Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)

Year 14, Day 222 - 8/10/22 - Movie #4,221

BEFORE: OK, here's that big blow-out summer concert I was talking about - from 1969.  Hey, I never said it was going to be a concert from THIS summer.  I missed this somehow when it aired on ABC, but that's OK, it's still on Hulu. 

Jesse Jackson, B.B. King, Martin Luther King, Richard Nixon, Dinah Shore and Stevie Wonder all carry over from "Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street". 

THE PLOT: Documentary about the legendary 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival which celebrated African-American music and culture and promoted Black pride and unity. 

AFTER: I don't know, this was the Oscar-winner for Best Documentary Feature last year, and for some reason, I'm not feeling it.  Like everything's in place, but is there something wrong with me?  Is this not my kind of music?  Am I the wrong color to enjoy this?  I watch films about black performers all the time, but this one just didn't thrill me somehow.  

Maybe it's the exact material, which doesn't feel like A-list material, if I'm being honest.  I'm not a fan of Nina Simone, I don't know any of her songs, so of course "Backlash Blues" is just going to leave me cold, I've got no frame of reference.  I've never really been a fan of Sly and the Family Stone, either, but at least I know his songs - to me "Everyday People" is a very stupid song, but one with a very important message about racial harmony and acceptance, so I kind of give it a pass.  But all that "so on and so on and scooby dooby dooby" stuff doesn't do it for me. Then there's a line about a blue one who can't accept a green one for living with a fat one - well, I don't think there are any blue or green people, so I'm always kind of scratching my head when I hear this song. 

I've never heard of Ray Barretto, or Herbie Mann, or Abbey Lincoln either - sorry if I seem out of touch. Really, I'm trying to find something here that appeals to me, and it ain't easy.  OK, there's Gladys Knight & The Pips doing "I Heard It Through the Grapevine", finally something I know - but as I said after watching that documentary about Motown last year, their version is just too frantic and arythmic for me - it predated the Marvin Gaye version, and the CCR version, both of which I prefer over this one.  This version of the song sounds like a mess, like the performers haven't quite figured out how to sing it yet. I know, I know, this version of the song was the original, but quite often I like cover versions better. 

Then there's the Edwin Hawkins Singers, which was really just a church choir, and that's when this Harlem Festival got a bit too preachy and religious for me.  The festival organizers justified this by saying that they wanted to bring some church stuff into the program because church attendance in NYC was declining, but did they ever think maybe there was a reason for that?  Maybe more and more people didn't LIKE church, so then why bring in a church choir?  To remind everybody of the thing they hate, which is church?  Or just to be a big pain in the ass?  

B.B King shows up, with another song I've never heard of - and same goes for the Chambers Brothers, they couldn't sing their hit song "Time"?  David Ruffin was there to sing "My Girl", but he was the only member of the Temptations to make the concert?  So people paid to see four Temptations but only got one?  That seems like a rip-off.  And I loved the Staples Singers so much when they sang on "The Weight" with The Band during "The Last Waltz", but here I just wasn't impressed by them.  OK, so Mavis Staples killed it on "Precious Lord Take My Hand", and so did Mahalia Jackson, but that's another church song.  And it was Martin Luther King's favorite hymn?  I'm tempted to ask "So what?" but that would probably get me into trouble.  

I'm going to say that the highlight of this whole concert was The 5th Dimension doing the two songs from "Hair", they recorded a medley of "The Age of Aquarius" and "Let the Sunshine In", and I liked everything about that, even the story that Billy Davis Jr. and Marilyn McCoo told about how they managed to see the Broadway show and convinced the producers of a mostly-white musical to let them record those songs as a single.  And then finding out that they appeared at the Harlem Cultural Festival to counter accusations that they weren't black enough when they covered songs by white people.  That's fascinating, all the way around. 

There's an interesting effect in merging the musical performances with the interviews, in addition to talking to some people who attended the festival, the filmmakers also interviewed some of the performers who are still alive, like Gladys Knight and Stevie Wonder, and other people who weren't there, like Chris Rock and Lin-Manuel Miranda, and got their reactions to watching the same footage that the audience just did. That all helps place this festival into proper historical perspective, but then part of me wishes that this film could have just been about the music, and also that the music could have been...better?  I hate to say that because "good" is subjective, and to some people this music might all be GREAT, but I just don't see it that way. 

The complaint among the Harlem community is that this festival took place the same year as Woodstock, but Woodstock got all the attention, with two feature films and a double-album, and the Harlem Cultural Festival was largely ignored, and it took fifty years to turn the footage into a documentary.  OK, I get that, but have you HEARD the music from the Woodstock Festival?  It totally kicked ass, except for Richie Havens and Sha Na Na.  TV producer Hal Tulchin recorded about 40 hours of concert footage in Harlem, and two TV specials aired clips from the festival in 1969, but that was it, the tapes then sat in a basement for 50 years.  The festival organizers tried for years to claim this was "the black Woodstock", but was it?  Also, you can't complain about Woodstock getting all the attention and then try to ride its coattails like that.  Plus, if you're going to do that, you might as well call this festival "Hoodstock".  

If you ask me, perhaps TOO much emphasis was placed here on the importance of this festival, there are cutaways explaining the Black Power movement, the rise of the afro, black fashions like the daishiki, and how significant it was that this many black people gathered together over the course of six Sundays in the summer of 1969.  You know, sometimes I just want to hear the music from a concert and not be bombarded with propaganda every five minutes.  I'm glad this was an important event for a lot of people, but give it a rest already. If it were a festival with mostly white performers and they were quoting the importance of white history and white fashion between the songs, and saying how great it was that so many white people assembled together in one place to celebrate being white, that would be very wrong, right?  Of course it would. Just saying. 

I don't know, maybe I'm just in a bad mood, I've got anxiety in my life right now because I'm not working much this month, so money's kind of tight.  I feel like either job could go away at any moment, and it troubles me.  I congratulate this film for winning the Oscar, and I acknowledge that the concerts were culturally significant, but they're just not my scene.  I read on IMDB that there were 40 hours of footage that got cut down to 24 hours, then 3 and 1/2, and finally 2.  Maybe that means the film would have been radically different if other choices had been made?  I'd be kind of interested in learning what material didn't make the cut. 

Also starring Ethel Beatty-Barnes, Barbara Bland-Acosta, Billy Davis Jr., Dorinda Drake, Sheila E., Margot Edman, Greg Errico, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Cyril "Bullwhip" Innis Jr., Musa Jackson, Gladys Knight (last seen in "Coming 2 America"), Adrienne Kryor, Alan Leeds, Darryl Lewis, Sal Masekela, Marilyn McCoo, Jim McFarland, Lin-Manuel Miranda (last seen in "Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It"), Luis Miranda (last seen in "In the Heights"), Denise Oliver-Velez, Roger Parris, Raoul Roach, Chris Rock (last seen in "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project"), Al Sharpton (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Greg Tate, Hal Tulchin, Allen Zirkin, 

with archive footage of Ray Barretto, Ben Branch, Stokely Carmichael (last seen in "Da 5 Bloods"), The Chambers Brothers, John Chancellor (last seen in "The U.S. vs. John Lennon"), Walter Cronkite (last heard in "Becoming Cousteau"), Sonny Fortune, Redd Foxx (last seen in "The Super Bob Einstein Movie"), Marcus Garvey Jr., Berry Gordy (last seen in "Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James"), Sly Stone (ditto), Edwin Hawkins, Walter Hawkins, Chuck Jackson, Mahalia Jackson (last seen in "Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President"), John F. Kennedy (last seen in "Julia"), Robert Kennedy (last seen in "WBCN and the American Revolution"), Tony Lawrence, Abbey Lincoln, John Lindsay, Moms Mabley, Malcolm X (last seen in "Judas and the Black Messiah"), Herbie Mann, Hugh Masekela, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Max Roach, Abe Rosenthal, David Ruffin, Mongo Santamaria, Nina Simone, The Staples Singers (also last seen in "Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President"), Willie Tyler, Blinky Williams. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 plugs for Maxwell House coffee

Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street

Year 14, Day 221 - 8/9/22 - Movie #4,220

BEFORE: If you look back through my Rock & Doc Block this year, you may spot a recurring theme, connecting the subjects Bob Ross, Jacques Cousteau, Julia Child and now the stars of Sesame Street - they're all PBS mainstays from decades past.  I think Sesame Street airs on HBO now, but that hardly matters - it's been a PBS kind of summer for me, since I also discovered the series "American Masters", which aired the Sammy Davis Jr. doc. and also the Rita Moreno one. HBO provided its share of material, also, by airing tonight's doc and also "Adrienne", "Jagged", "George Carlin's American Dream", "Becoming Mike Nichols", "Mr. Saturday Night", "Listening to Kenny G" and "The Super Bob Einstein Movie".  But as we've learned, all things must come to an end, so after tonight just four docs remain in the chain, but I think I'm going out with a bang. Tomorrow night, it's another concert film, and I really haven't watched enough of those. 

Dizzy Gillespie carries over from "Listening to Kenny G". 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story" (Movie #3,231), "Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey" (Movie #3,232)

THE PLOT: Take a stroll down Sesame Street and witness the birth of the most impactful children's series in TV history. From the iconic furry characters to the songs you know by heart, learn how a gang of visionary creators changed our world. 

AFTER: I feel I've sort of come full circle, in my doc chain and in my life - one of the first docs this year was a film about Rick James, and very early on in my career, I was a P.A. on a Rick James music video. (I know, I talk about it a lot, but it's one of the coolest moments in my life that I can reference...). While working for the same company, back in a land called the 1980's, I had the opportunity to work on a couple segments for "Sesame Street", pieces that CTW wanted to look like music videos.  One was called "Between", featuring a singer named Jeff Red, and you can catch that one on YouTube, I think.  I remember having to go to a prop house and choose a bed that most resembled a slice of bread, because one had to transition in post to the other. I can still remember the lyrics: "When there's cheese in the middle of two slices of bread, it's between, between.  And when you slip inside the sheets of your comfy bed, you're between, between."  That's just never going to go away, I'll be singing it when I'm 80 and in a nursing home, probably.  

The other video was called "Adventure", designed to teach kids the meaning of that word, and it starred the very popular group En Vogue, plus a couple of the Muppets, like Count von Count, Grover and Elmo.  This was before Elmo blew up bigger than the other characters and kind of went solo. (Yeah, this one's on YouTube, too, take a look if you want to peek into my past...) Anyway, while the women of En Vogue are on their adventures in Count's spooky castle, the director wanted the backgrounds to look like comic books, so the production company borrowed some actual comic books from me, to zoom into and create that style.  I remember making the director sign something that said if anything happened to the comics, then the company would buy me replacements, I was sort of a dick about it.  I remember also working on a shoot for a superhero-type version of Big Bird, only he was blue, and I don't know if Sesame Street ever did anything with that footage. 

Which kind of makes me wonder, why the hell didn't I try to get a job at the Children's Television Workshop?  I was young (21) and dumb, I guess, I had contacts there but I didn't hit anybody up for a job, that could have turned into a career. I might still be working there now, what a nice gig that might have been, and I'm trying to remember what prevented me from making moves in that direction. I guess because I was trying to be an adult and distance myself from childlike things, and I figured if I had to work on a children's show, I'd go bonkers or something.  My whole career in film and animation production, I've avoided children's shows, because really, just shoot me. So I charted my own course, moved on to work for a commercial animation agent, then an independent animator, then a couple of movie theaters.  But I'm sidelined right now, and so naturally I'm wondering what I did wrong, or if my life could have been better if I'd made different choices.  

But here's the thing, I also remember the CTW people seeming a bit uptight, like they took the education aspect of the show very seriously.  Each season of "Sesame Street" had a bible with the learning goals for each show, the lessons they wanted kids to learn, and if you've watch the show, you know they're also picky about the way the letters and numbers are presented - no serifs on the letters, for example, and the Q and the 9 have to be written on the screen a certain way, NO EXCEPTIONS, and so maybe I would have gone completely bonkers if I worked there. I guess I'll always wonder - a lot of guest stars have been on the show in the last 30 years, so maybe I missed out on collecting some cool stories about working on those shoots - instead I work at special movie screenings now and encounter celebrities that way, but maybe I'd have a bit more money in my bank account if I'd had a solid union job at CTW.  I just wish I knew if the universe was trying to tell me something, and if it was, did I miss it? 

Here's why the documentary is so tricky for me, though - I don't always like those "making of" segments that they used to add to DVDs as bonus features.  Maybe it's because I already know how films and TV are made, and so that stuff just doesn't interest me.  I already know how puppetry works, and I'm not that impressed by it, not even knowing where the puppeteer's hand goes in Big Bird's head, so one of his wings never moves as a result.  Who cares how the sausage is made?  Not me.  But I'll admit it was nice to see Jim Henson and Frank Oz working Bert & Ernie together, and to realize how much of their personalities came through in those characters.  

I already knew about Joan Ganz Cooney, she spoke at my college graduation ceremony, but I'll admit I didn't know much about the contributions of Jon Stone, who came up with the idea for the NYC street-like set and directed many episodes of the show.  Like many other people, I watched "Sesame Street" regularly when I was a kid, and I got caught up in its illusory nature. I didn't get the joke about the show being "sponsored" by specific letters and numbers until I was older, and realized that "J" or "8" were taking the place of Ivory Soap or Folger's coffee, which adults probably found hilarious, right?  

Also, I knew all the characters by their stage names, and didn't realize until many years later that those were actors who had different names in real life.  To me they were Maria and Bob and Gordon and Luis, and I honestly didn't think much about any other reality.  Perhaps when I realized that the "Mad Painter" character looked an awful lot like Mr. Bentley on the sitcom "The Jeffersons" did I start to understand what actors were, and that they could play different people on different programs.  And tonight I re-learned that there were really TWO different people who played Gordon, Matt Robinson and Roscoe Orman - they sort of hint that there's a story there, the first Gordon was maybe some kind of activist, and though he helped create the first black Muppet, Roosevelt Franklin, that character fell out of favor because it was perceived as a bit of a negative stereotype.  I've just looked up the first Gordon on Wikipedia, and learned there have really been FOUR actors playing Gordon over the years.  My childhood is a lie?  Anyway, it seems there was a changing of the guard in 2016, all of the characters I knew as a kid retired or aged out of the program.  Still, that's a solid gig, if you can play a character for 35 or 40 years, like actors do on some soap operas.  

Meanwhile, everyone from Raul Julia, Lily Tomlin, Andrea Martin, and Kristin Chenoweth to Charlotte Rae, Bill Irwin, Ruth Buzzi and Michael Jeter played recurring characters, and if you go back to the earlier days, people like Mel Brooks and Betty White often did the voice-overs for the animated segments - which have been directed by a lot of people I've known in real life, like Mo Willems, Jen Oxley and John Dilworth, so what the heck was I so afraid of, that I chose not to work on Sesame Street?  I should have my head examined.  Oh, well, I've got my pride, at least. 

I don't usually say this, but I wish they'd played more clips from the show, but I guess this doc is really intended to show more of the back-story, the methodology of the creators of the show, rather than rehashing what's been seen on the screen.  I'm kind of over the Muppets, anyway, they've all changed since they got bought out by Disney, just like your favorite band started to suck once they got that big multi-album recording contract, am I right?  Just like Anthony Bourdain when he signed the deal for his THIRD travel show with CNN.  Let's face it, nothing's as good as you remember it being when you were younger.  Just me?  And on top of that, we learn that Jim Henson got divorced because he was spending too much time working with the Muppets and not enough time with his kids.  This is another common theme in this year's documentaries, just as Wolfgang Puck's son had to learn cooking, and Jacques Coustea's sons had to learn scuba diving, Henson's had to learn puppetry so they could spend more time with their father. That's kind of sad, I think. 

Also starring Frank Biondo, Linda Bove, Fran Brill (last seen in "Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey"), Joan Ganz Cooney (ditto), Emilio Delgado (ditto), Bob McGrath (ditto), Roscoe Orman (ditto), Martin P. Robinson (ditto), Caroll Spinney (ditto), Christopher Cerf, Sam Gibbon, Bob Hatch, Brian Henson, Lisa Henson, Sharon Lerner, Loretta Long, Dick Maitland, Sonia Manzano (last seen in "Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It"), Lloyd Morrisett Jr., Jeff Moss, Edward L. Palmer, Holly Robinson Peete (last seen in "21 Jump Street"), Nick Raposo, Dolores Robinson, Matt Robinson, Dulcy Singer, Norman Stiles, 

with archive footage of Muhammad Ali (last seen in "The Super Bob Einstein Movie"), Paul Benedict (last seen in "After the Sunset"), Cab Calloway (last seen in "Sammy Davis Jr.: I've Gotta Be Me"), Northern Calloway, Johnny Carson (also carrying over from "Listening to Kenny G"), Johnny Cash (last seen in "Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind"), James Taylor (ditto), Dick Cavett (last seen in "Julia"), Fred Rogers (ditto), David D. Connell, Evelyn Davis, Danny Epstein, David Hartman, Florence Henderson (last seen in "Dean Martin: King of Cool"), Jane Henson, Jim Henson (last seen in "Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey"), Richard Hunt (ditto), Will Lee (ditto), Jerry Nelson (ditto), Lena Horne (last seen in "Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice"), Jesse Jackson (last seen in "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project"), Peter Jennings (ditto), James Earl Jones (last seen in "Coming 2 America"), Jerry Juhl, Madeline Kahn (last seen in "Mel Brooks Unwrapped"), B.B. King (last seen in "WBCN and the American Revolution"), Martin Luther King (also last seen in "Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It"), Emily Perl Kingsley, Eda LeShan, Gerald S. Lesse, Shari Lewis, Kermit Love, Loretta Lynn (last seen in "Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President"), Bob McRaney, Pat Nixon (last seen in "Sammy Davis Jr..: I've Gotta Be Me"), Richard Nixon (last seen in "The Kid Stays in the Picture"), Dinah Shore (ditto), Chet O'Brien, Odetta (last seen in "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan"), Frank Oz (last seen in "Knives Out"), Jack Paar (last seen in "Betty White: First Lady of Television"), Joe Raposo, Alaina Reed, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Lisa Simon, Paul Simon (last seen in "Becoming Mike Nichols"), Buffalo Bob Smith, Emily Squires, Jon Stone, Ed Sullivan (last seen in "Lucy and Desi"), Orson Welles (last seen in "Wolfgang"), Stevie Wonder (last seen in "Under the Volcano")

RATING: 6 out of 10 quickly-consumed cookies

Listening to Kenny G

Year 14, Day 219 - 8/7/22 - Movie #4,219

BEFORE: Just five documentaries left in the chain after this one, but I'm still spacing them out so I don't have a big 2-week gap in September, ideally.  So I should be done with the Summer Rock & Doc Block in just about a week - and the theme for the last week is going to be "Entertainers & Politicians" - which kind of works because I think when this is over, I'll have two new co-champions with more appearances this year than Nicolas Cage, and one of them was an entertainer, and the other was a politician. They're both very likely to turn up in any documentary about the 1960's through 1980's. 

Oprah Winfrey carries over from "Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain". It's kind of cheating, I know, because simply everybody has been on Oprah's show at some point, so who's surprised when two documentaries show their subject with her?  It's an easy link, no doubt - but I also get the satisfaction of knowing that if Anthony Bourdain were still around, he'd totally hate the idea of putting the documentary about Kenny G next to the one about him. Sorry, Tony, but you don't get to complain about this sort of thing any more.  

THE PLOT: An examination of the most popular instrumentalist of all time, Kenny G, and why he is polarizing to so many. 

AFTER: I'm now done with every movie that got signed to HBO's "Music Box" series that I wanted to see - I had no interest in the documentary about DMX, I just stuck to the ones that interested me. Well, sort of. I'm not really a Kenny G fan, so he's kind of on the cusp of who I'll watch a documentary about - provided he's lived a fascinating enough life, that is.  I didn't really know much about, say, Dick Gregory or Tiny Tim or Elaine Stritch until I took the time to watch their biographical docs - it's been an educational month-plus, that's for sure.  But is Kenny G a diverse enough person to hold my interest for 97 minutes?  For me, that's a big no. 

I don't feel much of a connection to his music, and it turns out I'm not alone - the music experts interviewed here don't think much of his music because it's not straight jazz, it's not really pop, and it certainly isn't rock, so what is it?  It's kind of it's own thing, what later came to be called "Smooth Jazz" by the people who name radio formats, and they built that format around HIS music.  The name came from a woman in a focus group who claimed to hate jazz, but she liked Kenny G because it was so smooth - that led to the A-HA moment in the marketing department, and for years Smooth Jazz was the music of choice for office buildings and dentist offices around the nation.  Mr. G's music is even bigger in China, where they play his song "Going Home" as the official song of closing businesses for the day, it's nearly mandatory to have that instrumental played, instead of a bell or a whistle, at closing time, signalling to all the workers it's time to stop working and pack up.  Yes, whether it's a factory or a shopping mall, nothing clears people out like playing Kenny G music - that seems about right.  

Kenny himself didn't really know this when he played in China, and accidentally played "Going Home" midway through a concert, and according to him, a fair number of people recognized the song, thought this meant that the concert was over and headed for the exits.  Umm, sure, Kenny, that's why half the crowd left your show early, if it makes you feel better to tell yourself that.  Now, what's the reason why people in America do the same thing?  Right, to beat the crowds and get out of the parking lot faster, sure. 

Kenny G also has a pretty high opinion of his own music, I get that, but I wonder why they didn't find more people to interview who also hold his compositions in high regard.  It makes me wonder if there are any experts out there who do - traditionally you would expect them to interview people who LIKE the subject of a documentary, not ones who can barely tolerate his music or feel very neutral about it.  One interviewed subject takes things a bit too far, referring to his instrumentals as "masturbation", and I hated it back in film school when people in class used that metaphor for any film they didn't like.  It should be reserved for films that are completely self-indulgent, but my issue with it is that it tries to make masturbation sound like a bad thing, and it's just not - it's sex with someone you care about.  Plus, that seems so archaic and Puritan to have a problem with self-pleasure.  Now, I think what the guy meant was that most jazz is performed by groups, like trios and quartets, where the musicians play off each other, take turns with the solos, and by contrast, Kenny G is just one guy, so therefore if most jazz is like group sex, then his instrumentals are therefore masturbatory.  But still, maybe find a better metaphor that doesn't link something quite pleasurable for many people to the music that you don't like.

His music also has a reputation for evoking emotions, and stories abound about people playing his songs in the background while, umm, in a romantic mood.  These people have never heard of Barry White or Marvin Gaye, I guess. Kenny himself doesn't claim to be that romantic of a person, but he was married twice and he has two sons (college graduates now), so he must have been in love at some point, right?  But this doc doesn't really get into that, it focuses more on record sales than relationships.  And Kenny's side hustles as a golfer and a pilot.  Musician, golfer, pilot, all of those things are somewhat similar in that they require a combination of skills, developed through practice, hard work and determination.  It's one thing to be diverse, but I don't know, it feels like maybe he's TOO diverse, that maybe he takes everything a bit too seriously.  

Still, for a Jewish guy from Seattle who almost went into his father's plumbing business, and studied accounting in college, he's done very well in the music business, despite what the haters say.  It's good to know that at least one high school "band nerd" made a career out of playing the saxophone, even if it took some time and a few different bands before Clive Davis offered him a solo record contract.  (He did play in Barry White's Love Unlimited Orchestra while still in high school, but that's not mentioned in this documentary.). What's weird is that he's composed many of his own songs, but has to work with professional musicians when it comes to things like chord progressions.  He can work out melodies, but not chords?  I guess that kind of makes sense, when I took a music theory class in junior high I had a similar problem, there were just too many choices, and the teacher couldn't quite explain which ones should follow the others, or maybe I was too dumb to understand it - let's just say it's a tricky thing to learn. 

Kenny G was also an early investor in Starbucks, so between that, record sales, royalties and tour money, he's probably doing quite well financially, and that gives him the freedom to record whatever he wants and collaborate with whoever he wants, so who cares what the critics say?  As you may know I work for an independent animator who's always running out of money, but the saving grace is that he gets to tell whatever story in his animation that he wants, there's no Hollywood studio telling him what the plot needs to be or censoring his content or language - and money does eventually come, sooner or later he'll get an offer to animate this commercial or that pilot project, and that keeps his studio going and keeps me employed - though quite often it's a case of feast or famine, and we're in a famine cycle right now.  Between Kickstarter campaigns and art sales to collectors, occasional royalty checks and money from foreign distributors, we keep the studio in business, but once in a while the insurance gets cancelled or the internet gets turned off, those are the breaks.  But man, it would be nice to work for somebody with a more steady stream of income and not have to worry about that for a while. 

But then there are the REAL Kenny G haters, like jazz musician Pat Metheny, who took issue with him playing a sax solo in a virtual duet with Louis Armstrong on "What a Wonderful World".  Since Kenny G is not a jazz artist, this recording irked a fair number of people who thought it was like spray-painting graffiti on the Mona Lisa, or even worse, some form of cultural appropriation for a white man to earn money and take credit for a recording made years ago by a black artist.  Yeah, that's a tough battle to fight, and probably the best thing to do is not even make that record in the first place, or if you do get away with it, just smile, nod, pick up your check and walk away quickly from any controversy like that. 

There are still worlds left to conquer, Kenny G would love to get back into working on soundtracks, he has done some music for films like "Dying Young" and "The Bodyguard", but he's got bigger plans, and there are some montages in this documentary, pieced together from clips from films like "Twister" and "Schindler's List", that give a suggestion of the stuff he'd like to do for Hollywood, and he's probably standing by the phone waiting for that call.  Hey, I say if Trent Reznor can win two Oscars for doing soundtrack work (for "The Social Network" and "Soul"), so can Kenny G.  Reznor is 75% of the way toward EGOT status, but all Kenny G has is one Grammy.  Hang in there, Kenny!

Also starring Kenny G (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Clive Davis (last seen in "Whitney"), James Gardiner, John Halle, Allen Kepler, Jason King (last seen in "Sammy Davis Jr..: I've Gotta Be Me"), Will Layman, Pat Prescott, Ben Ratliff, Chris Washburne, 

with archive footage of Louis Armstrong (also last seen in "Sammy Davis Jr.: I've Gotta Be Me"), Nat "King" Cole (ditto), Whitney Houston (ditto), Michael Bolton (last seen in "The Onion Movie"), Johnny Carson (last seen in "Wolfgang"), Katie Couric (ditto), Tom Cruise (ditto), Craig Ferguson (ditto), Arsenio Hall (ditto), Joan Rivers (ditto), Dana Carvey (last seen in "The Eyes of Tammy Faye"), Phil Hartman (ditto), Bill Clinton (last seen in "We Feed People"), Chelsea Clinton, Hillary Clinton (last seen in "Irresistible"), Natalie Cole, John Coltrane, Tony Danza (last seen in "Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond"), Sammy Davis Jr. (last seen in "Lucy and Desi"), Miles Davis, Jimmy Fallon (last seen in "The Accidental President"), Ralph Fiennes (last seen in "The Dig"), Warren G, Stan Getz, Mel Gibson (last seen in "Can We Take a Joke?"), Dizzy Gillespie (last seen in "Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President"), Merv Griffin (last seen in "Mr. Saturday Night"), Chris Hardwick, Helen Hunt (last seen in "How It Ends"), Janet Jackson (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Kashif, Jimmy Kimmel (last seen in "The Super Bob Einstein Movie"), Liberace (ditto), Larry King (ditto), Evelyn "Champagne" King, Jay Leno (last seen in "Julia"), Ramsey Lewis, Norm MacDonald (last heard in "Klaus"), Madonna (last seen in "Jagged"), Chuck Mangione, Reba McEntire (last heard in "Spies in Disguise"), Pat Metheny, Mike Myers (last seen in "The Sparks Brothers"), Bill Paxton (last seen in "Haywire"), Katy Perry, Joaquin Phoenix (last seen in "Reservation Road"), Drew Pinsky, Charlie Rose (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Will Smith (last seen in "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project"), Rod Stewart (last seen in "Tina"), Junior Walker, Dionne Warwick (last seen in "The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart"), The Weeknd (last seen in "Uncut Gems"), Kanye West (last seen in "Borat Subsequent Moviefilm")

RATING: 5 out of 10 internet challenges

Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain

Year 14, Day 218 - 8/6/22 - Movie #4,218

BEFORE: Anthony Bourdain and Emeril Lagasse carry over from "Wolfgang" - both men were seen in archive footage yesterday in a montage of some of the TV-stars who have become famous by following in the footsteps of Wolfgang Puck.  This is somewhat ironic because Bourdain totally dissed Emeril in his book and his first TV show, but he later reconciled with him on his second show.  

Yes, I'm THAT familiar with Bourdain's career, except I didn't watch any of his latest travel/food show on CNN, because by that time I'd seen through his mystique and I'd grown tired of it.  When this documentary was released last summer, I was working at an AMC and I made a few friends among the teens and twenty-somethings that worked there, but I bonded with one in particular, who was looking forward to this film being released, and also "Dune". I felt it was my duty as his friend to warn him about the David Lynch version of "Dune", but we disagreed about Bourdain, he was a big fan and by that time, I was so over Bourdain that I couldn't bring myself to get excited about the doc. (I'll explain this further below.) So I boycotted it, but I did promise my friend that I would watch it someday, and today is someday.  

This will wrap up "Chef Week" here at the Movie Year, it's been a good addition to the doc topic line-up, all things considered.  I'm glad I was able to work these four films in, it's a relief to have them off the board, and now I don't have to do this again.  

        

THE PLOT: A documentary about Anthony Bourdain and his career as a chef, writer and host, revered and renowned for his authentic approach to food, culture and travel. 

AFTER: OK, my first beef today is with CNN, which played the version of "Roadrunner" that I watched and burned to DVD.  The running time of "Roadrunner" is 1 hour and 57 minutes, and CNN aired the film a few months ago in a 2-hour timeslot, which was FILLED with commercials.  I get it, you have to pay the bills, but something had to give, to fit an 117-minute movie and at least 30 minutes of ads into a 2-hour slot, logically, mathematically, something had to be cut.  So what did I miss?  This morning I had to find the film online (HBO Max) in its unedited form, and it turns out, I missed quite a lot because CNN cut the HELL out of this movie.  Either air the movie or don't air the movie, but for God's sake, don't just cut things out of the film at random just to squeeze it into your time available. That should be illegal - and any director who allows a TV station to make edits to their movie this way should either sue them or have their head examined.  When I saw that John Lurie was listed in the IMDB credits but I hadn't seen him in the version I watched, I knew something was up.  

I'm going to pause here and skip through the film on HBO Max to see what I missed...  Jeezus, they cut out Bourdain in France, being bothered by a mime?  That's reality show GOLD right there - so CNN killed the film, it's death by a thousand (literal) cuts.  CNN, who was the third network to finance Bourdain's travels around the world with the show "Parts Unknown", and this is how they treat their (former) talent?  Jeezus again, the man is dead and you're still treating him like a damn commodity, somebody you can control, silence, keep under wraps - eff you, CNN.  First you cancel CNN+ so I can't see the Dionne Warwick documentary, and now this?  They also cut out a scene from Bourdain's travels in Haiti, where he encountered a number of poor, hungry people and tried to donate the food left over from his shoot to people on the street, and chaos ensued (this kind of echoed a scene in "We Feed People" where José Andrés chastised one of his workers for giving out food in a disorganized fashion).  There's a bit of a message here, but you won't get that message if you watch the hacked-up version on CNN. Let's just chop out the footage of the starving people and cut right to Bourdain and his young daughter, sure, why not?  Kiss my ass, CNN.  

Now, the rest of my issues today are with Mr. Bourdain himself - and maybe some of the things I'm going to say won't be popular, or P.C., but they represent how I feel.  Mental illness, drug abuse, suicide, these are very complicated problems, often they don't have simple solutions, and attempts to "fix" these issues often have mixed results and unintended consequences.  I know that avoiding the problems (editing them out of your life, the CNN solution) is not the answer, so I'm going to talk about them, even if somebody out there doesn't like my comments or my ideas or my feelings.  I just watched the scene with Bourdain and Josh Homme (another one that CNN edited out) and there was an interesting comment - "Nothing feels better than going home, and nothing feels better than leaving home."  Yes, that's true, and it's part of the paradox that was Anthony Bourdain - why couldn't he just, you know, be happy?  He mentions days out grilling in his backyard, cooking for his wife and daughter, and being ridiculously happy, why couldn't he just stop traveling and DO THAT?  That just wasn't in his nature, part of his deal was that he ultimately had to self-sabotage everything, maybe in a way everybody does, to some degree. 

Let me back up for a moment, because Bourdain was another one of those people, like Julia Child, Wolfgang Puck, Betty White, Rita Moreno, Jerry Lewis, George Carlin, Rick James and Dick Gregory, who kept advancing, changing careers, failing upward until he was deemed a success. (Meanwhile, his personal heroes were Ernest Hemingway, Charles Bukowski and Hunter S. Thompson, and those are a few big red flags right there...). He started as a mid-level cook at a NYC brasserie called Les Halles, and decided to write a memoir about the behind-the-scenes shenanigans at a NYC brasserie, and the book was a hit.  People were shocked (and also NOT shocked) when they learned that restaurants recycle the uneaten bread, the reason why you shouldn't order fish on Sundays, and the fact that the cooking staff from all the restaurants get together after the restaurants close and eat and get drunk and do drugs and god knows what else.  But he was telling his truth, and that was refreshing.  

"Kitchen Confidential" was a best seller, and then came "A Cook's Tour" as a book and a TV show - for my money, that was one of the most brilliant TV shows I ever watched, a guy who'd never traveled much being given a chance to tour other countries, with a TV network paying all the expenses.  That's the dream, right?  That's like winning the damn lottery, and he won that lottery THREE times. But spending so much time on the road torpedoed his first marriage, and then eventually the second one, too.  There's always going to be a disconnect when one half of a couple is on the road and the other isn't, it's the rock-star conundrum - one person goes out to tour and make the money, the other stays at home, and an imbalance is created.  Bourdain also got used to spending time alone, and that takes a toll, too.  Everything has an expiration date, sure, but there's no reason to hurry things along.  Bourdain was traveling, staying at nice hotels around the world, but dining alone - eventually this can lead to a desire to burn down one's life to the ground and start over.  We've all been there, when it's time to make a decision about quitting a job or ending a relationship or making some other kind of change, but then there are grown-up ways to do those things, and also very childish ways.  

After "A Cook's Tour", and all his issues with the Food Network, Bourdain moved on to the Travel Channel, and his second show, "No Reservations" - I watched every damn episode, but then he started having issues with his overlords at the Travel Channel.  Hmm, what's the common factor there?  I think he would have had issues with ANY network that tried to tell him what to do or what to say. By the time CNN offered him a multi-million dollar deal for "Parts Unknown", I was done.  I remember when my favorite band, ZZ Top, signed a multi-million dollar deal with a new record label, and then their music started to suck. It happens - people get rich sometimes and they stop trying, they forget what it's like to struggle and they start phoning it in.  

OK, I'm dancing all around it, but it's time to talk about mental illness, depression and such. It's hard for me to diagnose long-distance, of course, but maybe Bourdain was a bit like my constantly rebooting DVR, he somehow got the wrong mental software downloaded into his brain, and so life became a struggle, and traveling around the world became both a solution and part of the problem. Being in a relationship, same thing, it was his foundation in one way but also perceived as the anchor that was holding him back.  Starting a new relationship offered temporary relief, but eventually became its own problem.  Suddenly the guy who'd burned down two marriages had to experience what it was like to be the one left behind, rather than the one doing the leaving, and maybe he couldn't handle it.  Before stepping out with a new lover, that actress worked her way into Bourdain's crew, directing an episode here, getting that particular cameraman fired, and all that is a form of poison when you start mixing business with relationships. 

Suicide is the ultimate "Fuck you" move - besides being the ultimate expression of self-harm, it's also a terrible thing for a person to do to their friends and family, who then have to deal with the pain and the loss.  What a dick move. Get help, get therapy, try yoga, get a new hobby, watch some cartoons, do whatever it takes to not kill yourself during one of those down moments.  Maybe it's not that easy, but then maybe it is, I don't know, I'm not a mental health professional.  But I've had my down moments, too, especially over the last couple of years - if you haven't been depressed during the Trump years and the pandemic, man, you just weren't paying attention. I lost one job and I had to find a new tribe and a new purpose and I'm still constantly anxious about money and work and self-worth and my parents' health issues, but giving up just isn't an option, and I wonder why Bourdain did, leaving two ex-wives, an ex-girlfriend, a daughter and many friends to feel that pain and loss. 

Plus, that defines him now - his legacy is that of someone who got consumed by darkness at the end, and I'm not sure that's accurate, only everyone who talks about Bourdain in this film kind of confirms, yeah, that's who he was.  He had an addictive personality, but was also always joking about killing himself or blowing things up or harming others, and so there wasn't just a warning sign, there was like a highway's worth of warning signs.  So maybe he's proof that you can't run away forever, but as Jim Steinman once wrote, there's nothing wrong with getting a good head start. Part of me wanted to believe that maybe he didn't mean to kill himself, perhaps he was just indulging in some auto-erotic asphyxiation, trying to get a better orgasm by choking himself. But I wasn't there, I don't know the details, so we may never know - and somehow in our society it's better to be perceived as a depressive mental patient than a kinky thrill-seeker, I guess. 

Look, I don't have all the answers, I never said that I did, even though I often act like I do. These issues of what it all means, how to get and stay happy, how to feel satisfied whether you're stuck at home or traveling around the world, whether you're alone or with someone who unexplicably cares about you, it's all very complicated.  But we owe it to ourselves to keep trying to solve the puzzle of our own lives, every day, keep trying new things or finding new solutions, and if one road is blocked, try a different one.  Or take a day for yourself once in a while, do something silly or pointless that makes you feel good, just don't overdo it, all things in moderation and balance.  And when absolutely necessary, if you have to burn your life to the ground and start again, try to deal with that as best you can - but if you're just a mid-level cook at a struggling restaurant or the equvialent of that, honestly, that's OK too.  At the end of the day, I don't know if life is better experienced as a constant journey, a sequence of going places, or by staying in one place and trying to be happy there.  Are you defined by where you go and what you do there, or is life ultimately nothing but a series of bad decisions that all sort of made sense at the time?

Please, for God's sake, for all that you consider holy, do NOT watch the hacked-up version on CNN, watch the film on HBO Max, with no edits, the way the director intended.  Why someone with an agenda had to cut John Lurie and Josh Homme out of this film to make it safe for TV, I honestly have no idea.  You can only take out so many little Jenga pieces before the entire tower collapses.  I guess the big controversy here was that the director used computer "deepfake" simulations of Bourdain's voice - because who the HELL reads all their e-mails out loud? - but I don't care about that, the bigger travesty is shredding the film, and therefore any sense of continuous narrative, for airing on TV. 

Also starring Christopher Bourdain, Ottavia Bourdain, David Chang, Helen M. Cho, David Choe, Christopher Collins, Morgan Fallon, Josh Homme (last seen in "Dean Martin: King of Cool"), Philippe Lajaunie, Todd Liebler, John Lurie, Alison Mosshart, Doug Quint, Karen Rinaldi, Eric Ripert, Joel Rose, Lydia Tenaglia, Tom Vitale, Kim Witherspoon, 

with archive footage of Christiane Amanpour (last seen in "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project"), Asia Argento, Cate Blanchett (last seen in "An Ideal Husband"), David Bowie (last seen in "Jagged"), Marlon Brando (last seen in "Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It"), Charles Bronson (last seen in "The Sandpiper"), Anderson Cooper (last seen in "The Accidental President"), Bradley Cooper (last seen in "All About Steve"), Christopher Doyle, Adam Driver (last seen in "The Sparks Brothers"), Bengt Ekerot (last seen in "The Seventh Seal"), Terry Gilliam (last seen in "Jupiter Ascending"), Ernest Hemingway (last seen in "The Kid Stays in the Picture"), David Letterman (also carrying over from "Wolfgang"), Trevor Noah (last seen in "All In: The Fight for Democracy"), Iggy Pop (last seen in "Bad Reputation"), Nancy Putkoski, Keith Richards (last seen in "Count Me In"), Lance Robertson, Martin Sheen (last seen in "Judas and the Black Messiah"), Michael Steed, Max von Sydow (last seen in "Lucy and Desi"), Hunter S. Thompson (last seen in "Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President"), Harvey Weinstein, Oprah Winfrey (last seen in "Spielberg"), Tracy Westmoreland, Zach Zamboni. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 jiu-jitsu matches

Wolfgang

Year 14, Day 217 - 8/5/22 - Movie #4,217

BEFORE: I'm fighting with the cable company AGAIN, it's the company whose name rhymes with "rectum". I've got an older DVR and I can't upgrade it, because it's full of movies that I PAID FOR but haven't had a chance to watch yet, because I've got a system, and they don't understand that. And they persist in downloading NEW software updates to my OLD (three years old) DVR, which causes it to crash and reboot, over and over.  So now I'm trying to get them to reinstall the old software, which worked and didn't crash, and they say they can't do that.  OK, well, how about you download all these saved movies from my current DVR drive to another drive, and let me have a new box with those movies THAT I PAID FOR on it?  Nope, they can't do that either.  Well, here's an idea, since they KNOW that my DVR can't handle the new software, what about just opting me out from the update, and NOT downloading the new software to it that causes it to crash repeatedly?   Nope, that's not an option either.  It's so simple, just DON'T send me the update, and they can't handle that. "Oh, we want everybody to have the best, most upgraded software..."  Great, only it's like putting the wrong gas in your car, you just know the engine can't handle it, but sure, let's do it anyway.  Idiots.  

Their only proposed solution is to give me a new, empty DVR and I then lose access to about 65 movies that I PAID FOR with my monthly cable bills, and many of those movies are not currently running on any channel, so then I'd have to go and watch them on another service, maybe iTunes or YouTube, which would cost me money, so no, you can NOT upgrade my DVR, not unless you figure out a way to transfer all those movies over to the new drive.  I'll cancel my service completely before I let that happen.  The best advice from the service technician was to try and clear some of the movies off the DVR, put them on VHS or DVD, and then turn in the box.  Well, yeah, that's a constant process for me, but not every channel allows me to make dubs like that, plus the new DVR won't allow me to dub movies to DVD at all, AND how do you expect me to do that when the DVR keeps crashing?  Thanks for the non-helpful advice, buddy, go take a long walk off a short pier while you're at it.  I realize that all equipment has a lifespan, and someday my DVR will die and need to be replaced, but there's no need to hurry the process along by downloading new software to it that it can't handle.  This is why I avoid updates on my phone and computer, too, it's a scammy process that eventually leads to me needing a new phone or new computer, so no thanks.  I want to be the one who decides when I upgrade my hardware, not a software incompatibility problem.  OK, rant over. 

Julia Child carries over from "Julia". 

THE PLOT: An intimate portrait of the life and work of the original "celebrity chef", Wolfgang Puck. 

AFTER: At first glance, Wolfgang Puck appears to be a very happy guy - but when he starts talking about his early days getting into cooking, he mentions that he hated his stepfather.  Wolfie grew up in a poor-ish family in Austria, and his stepfather always made him feel like he was never good enough, that he'd never amount to anything, that if he started working in the restaurant industry he'd be sure to fail, and he'd come home a month later, admitting defeat.  In other words, his stepfather was German. Oh, I know that level of mind-fuckery very well, I had two German grandmothers, plus a Polish grandfather and another half-German one (from Alsace, so possibly French).  Actually, one grandmother was half-German and half-Irish, so she was the nicer one - the full German grandmother gave me that same treatment when I was a teen, and she moved into my parents' house.  I was lazy, I needed a haircut, I was doing well in school but somehow I was still never going to amount to anything - so I feel you, Wolfgang.

I don't know if this all goes back to Germany losing World Wars I AND II or what, because my grandmother left Bavaria before Hitler took over - Wolfgang Puck was born in 1949, so post WWII but by then the national resentment was probably twice as bad, and they took it out on their children.  But for some Germans and Austrians, there was a hidden motivating effect, Puck was twice as determined to succeed as a chef JUST to prove his stepfather wrong.  And he didn't just stay away for a month, he didn't return home for YEARS, that'll show 'em.  He was doing well working in Provence, Monaco and Paris, but even if he weren't, he'd probably rather live in a rundown flat or on the street rather than go home and give his stepfather the satisfaction of being proven right.  

But then Puck came to the United States, and spent two years in Indianapolis - though this doc makes it seem like he headed straight for L.A., where he became chef at a French restaurant named Ma Maison, at a time when people didn't care who cooked their food, they only sort of cared who owned which restaurant.  That seems silly, don't you pick a barber or a doctor based on their abilities, not by who owns the barber shop or the hospital?  Wolfgang first changed the menu at Ma Maison, then he went and changed the whole industry by becoming the first celebrity chef.  But he still wanted to own his own restaurant, so when the owner of Ma Maison offered him part ownership of the restaurant but less pay, he hit the road and opened up Spago instead in 1982.  

There's no mention here about Wolfgang's first wife, but his second wife was his business partner at Spago - funny, I thought you shouldn't mix business with pleasure, but it seemed to work for them, for a while, anyway.  After 15 years of success they moved Spago to Beverly Hills and then opened up other restaurants all over the world, so they must have been absolutely raking it in.  Nothing gold can stay, Puck was jetsetting around the world and hosting Oscar parties, and he and Barbara split up in 2003.  I wonder, did she get half the restaurant empire, or just the money?  The documentary doesn't say.  Puck issues the same refrain I've heard many times in these documentaries, from Frank Zappa to Luciano Pavarotti, all these guys wish they hadn't worked so hard and that they'd spent more time with their kids, been better fathers.  Puck sort of has an excuse here, because he didn't have a child until he was 40 and a success, and of course it takes time and effort to run a restaurant empire, but still, if his stepfather was so shitty he really should have figured out a way to be a more hands-on father.

Wolfgang's been around so long that we've all gotten used to him as the elder statesmen of chefs - it's a bit weird to see footage of him when he was in his 30's and 40's and realize that he was young once, too.  Kind of like seeing that glamorous nude photo of Julia Child...shudder...  And as this documentary shows, he appeared on nearly every talk show in history, doing cooking segments of one kind or another.  Julia Child might have been one of the first chefs to host a TV cooking show, but Wolfgang was really the first one to be on every talk show, every channel.  A familiar face, a household name, and who knows, there might not even have been a Food Network if he hadn't been so high-profile.  Julia gave way to Wolfgang, who gave way to Emeril, Rachael and so on.  

And there might not have ever been smoked salmon pizza if Puck's restaurant hadn't run out of bread on the night when Joan Collins showed up, and he invented the dish to satisfy her.  He maybe didn't single-handedly invent California cuisine, but he sure popularized it.  Mixing the fresh local produce with French cooking techniques might have been genius, but why did it take so long for this Austrian to finally put some damn weiner schnitzel on his menu?  To me that should have been a no-brainer from the start. French cooking gets all the good press, but to me German cooking is where it's at. Three years ago we were at the buffet at the Paris Hotel in Vegas, and there were five food stations, representing different regions in France - Brittany, Provence, Normandy, Burgundy and Alsace.  Just genius - but my favorite was the Alsatian food. 

Another casino-related story, in February 2017 we visited Wolfgang Puck's American Grille at the Borgata in Atlantic City (an apparent casualty of the pandemic, it re-opened without Puck as the American Bar & Grille...).  I enjoyed New England clam chowder, a roast half-chicken and a chocolate peanut butter tart for dessert.  But this story is about the guy at the table next to us, who we came to call "Twitchy" for obvious reasons.  My wife had noticed him earlier at the Borgata, because they're both smokers, and she kind of notices the other people who step outside for cigarettes when she does. At his table he was acting, well, very twitchy, and talking to himself, wondering out loud how soon his pizza would arrive, he had left something in his car, and he asked us to watch his stuff while he ran to his car - who DOES that?  We never answered him, we pretended not to notice him, but he acted as if we'd agreed to watch his coat and bag, so he stepped out.  Dude, we never agreed.  So the waiter came over to us and saw Twitchy's coat and bag, but in a public place you're not supposed to leave a bag unattended, and an unattended bag is something of a security risk. We told the waiter about this twitchy guy who might have said he was heading to his car in the garage, but the waiter really wanted to turn the table, so he picked up the coat and bag and took them to lost and found - we tried, Twitchy, we did, but the waiter didn't want to hear it.  Within minutes, a couple was seated at Twitchy's table and we just sat and waited for the fireworks that were sure to happen when he returned.  I think we told the couple what had happened before they arrived, and when Twitchy came back, the waiter had his pizza boxed up and ready to go, and sent him on his way.  I guess the moral is that the biggest sin at a Wolfgang Puck restaurant is taking up space without actually being present, they'll pack up your stuff and your food and kick you out.  Good to know. 

Anyway, Wolfgang Puck's getting older and he's got some regrets, sure, but he's still crushing it on the restaurant scene.  Like Julia Child and so many of this year's documentary subjects, he's reinvented himself a couple times over, but he's also looking forward and not back, while still wondering how much "forward" he's got left in him.  Well, he's on wife number three and got two more kids out of the deal, so there's a second chance to be a better father, I guess. I'm still not sure if being rich and famous makes that easier or harder, though. 

Also starring Wolfgang Puck (last seen in "The Weather Man"), Evan Funke, Barbara Lazaroff, Byron Lazaroff-Puck, Laurie Ochoa, Michael Ovitz, Mark Peel, Christine Puck, Gelila Assefa Puck, Ruth Reichl (also carrying over from "Julia"), Nancy Silverton, Patrick Terrail, 

with archive footage of Ed Begley Jr. (last seen in "Eating Raoul"), Anthony Bourdain, Michael Caine (last seen in "The Eagle Has Landed"), Johnny Carson (also carrying over from "Julia"), Charles Gibson (ditto), Emeril Lagasse (ditto), David Letterman (ditto), Rachael Ray (ditto), Joan Collins, Sean Connery (last seen in "Spielberg"), Tom Cruise (ditto), Katie Couric (last seen in "The Go-Go's), Billy Crystal (last seen in "Sammy Davis Jr.: I've Gotta Be Me"), Tony Curtis (ditto), Arsenio Hall (ditto), Shirley MacLaine (ditto), Sidney Poitier (ditto), Giada De Laurentiis, Angie Dickinson (last seen in "The Kid Stays in the Picture"), Paul Newman (ditto), Craig Ferguson (last seen in "We Feed People"), Bobby Flay (ditto), Martha Stewart (ditto), Guy Fieri, Bryant Gumbel (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Tom Hanks (last seen in "A Hologram for the King"), Nicole Kidman (last seen in "Margot at the Wedding"), Kelly LeBrock, Joan Lunden, Dick Martin (last seen in "Betty White: First Lady of Television"), Bette Midler (last seen in "Lucy and Desi"), Joan Rivers (ditto), Jamie Oliver (last seen in "This Must Be the Place"), Sean Penn (ditto), Vincent Price (last seen in "I Am Divine"), Gordon Ramsay, Julia Roberts (last seen in "Ben Is Back"), Al Roker (last seen in "The Bill Murray Stories"), Diane Sawyer (last seen in "Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg"), Arnold Schwarzenegger (last seen in "Aftermath"), Steven Seagal (last seen in "The Onion Movie"), Sylvester Stallone (last seen in "Mr. Saturday Night"), Curtis Stone, Orson Welles (last seen in "Dean Martin: King of Cool") and the voices of Tom Brokaw (also last seen in "Dean Martin: King of Cool"), Robin Leach

RATING: 6 out of 10 frozen pizzas

Julia (2021)

Year 14, Day 215 - 8/3/22 - Movie #4,216

BEFORE: Welcome back, it's Chef's Week here at the Movie Year, a special foursome of movies devoted to famous chefs - two living, two not so much.  I don't think I've covered any chefs before in past versions of the Rock & Doc Block, I'll have to check.  This was a last-minute addition, I saw a way to put three docs about chefs together, but I didn't see the way to work them into this year's chain, I tried very hard, it was just not possible.  Then the fourth film came my way, and based on the credits listed on the IMDB, I suddenly saw the way - that's how things tend to work out for me, quite often.  

Chef is something of a unique title, we've grown accustomed to adding it quite liberally to the names of people who cook our food in restaurants, to the point where it feels a little weird to NOT say "Chef José Andrés", as if the word is part of his name.  But we don't do that for other jobs, like you don't talk about your friend by callng him "Accountant Frank Smith", not unless you know two guys named Frank Smith, I guess, and you need to distinguish him from "Barber Frank Smith".  The only other people we do this for are the President and maybe the Supreme Court Justices.  Oh, and doctors.  I can get doctors, but why are chefs so special?  

José Andrés carries over from "We Feed People". I left out the word "chef" because maybe there's more to him than just being defined by his profession, maybe he's a complex guy and I don't want to belittle or pigeonhole him. 

THE PLOT: The story of the legendary cookbook author and television superstar who changed the way Americans think about food, television and even about women. 

AFTER: Yes, there's more to the story of Julia Child then you may be aware of, because your memories of her probably started whenever you first watched her TV show, and she'd lived a whole life by then, being a TV star was her second, no wait, third profession.  That's a bit of a running theme this year, whether you want to be the next Betty White or Rita Moreno or Rick James or Sparks Brothers, keep at it, but also keep re-inventing yourself until you land on something really good or successful.  Dick Gregory started out as a comic but ended up as a civil rights activist and healthy lifestyle advocate, while Jacques Cousteau was a free-diving fanatic who became an inventor and a filmmaker. Mel Brooks and Jerry Lewis started doing funny voices in clubs, and look how far they went from there. Robert Evans, Rita Moreno and Bob Einstein also possessed this power of longevity - hey, remind me about all this the next time I watch a documentary about a dead celebrity, which will probably be on Saturday. 

Julia never cooked when growing up, she was born into a wealthy family in California, her mother was the daughter of a lieutentant governor of Massachusetts, while her father was a land manager who invented foreclosure or something. Julia attended a polytechnic junior high and then played sports at Smith College - she was a big girl, after all. After a short stint as an advertising copywriter, she tried to enlist in the Women's Army Corps when World War II broke out, but she was too tall, so she worked as a typist for the OSS, which later became the CIA. She worked her way to become a researcher for the head of the agency, but she was NOT a spy as rumors have suggested. Instead she kept track of the names of German officers on index cards, and later helped develop a shark repellent when too many underwater explosives were being set off by sharks.  Yeah, right - and actress Hedy Lamarr helped a guidance system for torpedoes that became Bluetooth, sure...

Julia (McWilliams at the time) met her future husband, Paul Child, when they were both stationed in Sri Lanka (Ceylon at the time).  He also worked for the OSS as a mapmaker, and after the war ended, they got married in Pennsylvania, and moved to Washington DC before the State Department assigned him to Paris, and there he introduced Julia to fine French cuisine, and that's when her life got a lot more interesting.  One meal at La Couronne in Rouen, France, consisting of fine wine, oysters and sole meuniere was enough to spark her inspiration, and she wanted to learn everything about French cuisine, graduated from the Cordon Bleu cooking school and joined a women's cooking club, where she met Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, who were working on a French cookbook for Americans.  Child offered them insight into the American palette and sensibility, plus she was a darn good typist - and anyone who can keep track of a multitude of Nazi officers can probably also keep track of the many ingredients necessary for a recipe.

It took a decade of traveling around Europe, tasting food and translating recipes, to put the cookbook together - nice work if you can get it, huh?  But the first U.S. publisher rejected the manuscript for "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" because it was a giant 726-page encyclopedia-sized book, and it was felt that most Americans would find that too large, too much of a challenge, meanwhile in post-war America people were cooking with instant mashed potatoes, mixing powdered drinks and discovering this thing called "fast food", so why would they want to cook in a much more difficult and time-consuming manner, as the French chefs do?  But the women authors persisted, and the second publisher printed the book and created a best-seller - known for its helpful illustrations and attention to details, that book is STILL in print, after 60 years. Along with what was essentially the first best-selling cookbook in America came the invention of the book tour, with Julia and her co-authors traveling across the U.S. to speak about the book and pimp more copies in every city.  It's hard to imagine a time when authors didn't go out on tours to promote their books, right? 

It's also hard to imagine a time before the Food Network and the Cooking Channel, but before Julia came along, chefs didn't appear on TV, certainly not female ones - all of this came about because Julia and Paul Child lived in Cambridge, MA and she was scheduled to appear on a PBS show about books to promote her cookbook.  The Public Broadcasting System at the time was pretty much used for hurricane warnings and college professors ranting about Shakespeare's works, this was pre-Sesame Street, pre-Great Performances, pre-Nova and whatever the hell else people watch on PBS.  I only check the listings because the PBS station in NYC runs one semi-obscure "indie" film every Saturday night, and it might be one that I've seen but aired on Netflix or a cable channel that runs that signal that prevents me from dubbing it to DVD. (PBS does NOT run that signal, so gotcha!). Oh, and I recently discovered "American Masters", that's my new favorite PBS show, they aired the Sammy Davis Jr. and the Rita Moreno docs just when I needed to see them - thanks, PBS, there may be a little something extra for you this year when pledge week rolls around.

Anyway, that appearance on the book review show was a success, because Julia made the host an omelet, right there on camera, and he loved it.  Then somebody at the station put two and two together and thought, "Hey, what if there was just a show with this crazy lady cooking something delicious, there's nothing else like that on television!"  Fast forward sixty years and then somehow you get four people forced to cook with pig intestines on "Chopped", you can all see how we got there, right?  Child's cooking show was produced quite cheaply, in a demonstration (fake) kitchen somewhere in the Boston area, with the cameras and lights held together with chewing gum and string, no scripts, and no editing - Julia's "mistakes" had to be left in the show, and thus began the process of having the finished dish prepared beforehand, which is common practice now just to save time. That line where a TV chef says, "OK, this meat needs to marinate for 17 hours, but I have another roast right here that I started marinating yesterday..."  Yeah, she invented that. 

"The French Chef" ran on PBS stations around the U.S. for 10 years, it was like the "I Love Lucy" of cooking shows, because just as Lucille Ball went on to produce "The Lucy Show", "Here's Lucy" and "Life with Lucy", Julia had "Julia Child & Company", "Dinner at Julia's", "Baking with Julia" and at the age of 87, co-hosted "Julia & Jacques Cooking at Home" with Jacques Pepin. Plus she appeared on darn near every talk show made during the 1980's and 1990's, which is very considerate of her, as if she knew someday someone would need to link a bunch of documentaries together based on those talk-show bookings. 

It wasn't all butter and sugar, though her husband became her greatest supporter, always ready to chop onions or wash dishes - hey, everyone who retires from the intelligence agencies needs to keep busy, right?  The couple had no children, and Julia Child was an advocate for Planned Parenthood - perhaps she felt that she couldn't accomplish as much as she did if she had to raise children, or who knows, maybe she felt that kids would kill the great romance she had going.  If you watch this documentary you WILL see a glamour shot of a nude Julia Child in their Paris apartment, don't say I didn't warn you.  But she was young and needed the money...

By the 1990's, Julia's cooking shows were based in her home, though sadly her husband had to live in a nursing home after he suffered a series of strokes in 1989.  He passed away in 1994, but Julia kept living in their house until she moved to a retirement community in 2001 and donated her house to Smith College, and her kitchen to the Smithsonian.  Julia herself passed on in August 2004, two days before her 92nd birthday.  OK, maybe she didn't win the EGOT but she had three Emmys, a Peabody, the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, France's Legion of Honor, a fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and she's in the National Women's Hall of Fame. Not bad for her third career...

Also starring Paul Bogaards, André Cointreau, Susy Davidson, Barbara Fairchild, Jane Friedman, Ina Garten, Charles Gibson, Daniele Mazet-Delpeuch, Russell Morash, Sara Moulton, Jacques Pepin, Alex Pirie, Alex Prud'homme, Ruth Reichl, Cecile Richards, Marcus Samuelsson, Francois Simon, Jean-Francois Thibault, Stephanie Vachon, Anne WIllan, Dorothy ZInberg

with archive footage of Julia Child (last seen in "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project"), Paul Child, Dan Aykroyd (last seen in 'Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road") Simone Beck, Dick Cavett (last seen in "Lucy and Desi"), Johnny Carson (last seen in "The Super Bob Einstein Movie"), Jay Leno (ditto), Phil Donahue (last seen in "Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed"), Jacqueline Kennedy (last seen in "Sammy Davis Jr.: I've Gotta Be Me"), John F. Kennedy (ditto), Emeril Lagasse, David Letterman (also carrying over from "We Feed People"), Rachael Ray (last heard in "The Emoji Movie"), Fred Rogers (last seen in "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood"), Tom Snyder (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream")

RATING: 6 out of 10 ways to cook a whole chicken

We Feed People

Year 14, Day 213 - 8/1/22 - Movie #4,215

BEFORE: OK, I'm not exactly sure how many films I'll watch in August, but I've got 41 films to get me to October, so maybe I'll watch 20 of them in August and 21 in September?  I may have to start the horror films a little early this year, because we're planning for a week's vacation in October, and I may lose a couple days to New York Comic-Con, plus I hope the theater will be open again before then, so yeah, it could be a busy month. If I move four October films into September, that cuts down October's movies to 19, plus 8 days off makes 27, plus 3 days for NYCC makes 30, and October has 31 days, so yeah, I think I can swing it. It's all kind of coming together, my plan to wrap up Movie Year 14 - who knows, I may have to revise it, but at least there is a plan, one that prevents me from adding any more documentaries to the Summer Rock & Doc Block. 

Anyway, here are the links that should get me to the end of August - José Andrés, Julia Child, Emeril Lagasse, Oprah Winfrey, Dizzy Gillespie, Stevie Wonder, Al Sharpton, Stephen Colbert, Deon Cole, DeWanda Wise, Chris Pratt, Taika Waititi, Toby Jones, Penelope Wilton, Denzel Washington, Isabel Arraiza and Corey Stoll. Yep, that's only 17 people to link 21 films, I'm that good.  David Letterman carries over from "The Super Bob Einstein Movie". 

THE PLOT: A chronicle of how Chef José Andrés and his nonprofit rebuild nations in the wake of disaster, providing healthy food to those affected. 

AFTER: Today's film comes with a personal story, I worked at the gala NYC premiere for this film, back in early May. Because it was produced by National Geographic, it was a big deal, extra security was hired for the theater where I work, there was a big outdoor set-up for the celebrities to arrive and check in, tents, a yellow carpet, and there was extra personnel to check people in, run things and do a lot of the things the usual theater staff does - I'd had a bad cold the week before, so I was fine with being relegated to outdoor tasks, like monitoring the ADA ramps and keeping the sidewalk traffic moving safely.  It's not challenging work, but on the days with big premieres these things still need to be done, and it's kind of all hands on deck, no complaining allowed.  I like the outdoor work because then I can watch the celebrities arrive, and since my wife and I watch so much Food Network, I recognized so many people - Ted Allen, Gail Simmons, Marcus Samuelson, Rachael Ray - from a fair distance away, but still, I was a bit star-struck.  Director Ron Howard and chef José Andrés spoke after the film, with the conversation moderated by Padma Lakshmi from "Top Chef" (again, I watched a bit from afar, like the back of the theater).

I worked late, supervising the tent breakdown, maybe got home at midnight or 1 am, and my wife was out the same night, at a co-worker's funeral.  But the next day, she texted me that after interacting with everyone at the funeral she took a COVID test, and it came up positive - so I ran to the nearest walk-in clinic and got a test myself, and I was positive, too.  Since I had felt sick the week before maybe I gave it to her, or maybe she caught it at the funeral and gave it to me, we don't really know.  I called in sick and didn't go to work for two weeks, until I tested negative, but man, was I glad I worked outside that day.  I didn't want to be the guy who gave COVID to half of the stars of Food Network, or even Ron Howard.  I had to report my status to the school that runs the theater, and they wanted to know which of my co-workers I'd interacted with the night before, and thankfully all those interactions were outside, talking with other masked people.  

I greatly admire the work that's been done by World Central Kitchen - Chef Andrés felt so strongly about fighting hunger caused by disasters that he went ahead and DID it, he didn't let not knowing exactly how to do it at first stop him.  Then he assembled a team of like-minded individuals, people willing to dedicate themselves to doing whatever it takes to feed people due to a mixture of kindness, dedication and not having something else to do with their time, or finding themselves at a personal crossroads, and figuring that this was at the very least a positive way to take action.  Anybody who's been out of work for any length of time might recognize that feeling - taking a job because, well, it's something to do, and maybe I can make a positive change in one little corner of the world.  

The film follows Chef Andres through several disasters, like when Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in 2017, and President Useless thought he could fix things somehow by throwing rolls of paper towels into a crowd (really?) while Chef Andrés was figuring out a way to make sandwiches while waiting for the paella to be done.  Which person was ultimately more helpful?  From there, Andrés moved on to a volcanic eruption in Guatemala, and then a couple years later he was delivering meals to the Navajo nation at the start of the pandemic, then figuring out how to get restaurant kitchens in major U.S. population centers opened again to help make meals for city-dwellers.  I'm awestruck, I'm envious and ashamed - envious of people who have such a clear mission and direction in their lives, and ashamed that I haven't done more for charity over the years.  

I tried doing volunteer work for City Harvest, but they just sent me around the Union Square Farmer's Market in Manhattan with a bag to see if I could collect unsold produce at the end of a day - I wasn't good at it, I hated feeling like a beggar and so I didn't keep doing it, I figured I could just mail in a contribution to the charity and probably accomplish more in the long run.  Meanwhile my father, who worked a trucking job five days a week when I was young chose to spend his weekends hauling loads of furniture for Catholic charities to restock their donation centers. I helped him with that a few times when I was a teen, but my heart wasn't really in that either.  Again, mea culpa, I feel like I could have, should have done more.  I used to donate blood regularly but then I got busy, so I haven't done that in years either.  

Hey, I kept people safe outside the screening of "We Feed People", that's something, isn't it? They couldn't have a gala premiere and spread their message if they were worried about people tripping on the ramps outside, or if fans were bothering the celebrity chefs who had come to attend the event.  No need to thank me, I got paid for my services and then of course took two weeks off so I wouldn't give anybody COVID.  Really, I'm a giver, but nobody wanted me to give them COVID, so Food Network stars, you're welcome.  If you can get over the feeling of inadequacy that this film may cause, it's important stuff - they should make more documentaries about people doing charity work, because it is uplifting. 

Also starring José Andrés, Carlota Andrés, Inés Andrés, Patricia Fernandez de la Cruz, Sam Bloch, Robert Egger, Nate Mook, Kyle Pounders, Trevor Riggen, Carole Sugarman, Maisie Wilhelm, Richard Wolffe, 

with archive footage of Ferran Adria, Joe Biden (last seen in "Becoming"), Bill Clinton (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Craig Ferguson (last seen in "The Ugly Truth"), Bobby Flay, Martha Stewart (last seen in "Let's Go to Prison"), Donald Trump (last seen in "Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me"), Melania Trump (ditto)

RATING: 7 out of 10 distribution centers on the Ukraine-Poland border