacher (thankfully, not at my schools, but in the next town over) and my high-school music teacher was also the church choir director with my mom as her organist, so at Christmastime I'd often sneak into the choir loft and sight-read the bass part on all the Christmas music. And I just saw my mother at Christmas, and watched her interact with her grandchildren, so that probably brought all those memories of my over-protected upbringing to the surface.
The good news is that I no longer have those recurring nightmares of watching my first wife make out with other women, but my brain has chosen to replace those by going back to high-school anxieties, even though I'm nearly 50. And of course, they can't be GOOD high-school dreams about doing well on tests or enjoying lunch in the cafeteria - at night when my defenses are down, my brain can't resist focusing on bad stuff.
Jack Nicholson carries over from "The Postman Always Rings Twice" to make a cameo in this documentary. This was on my someday/maybe list, but including it made my January linking possible, so that moved it up to near the top of the list.
THE PLOT: Documents Joaquin Phoenix's transition from the acting world to a career as an aspiring rapper.
AFTER: Speaking of anxiety, I mentioned on January 1 that I was planning to watch at least 10 films this month on Netflix, partly because those films are instrumental to keeping my chain going, but also because I was worried that they could vanish from the streaming service at any time. Sure enough, that happened - this film was available on Netflix a couple of months ago when I first noticed it, and still available there a couple of weeks ago when I programmed it into my chain. But tonight when I sat down to watch it, it was gone. So I had to watch it on iTunes at an additional cost of $3.99 - I just made this chain, I'm not going to try and alter it now.
Maybe there's no real rhyme or reason to why films come on and off various streaming sites - the animated feature I worked on was made available on Netflix for a 2-year period, and right after the contract was up, it was no longer available there. So maybe it was just time. Or maybe there are too many people connected with this film who got caught up in the recent sexual harassment scandals - Casey Affleck directed this film (Joaquin was his brother-in-law at the time) and it seems like maybe somebody at Netflix wanted to distance the company from Casey or this film. Based on some of the content here, I can certainly understand why.
(EDIT: Suspicions confirmed. A producer on this film sued Affleck for $2 million, and a cinematographer also filed a suit. I won't get into the details of the claims here, but you can find them on Wikipedia. Joaquin Phoenix is seen in this documentary hiring two hookers at one point, and in another segment bringing several women to his hotel room to party after his performance at a nightclub. After a few drinks he pulled what's probably his signature "move", telling the ladies that his friend Antony has an unusual Johnson, prompting him to expose himself, thereby breaking the ice with the ladies. This actually gives some insight into the recent accounts of Hollywood sexual assault behavior, and as I suspected, some of it probably came about from just terrible flirting technique. That doesn't make it right, by any means, but I understand where some of it may come from. And then the offenders keep doing it because at least part of the time, it gets results.)
The main gist of the film concern's Joaquin's decision to quit acting and record a rap album, and while I applaud anyone's decision to stretch their talents and try new things, a cause I've been championing here in the first week of the New Year, come on. There's only one white rapper who's any good - just try and name another one. Can't do it, can you? Here's a case where someone looked down deep inside himself and asked the question "What do I want to be doing with my life?" and forgot to ask the question "But, am I any good at rapping?" And the answer was a resounding "NO", even if he refused to hear it. So this documentary becomes a descent into a form of heartbreak, as Joaquin meets with Sean "P. Diddy" Combs who first asks him how much money he's willing to spend to make the album, but ultimately has to find a way to tell him that he's not going to produce an album for "J.P." (or is it "Jay-P"?)
The decision over the announcement to quit acting - when to make it, how to talk about it on his "last" press junket - looms over everything here, and it led to the extremely awkward interview on Dave Letterman's show, where Joaquin was so stilted and unwilling to provide information that Dave ended by quipping, "Joaquin, I'm sorry you couldn't be here tonight." As for the rap career, consider that after he quit acting, he was in the films "Her", "Inherent Vice" and that last Woody Allen film - because he still needed to make payments on his house. And in the end, it's the market that dictates whether someone's going to succeed with a side venture like this. Currently we're being told that Daniel Day-Lewis is retiring from acting, and you have to wonder if this is just a publicity hoax to sell more tickets to his "last" film. Japanese animator Miyazaki has retired three times by my count, each of his last three films was supposedly his "last" film, and this was likely done to secure the film better festival slots - what programmer wouldn't want to screen a master animator's last film? But it's an ongoing scam.
The rest of the film concerns Joaquin's interactions with other actors during script meetings and play rehearsals - Casey Affleck talked Joaquin into doing a reading of a play for charity, and then Joaquin got upset that Casey's character was in every scene, and his wasn't. He also meets with Ben Stiller for a possible role in the film "Greenberg" and gets upset when he thinks Stiller is acting too much like Ben Stiller (the character) during the meeting, then tearing apart the type of humor seen in "Meet the Parents". (He may be right about slapstick humor, but he just doesn't say this in the best way.) Poetic justice occurs later when Stiller parodies Joaquin during an award show by wearing a large fake beard and claiming that he wants to quit acting too.
And we see Joaquin spending time with his two best friends, aka his entourage - and they have to cook and clean for him, make all his travel arrangements on a moment's notice, and play phone tag with the assistants of other celebrities to arrange meetings. They seem to be paid in blame and insults, with Joaquin frequently tearing them down so that he can feel better about himself when things go wrong, which is often. These guys take so much crap from their friend/boss that one even decides to pay him back in that same currency, literally.
But how much of this is real and how much isn't? This is a common problem with documentaries - th act of filming has been known to change the events in front of the camera, plus with editing we have to wonder if the events before us really went down in this order, or if pick-up shots were made later to justify certain behaviors. And when Jay-P's rap performance ended with him brawling with some audience members, I noticed that there's a listing in IMDB for "Miami hecklers", so were they actors hired to make trouble, or did they just happen to be actors? This is unclear.
Saying after the fact that the majority of this film was staged is either a bold play after-the-fact to clear the way for the actor to return to acting, or a genuinely insightful take-down of so-called "reality" television, much of which is also staged to some degree. Or possibly an attempt to excuse the behavior of its star in the "candid" footage, which is just disgraceful. Now I'm not even sure which is worse, if the events in this film are real or staged. Because if it's real, these people should be ashamed of themselves, and if it's not, then they've wasted everybody's time, so they should again be ashamed of themselves.
Also starring Joaquin Phoenix (last seen in "Irrational Man"), Antony Langdon, Larry McHale, Casey Affleck (last seen in "Out of the Furnace"), Sean Combs (last seen in "Muppets Most Wanted"), Ben Stiller (last seen in "Orange County"), Carey Perloff, Edward James Olmos (last seen in "Blade Runner 2049"), with cameos from Billy Crystal (last seen in "The Comedian"), Danny DeVito (ditto), Danny Glover (last seen in "Dirty Grandpa"), Bruce Willis (last seen in "The Bonfire of the Vanities"), Robin Wright (last seen in "Justice League"), Sean Penn (last heard in "The Angry Birds Movie"), Mos Def (last seen in "16 Blocks"), Jamie Foxx (last heard in "Rio 2"), Jerry Penacoli, with archive footage of David Letterman (last seen in "Sully"), Paul Shaffer, Natalie Portman (last seen in "Jackie"), John Travolta (last seen in "Savages"), Nathan Lane (last seen in "He Said, She Said"), Jay Leno (last seen in "Sandy Wexler"), Conan O'Brien (ditto), Alec Baldwin (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Steve Coogan (ditto), Regis Philbin, Kelly Ripa, Ashley Olsen, Joan Rivers, Britney Spears, Olivia Munn, Kevin Pereira, Hugh Grant, Brett (ugh) Ratner.
RATING: 3 out of 10 limo rides
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