BEFORE: I made it to July 4, and the chain is still holding, more than halfway through the year, almost 2/3 even. I worked very hard to get to THIS movie on THIS date, but of course there's always room for second guessing. I have "Famous Nathan" on the documentary list this year, and today's the day of the annual hot dog eating championship out at Coney Island, which I always watch. Could I have worked a bit harder and got the film about the company's founder to land on July 4? Would that have been more appropriate?
I'm not sure I could have made that work, the linking maybe just wasn't there - or perhaps that's just an excuse to not tear apart the rest of the chain and put it back together in a different order. That's just not how I want to spend my holiday, today should be about eating some American foods and thinking about our country, celebrating its birthday. If I say that a film with "American" in the title is a good enough tribute, then that's what it is. Anyway, I'll get to that hot dog movie, it's just going to take three more weeks or so. That film now serves a purpose, creating a link so I can watch the last movie in the Doc Block, and as far as I can tell, that's a good film to end with, because it gives me so many options for moving forward. So that's that, the die is cast. I'll save my comments on this year's hot dog competition for then, they're quite controversial.
Stephen Colbert carries over from "Yogi Berra: It Ain't Over".
THE PLOT: In this deeply intimate documentary, musician Jon Batiste attempts to compose a symphony as his wife, writer Suleika Jaouad, undergoes cancer treatment.
AFTER: What I've noticed about actors (and musicians) from watching movies is that there's often a time where you just don't see an actor any more, at a certain age they seem to drop out of the public eye, and whether this is because the casting directors don't call them any more, or they chose to leave the business, or they're having some kind of health problems, I just can't say. Not every actor is like Donald Sutherland or Robert De Niro, who just keep working and getting cast well into their 70's or 80's, and have no retirement plan, they just want to keep working. I'm sure there's some form of age-ism going on perhaps, actresses have sometimes been known to speak out when they reach 40 or 50 and they don't get cast in romantic movies any more and they start getting calls to play younger actresses' overbearing mothers. I'm sure this is why so many actors want to transition to producing or directing, because they can see a time when the business might decide they can't play lead roles any more - I'm not saying it's right, but obviously it's what happens.
It's also possible that some people choose to leave show business, maybe they took a lead role and earned a big enough paycheck that they can retire early, who can say? Maybe they set aside just enough money to buy a little beach house on a tropical island and open up a bar, and they just want to disappear from the rat race. Or perhaps they have so much going on in their personal life that they need to step away from the hustle for six months or a year. This documentary follows a number of months in the life of Jon Batiste, who for a stretch seemed to be the busiest man in show business, he had a steady gig as the band leader for "Late Show ith Stephen Colbert", but also had released an album that proved to be very popular and was nominated for multiple Grammys, worked on a few movies like "Soul", and then made ambitious plans to compose and perform his own symphony. This sounds like a work schedule that would put anyone to the test, and then on top of that, his girlfriend's leukemia came back, which turned everything in his life upside-down and sideways.
All I really saw from my perspective at the time was that he wasn't showing up for the talk show any more, and then the announcement came he was leaving the show, and band member Louis Cato would take over the "Paul Shaffer" role, which is a combination of band leader and sidekick. I didn't even think to research the reasons why, I just assumed that his career was going well on multiple fronts, and he outgrew the show. Which would have been fine, once he got his fingers into movies, albums, awards, who needs the daytime job any more? I totally understand how one job leads into the next, and that one leads into the next, and then you can drop some of the old ones, it's how I built my career in animation. (And a night-time job at a movie theater is a great one to have, because you can keep your days free for job-hunting and going on interviews.)
But there was more to the story, Batiste needed time to spend with his girlfriend while she battled cancer, and he still had to maintain the appearances at award shows and other events that he had committed to before her diagnosis. A lot of jobs offer PTO now, in addition to sick leave, but if you're a freelance musician, you probably have to just block this out yourself, nobody can do it for you, and something has to give somewhere. We're all looking for that balance between work, family and free time and maybe nobody gets it 100% right, but to each his own, really, that doesn't mean we should stop trying. My parents are down in North Carolina and I have to figure out how many times a year we can make the trip down there, and whether that's enough so that years from now I won't feel like I didn't take the chance to be part of their "golden years" when I had it.
Once he pulls back from his other gigs, and after the Grammy Awards, Batiste keeps moving forward with his composing efforts - here my knowledge really falls short, because there's a whole world there of music production that I know next to nothing about, even though I've arranged music for a cappella singers and I've sung on a couple movie soundtracks. Putting chords together, making an original melody, lyrics, getting performers to work together, all of that is completely beyond me - it may even be beyond Batiste, who seems to favor both improvisation and breaking the typical rules of composition in favor of giving input to the people who are on stage at the moment.
So I'm not really qualified to judge the final resulting music, which ended up being influenced on the spot by a power outage at Carnegie Hall, but rather than subject the audience to ten minutes of silence, suddenly included an impromptu piano piece by Batiste in place of whatever the orchestra was supposed to play. And this performance was always meant to be a one-off, since it was partially being written on the spot - but it seems the intent was to weave together some Native American singers and instruments with Negro spirituals, and create a new musical synthesis out of the many voices from American history, and that seems like a lofty goal to have, but that's also America in a way, putting together something new from the many different cultures and different experiences of immigrants and various tribes.
An "American" symphony wouldn't have to follow the traditional rules of European composers, and those are old hat, anyway. What would modern American classical music sound like, anyway? If I can compare it to food for just a minute, what is American food? Well, sure, it's not French or Italian or even Mexican, but it might involve some of those techniques. We've got California cuisine, Southern cuisine, New England cuisine, Gulf Coast cuisine, and they're all different. I'm personally aware that Texas BBQ isn't the same as Carolina BBQ, then there's Memphis BBQ and they're all different, I wish there was a NYC BBQ style, because pastrami is just a form of brisket, after all. Then there's pizza, NY pizza and Chicago pizza and Detroit pizza, California pizza, all different. So what is American food, and what is American music?
In both cases, it really should be "all of the above", this country being the giant melting pot that it is. But for some people it's so easy to forget that we're a nation of immigrants, people who have been kicked out of every other country on the planet. So your ancestors came over on the Mayflower, so what? It's only because they got kicked out of England, and just because your family's been here longer, or came here under their own power, that doesn't make you any better than anyone else. Traditional American values? What the hell are those, anyway? Just what YOU have been taught to believe? Get off your damn high horse. American values are whatever Americans say they are, and I've got this piece of paper here to back me up. We the people are trying to form a "more perfect" union, and everybody gets a voice. If there's something you don't like, gay marriage or abortion or whatever, you can't just retroactively make it illegal by paying off four Supreme Court justices. We're going to have to have a serious discussion about this someday soon.
Anyway, that's where my head is at on this Independence Day, now I have to go and mentally deal with the results of the hot dog eating contest.
Also starring Jon Batiste, Lindsey Byrnes, Jonathan Dinklage, Billie Eilish (last seen in "Nothing Compares"), Suleika Jaouad, Lenny Kravitz (last seen in "Shotgun Wedding"), Joe Saylor,
with archive footage of Louis Cato, Simon Helberg (last seen in "Space Oddity"), Trevor Noah (last seen in "Butterfly in the Sky"), Questlove (last seen in "Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage?"), James Taylor (last seen in "Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street"), Scott Tixier, Stevie Wonder (last seen in "Scandalous: The True Story of the National Enquirer")
RATING: 6 out of 10 nominees in each category
No comments:
Post a Comment