Peter Bart: Hollywood Stars Get High Marks Returning To Fall Film Festivals And Hustling Their Wares
While the Emmys drew mixed reviews, the film festivals closed to strong applause this week, not only for their movies (we’d forgotten some) but for their star turnout.
Cate Blanchett, George Clooney, Taylor Swift and Julianne Moore were out there giving interviews and courting critics as in years gone by. Some had become strangers due to a mix of Covid-caused delays and their own rigid rules of self-protection.
Movie stars once made three or four films a year and were constantly before us, pitching their wares. I once congratulated Tom Hanks three times in a week and the Damon-Affleck team seemed equally ubiquitous. Now even Jennifer Lawrence wants the spotlight again and Harrison Ford has also abandoned invisibility.
Of course, the presence of stars at premieres also guarantees some flying shrapnel on social media. At the Venice premiere of Don’t Worry Darling, did Florence Pugh,...
Cate Blanchett, George Clooney, Taylor Swift and Julianne Moore were out there giving interviews and courting critics as in years gone by. Some had become strangers due to a mix of Covid-caused delays and their own rigid rules of self-protection.
Movie stars once made three or four films a year and were constantly before us, pitching their wares. I once congratulated Tom Hanks three times in a week and the Damon-Affleck team seemed equally ubiquitous. Now even Jennifer Lawrence wants the spotlight again and Harrison Ford has also abandoned invisibility.
Of course, the presence of stars at premieres also guarantees some flying shrapnel on social media. At the Venice premiere of Don’t Worry Darling, did Florence Pugh,...
- 9/15/2022
- by Peter Bart
- Deadline Film + TV
The Village Voice, which was founded in 1955 and left an indelible mark on New York’s cultural and political landscape for decades, has finally faced up to its daunting business reality and opted to cease editorial operations.
The news bubbled up in reports early this afternoon by Gothamist, the Associated Press and Columbia Journalism Review. Those outlets obtained a recording of a conference call with staffers conducted this morning by Peter Barbey, who bought the weekly from Voice Media Group in 2015.
“Today is kind of a sucky day,” Barbey said on the call. “Due to the business realities, we are going to stop publishing Village Voice new material.”
About half of the remaining 20 staffers were laid off as of today, with the other half winding down operations and focusing on digitizing the paper’s extensive archives. In 2017, the Voice had stopped publishing its print edition but remained online.
In a later statement,...
The news bubbled up in reports early this afternoon by Gothamist, the Associated Press and Columbia Journalism Review. Those outlets obtained a recording of a conference call with staffers conducted this morning by Peter Barbey, who bought the weekly from Voice Media Group in 2015.
“Today is kind of a sucky day,” Barbey said on the call. “Due to the business realities, we are going to stop publishing Village Voice new material.”
About half of the remaining 20 staffers were laid off as of today, with the other half winding down operations and focusing on digitizing the paper’s extensive archives. In 2017, the Voice had stopped publishing its print edition but remained online.
In a later statement,...
- 8/31/2018
- by Dade Hayes
- Deadline Film + TV
Set in New York’s Chelsea Hotel, the film Portrait of Jason is notorious for its white director’s humiliation of its black star. A new movie revisits the story
On the afternoon of Friday 9 June 1967, a select group was ushered into a fourth-floor screening room at the Museum of Modern Art in New York to view the latest film by Shirley Clarke, the Oscar-winning director and longtime participant in the downtown scene. The guestlist included Andy Warhol, filmmakers Elia Kazan and Da Pennebaker, Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg and jazz critic Nat Hentoff.
Clarke must have particularly relished inviting Warhol, since the star of her project, Jason Holliday, was someone he had been trying to film. Disdainful of Warhol’s presence on the scene (he tried to move into the Chelsea Hotel, but couldn’t hack it, Clarke would scornfully tell people), she screened a film that afternoon which in...
On the afternoon of Friday 9 June 1967, a select group was ushered into a fourth-floor screening room at the Museum of Modern Art in New York to view the latest film by Shirley Clarke, the Oscar-winning director and longtime participant in the downtown scene. The guestlist included Andy Warhol, filmmakers Elia Kazan and Da Pennebaker, Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg and jazz critic Nat Hentoff.
Clarke must have particularly relished inviting Warhol, since the star of her project, Jason Holliday, was someone he had been trying to film. Disdainful of Warhol’s presence on the scene (he tried to move into the Chelsea Hotel, but couldn’t hack it, Clarke would scornfully tell people), she screened a film that afternoon which in...
- 9/19/2015
- by Tavia Nyong'o
- The Guardian - Film News
Review by Kathy Kaiser
What do you get when you combine a love for jazz from a very young age – a prolific journalistic talent – and a civil rights libertarian who will let you know exactly where he stands on any issue, including being pro-life – you get the story of the man – The Legend – whose life of work has touched both the cultural and political sides of our mere existence in this country for over 65 years – Nat Hentoff.
David L Lewis, a journalistic and broadcast media talent himself for over 30 years, brings the man himself along for this ride – exposing Hentoff’s life’s work – and mostly in his own words – with this new documentary – The Pleasures Of Being/ Out Of Step. Stepping into the limelight of his career, Hentoff emerged as the Jazz critic of all critics, being named The Jazz Master and gaining fame and recognition by the musicians...
What do you get when you combine a love for jazz from a very young age – a prolific journalistic talent – and a civil rights libertarian who will let you know exactly where he stands on any issue, including being pro-life – you get the story of the man – The Legend – whose life of work has touched both the cultural and political sides of our mere existence in this country for over 65 years – Nat Hentoff.
David L Lewis, a journalistic and broadcast media talent himself for over 30 years, brings the man himself along for this ride – exposing Hentoff’s life’s work – and mostly in his own words – with this new documentary – The Pleasures Of Being/ Out Of Step. Stepping into the limelight of his career, Hentoff emerged as the Jazz critic of all critics, being named The Jazz Master and gaining fame and recognition by the musicians...
- 7/21/2014
- by Movie Geeks
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
It's challenge enough to try to fit all the life we have to live into our 80 or so years, so imagine the difficulty of trying to cram one such life into 85 minutes of documentary. Compound that problem a couple hundred times and you can appreciate the task faced by David L. Lewis. The Pleasures of Being Out of Step, his feature-length tribute/study/profile of longtime Village Voice First Amendment defender Nat Hentoff, that brilliant and combative journalist, critic, screed writer, and novelist, must not only cover Hentoff's own triple-stuffed life but also thumbnail histories of jazz, the civil rights movement, the alternative press, and the multitude of characters knocking about those worlds. What other doc is obliged to show us vintage footage of Charles Mingus ...
- 6/25/2014
- Village Voice
Toh! has scored a trailer exclusive to David L. Lewis's DocNYC Grand Jury prize winner "The Pleasures of Being Out of Step." The film centers on legendary jazz writer and civil libertarian Nat Hentoff, who's now 88. "Pleasures" opens on June 25 at the IFC Center in New York, via First Run Features. Here's the official synopsis:The Pleasures of Being Out of Step profiles legendary jazz writer and civil libertarian Nat Hentoff, whose career tracks the greatest cultural and political movements of the last 65 years. Powerfully narrated by actor Andre Braugher, the film is about an idea as well as a man – the idea of free expression as the defining characteristic of the individual.The doc is Lewis's feature film debut.
- 4/1/2014
- by Beth Hanna
- Thompson on Hollywood
The Pleasures Of Being Out Of Step is welcome and overdue documentary on Nat Hentoff, jazz music critic and columnist. If you ever read The Village Voice from the 1960s to the 1990s you have probably read his columns. If you have any interest in jazz music you already know who Nat Hentoff is. During the 50s and 60s and on into the 70s Hentoff wrote the liner notes for hundreds of jazz albums. Hentoff’s wife informs us that he only wants to read and write, he has no other interests.
Besides being a powerhouse write and erudite columnist Hentoff is most famous for pissing off people all across the political spectrum. Labeled a Liberal most of his professional life, a label Hentoff himself doesn’t much care for, Hentoff has taken several positions that anger Liberals all across the country. Other than jazz music Hentoff is an expert on the Bill of Rights,...
Besides being a powerhouse write and erudite columnist Hentoff is most famous for pissing off people all across the political spectrum. Labeled a Liberal most of his professional life, a label Hentoff himself doesn’t much care for, Hentoff has taken several positions that anger Liberals all across the country. Other than jazz music Hentoff is an expert on the Bill of Rights,...
- 11/16/2013
- by Movie Geeks
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
Doc NYC is set to mark its fourth annual return from November 14-21 at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village and Chelsea's Sva Theatre. Having swiftly expanded into the largest documentary festival in the U.S., the week-long lineup will showcase 131 films and events including 72 feature-length film screenings, 39 shorts in addition to 20 panel discussions and master classes. The festival's highlights will include the opening night premiere of Errol Morris's "The Unknown Known" and a closing night world premiere of Michel Gondry's "Is The Man Who is Tall Happy?" Doc NYC will also feature a panel discussion with guest attendee Noam Chomsky as one of its main highlights. Echoing the anticipated special guest appearances Errol Morris, Noam Chomsky, Michel Gondry, Oliver Stone, Sarah Polley, Kathleen Hanna, Ricki Lake, Jonathan Franzen, Grace Lee Boggs, Chuck Workman, Donna McKechnie, Nat Hentoff, Doug Pray and more, Doc NYC artistic director Thom Powers remarked,...
- 10/17/2013
- by Ramzi De Coster
- Indiewire
Everett Collection Miles Davis in the 1980s.
Miles Davis, who would’ve turned 85 today, was, without dispute, a giant of late 20th century music, fronting two of America’s great quintets and developing several streams of modern jazz. He was also my first major assignment for The Wall Street Journal.
This was back in the early ‘80s when the paper was introducing its Leisure & Arts section. I had written a review of a book about Davis and was encouraged by...
Miles Davis, who would’ve turned 85 today, was, without dispute, a giant of late 20th century music, fronting two of America’s great quintets and developing several streams of modern jazz. He was also my first major assignment for The Wall Street Journal.
This was back in the early ‘80s when the paper was introducing its Leisure & Arts section. I had written a review of a book about Davis and was encouraged by...
- 5/26/2011
- by Jim Fusilli
- Speakeasy/Wall Street Journal
The Jazz Loft Project. Video by Lauren Hart and Sam Stephenson. Photographs by W. Eugene Smith. From the new book, The Jazz Loft Project (Knopf). (Soundtrack: “Avalon,” recorded January 29, 1960 - Zoot Sims, sax; Eddie DeHaas, bass; Dave McKenna, piano; Roy Haynes and Ronnie Free, drums.) In 1957, pioneering Life photo-essayist W. Eugene Smith walked out on his family in suburban Croton-on-Hudson, New York, and moved to Manhattan, occupying a loft at 821 Sixth Avenue where he could live a full, degenerate, bohemian life. On the fourth floor of the building was a music studio (and sometime drug den) in which Thelonius Monk and other jazz artists of the day would jam well into the morning. So many top-flight musicians would congregate there—Blakey, Coltrane, Mingus, and scores more, from Bill Evans and Hall Overton to Henry Grimes to Zoot Sims—that the haven began to attract a circle of curious artiste-confreres such as Henri Cartier-Bresson,...
- 11/24/2009
- Vanity Fair
TORONTO -- While two and a half hours may sound like a long time for a docu on one of America's most endlessly rehashed issues, the end credits may roll in Lake of Fire before viewers tire of it. Smart, visually appealing, and consistently engaging, it finds fresh ways of addressing a debate that is, thanks to new state laws and changes in the Supreme Court, once again becoming unavoidable. It has the right stuff to rise above the non-fiction pack, both in commercial terms and in the public discussion, even if the subject's fatigue factor will keep some potential viewers away.
The film was shot over at least a dozen years, stretching back to 1993 demonstrations marking the 20th anniversary of Roe V. Wade. Director-cinematographer Tony Kaye makes a choice in handling video footage from various points in the medium's development -- he presents all of it in black-and-white -- that not only smartly lends it some uniformity but increases its visual appeal and fits the subject's gravitas. In more recent footage, high-def compositions have a level of artfulness echoed in the film's other production values (ranging from highbrow modern classical music on the soundtrack to credits by typography star Jonathan Barnbrook).
It is not the "definitive work" some have claimed it to be (as if a single film could cover this territory comprehensively), but what it does, it does exceptionally well. After initially appearing to be a comprehensive examination of the moral, ethical, and political sides of the abortion question, it eventually finds too much material to ignore in one arena -- leaning heavily toward the portraiture of the most extreme factions of the anti-abortion movement, with footage of rallies and accounts of violence against abortion providers.
There's more to the film than that, and Lake is most exciting when talking to dispassionate thinkers whose own sympathies are sometimes too complex to attribute one way or another. Noam Chomsky, predictably, offers a nuanced view, acknowledging a set of "conflicting values" in which, as Alan Dershowitz puts it, "everybody is right." Chomsky is one of the left-leaning speakers in the film who is most generous in considering the anti-abortion position, although he also draws a line in the sand, affirming that abolitionists can only be taken seriously when they have a consistency of viewpoint: The "seamless garment," which Nat Hentoff (a liberal atheist who opposes abortion rights) explains as the application of pro-life thought to war, capital punishment, and oppression. Viewers wanting a truly comprehensive investigation will wish for more voices like Hentoff's: rational people who can defend their position in terms that all American accept (without, for instance, insisting on America's getting "back to the Bible").
But Kaye instead devotes his remaining time to a heartbreaking and viscerally disturbing first-hand look at abortion. We see it in completely explicit clinical shots, watching "fetal parts" -- half-intact head, arms, and legs -- as they are extracted from a woman's body and reassembled in a lab tray; and we follow one woman from the time she enters the clinic, through pre-procedure screening, through the operation and the counseling that follows. This footage is graphic and emotional enough to give pause to partisans on both sides of the debate: both those who would like to argue about "choice" as an abstract matter for bumper-stickers and political rallies, and those who delude themselves and their audiences into thinking that any woman can go through this procedure casually, unmindful of its ramifications.
LAKE OF FIRE
No U.S. Distributor
Anonymous Content
Credits:
Director: Tony Kaye
Producer: Tony Kaye
Executive producers: Yan Lin Kaye, Steve Golin, David Kanter
Director of photography: Tony Kaye
Music: Anne Dudley
Editor: Peter Goddard
No MPAA rating
Running time -- 152 minutes...
The film was shot over at least a dozen years, stretching back to 1993 demonstrations marking the 20th anniversary of Roe V. Wade. Director-cinematographer Tony Kaye makes a choice in handling video footage from various points in the medium's development -- he presents all of it in black-and-white -- that not only smartly lends it some uniformity but increases its visual appeal and fits the subject's gravitas. In more recent footage, high-def compositions have a level of artfulness echoed in the film's other production values (ranging from highbrow modern classical music on the soundtrack to credits by typography star Jonathan Barnbrook).
It is not the "definitive work" some have claimed it to be (as if a single film could cover this territory comprehensively), but what it does, it does exceptionally well. After initially appearing to be a comprehensive examination of the moral, ethical, and political sides of the abortion question, it eventually finds too much material to ignore in one arena -- leaning heavily toward the portraiture of the most extreme factions of the anti-abortion movement, with footage of rallies and accounts of violence against abortion providers.
There's more to the film than that, and Lake is most exciting when talking to dispassionate thinkers whose own sympathies are sometimes too complex to attribute one way or another. Noam Chomsky, predictably, offers a nuanced view, acknowledging a set of "conflicting values" in which, as Alan Dershowitz puts it, "everybody is right." Chomsky is one of the left-leaning speakers in the film who is most generous in considering the anti-abortion position, although he also draws a line in the sand, affirming that abolitionists can only be taken seriously when they have a consistency of viewpoint: The "seamless garment," which Nat Hentoff (a liberal atheist who opposes abortion rights) explains as the application of pro-life thought to war, capital punishment, and oppression. Viewers wanting a truly comprehensive investigation will wish for more voices like Hentoff's: rational people who can defend their position in terms that all American accept (without, for instance, insisting on America's getting "back to the Bible").
But Kaye instead devotes his remaining time to a heartbreaking and viscerally disturbing first-hand look at abortion. We see it in completely explicit clinical shots, watching "fetal parts" -- half-intact head, arms, and legs -- as they are extracted from a woman's body and reassembled in a lab tray; and we follow one woman from the time she enters the clinic, through pre-procedure screening, through the operation and the counseling that follows. This footage is graphic and emotional enough to give pause to partisans on both sides of the debate: both those who would like to argue about "choice" as an abstract matter for bumper-stickers and political rallies, and those who delude themselves and their audiences into thinking that any woman can go through this procedure casually, unmindful of its ramifications.
LAKE OF FIRE
No U.S. Distributor
Anonymous Content
Credits:
Director: Tony Kaye
Producer: Tony Kaye
Executive producers: Yan Lin Kaye, Steve Golin, David Kanter
Director of photography: Tony Kaye
Music: Anne Dudley
Editor: Peter Goddard
No MPAA rating
Running time -- 152 minutes...
- 9/18/2006
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
The 1960s are generally thought of as the primary period of social ferment in this country, but the seeds for that cultural uprising were sown in the previous decade. That is the thesis of Betsy Blankenbaker's intelligent if standard talking heads/archival footage documentary, based on the autobiographical book by Dan Wakefield, and she makes the case in clear, convincing fashion.
Running a mere 72 minutes, the film doesn't offer much in the way of depth. Despite its title, it mainly focuses on the denizens of Greenwich Village, where people from all over the country congregated to avoid the stifling conformism of the Eisenhower era. Included are interviews with some of the writers and artists who were part of the scene, including -- besides Wakefield -- Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Nat Hentoff, Calvin Trillin, Norman Mailer, Ed Fancher (the founder of the Village Voice), and, representing the film's coup in terms of marquee value, Robert Redford. Archival footage presents other seminal figures of the era, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Mailer and James Baldwin.
The film contains several distinct segments, including ones devoted to Baldwin, depicted as torn between his concern about civil rights and his desire to write; the prevalence of alcohol among the literary set; and the subordinate roles afforded women. Mainly, though, it deals with reminiscences: novelist Lynn Sharon Schwartz's recollection about how people came to New York to have sex, Wakefield's description of a botched suicide attempt the night before an important interview for a scholarship and Talese's amusing account of how the editorial offices of the New York Times were a hotbed of illicit affairs.
NEW YORK IN THE FIFTIES
Avatar Films
Director: Betsy Blankenbaker
Producers: Betsy Blankenbaker, Dorka Keehn
Directors of photography: Bobby Shepard, Dustin Teel, Jeff Watt
Editor: Steve Marra
Music: Steve Allee
Color/stereo
Running time -- 72 minutes
No MPAA rating...
Running a mere 72 minutes, the film doesn't offer much in the way of depth. Despite its title, it mainly focuses on the denizens of Greenwich Village, where people from all over the country congregated to avoid the stifling conformism of the Eisenhower era. Included are interviews with some of the writers and artists who were part of the scene, including -- besides Wakefield -- Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Nat Hentoff, Calvin Trillin, Norman Mailer, Ed Fancher (the founder of the Village Voice), and, representing the film's coup in terms of marquee value, Robert Redford. Archival footage presents other seminal figures of the era, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Mailer and James Baldwin.
The film contains several distinct segments, including ones devoted to Baldwin, depicted as torn between his concern about civil rights and his desire to write; the prevalence of alcohol among the literary set; and the subordinate roles afforded women. Mainly, though, it deals with reminiscences: novelist Lynn Sharon Schwartz's recollection about how people came to New York to have sex, Wakefield's description of a botched suicide attempt the night before an important interview for a scholarship and Talese's amusing account of how the editorial offices of the New York Times were a hotbed of illicit affairs.
NEW YORK IN THE FIFTIES
Avatar Films
Director: Betsy Blankenbaker
Producers: Betsy Blankenbaker, Dorka Keehn
Directors of photography: Bobby Shepard, Dustin Teel, Jeff Watt
Editor: Steve Marra
Music: Steve Allee
Color/stereo
Running time -- 72 minutes
No MPAA rating...
The 1960s are generally thought of as the primary period of social ferment in this country, but the seeds for that cultural uprising were sown in the previous decade. That is the thesis of Betsy Blankenbaker's intelligent if standard talking heads/archival footage documentary, based on the autobiographical book by Dan Wakefield, and she makes the case in clear, convincing fashion.
Running a mere 72 minutes, the film doesn't offer much in the way of depth. Despite its title, it mainly focuses on the denizens of Greenwich Village, where people from all over the country congregated to avoid the stifling conformism of the Eisenhower era. Included are interviews with some of the writers and artists who were part of the scene, including -- besides Wakefield -- Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Nat Hentoff, Calvin Trillin, Norman Mailer, Ed Fancher (the founder of the Village Voice), and, representing the film's coup in terms of marquee value, Robert Redford. Archival footage presents other seminal figures of the era, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Mailer and James Baldwin.
The film contains several distinct segments, including ones devoted to Baldwin, depicted as torn between his concern about civil rights and his desire to write; the prevalence of alcohol among the literary set; and the subordinate roles afforded women. Mainly, though, it deals with reminiscences: novelist Lynn Sharon Schwartz's recollection about how people came to New York to have sex, Wakefield's description of a botched suicide attempt the night before an important interview for a scholarship and Talese's amusing account of how the editorial offices of the New York Times were a hotbed of illicit affairs.
NEW YORK IN THE FIFTIES
Avatar Films
Director: Betsy Blankenbaker
Producers: Betsy Blankenbaker, Dorka Keehn
Directors of photography: Bobby Shepard, Dustin Teel, Jeff Watt
Editor: Steve Marra
Music: Steve Allee
Color/stereo
Running time -- 72 minutes
No MPAA rating...
Running a mere 72 minutes, the film doesn't offer much in the way of depth. Despite its title, it mainly focuses on the denizens of Greenwich Village, where people from all over the country congregated to avoid the stifling conformism of the Eisenhower era. Included are interviews with some of the writers and artists who were part of the scene, including -- besides Wakefield -- Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Nat Hentoff, Calvin Trillin, Norman Mailer, Ed Fancher (the founder of the Village Voice), and, representing the film's coup in terms of marquee value, Robert Redford. Archival footage presents other seminal figures of the era, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Mailer and James Baldwin.
The film contains several distinct segments, including ones devoted to Baldwin, depicted as torn between his concern about civil rights and his desire to write; the prevalence of alcohol among the literary set; and the subordinate roles afforded women. Mainly, though, it deals with reminiscences: novelist Lynn Sharon Schwartz's recollection about how people came to New York to have sex, Wakefield's description of a botched suicide attempt the night before an important interview for a scholarship and Talese's amusing account of how the editorial offices of the New York Times were a hotbed of illicit affairs.
NEW YORK IN THE FIFTIES
Avatar Films
Director: Betsy Blankenbaker
Producers: Betsy Blankenbaker, Dorka Keehn
Directors of photography: Bobby Shepard, Dustin Teel, Jeff Watt
Editor: Steve Marra
Music: Steve Allee
Color/stereo
Running time -- 72 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 2/22/2001
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Robert Weide's film about Lenny Bruce serves an invaluable function in providing information about a seminal cultural hero whom everyone seems to know of without knowing much about.
This cogent, well-organized, informative and engrossing documentary is a must-see for anyone interested in how Bruce changed the face of comedy and led the way toward today's anything-goes culture. Produced by HBO, it is receiving its premiere engagement at New York's Film Forum.
The film breaks no new ground stylistically; it is a conventional documentary, a chronological portrait of Bruce's life as told through archival footage and talking heads. But when the story is this powerful and the central figure so dynamic, there is no need for fanciness.
The project details Bruce's evolution from a conventional, shtick-ridden comic to a taboo-busting social commentator whose use of profanity and thoughtful but hilarious explorations of such subjects as race, sex and religion led to his downfall. Weide's thesis is that Bruce's social criticism, much more than his use of explicit language, is what led the authorities to crack down on him, and he makes his case with conviction. He also doesn't neglect to chronicle the less attractive aspects of Bruce's life, including his drug addiction, but neither does he dwell on them.
Included is much fascinating rare footage. Assembled are home movies; clips of Bruce's appearances on television shows that haven't been seen in decades (and in one case, never, since it was deemed too controversial for broadcast); scenes from a grade B crime movie that Bruce directed, wrote and starred in; a television interview with Nat Hentoff in which Bruce was clearly stoned; and news footage in which Bruce's naked corpse is surrounded by police and photographers. We also get to see and hear many examples of Bruce in his prime, with excerpts from many of his classic routines.
There are also interviews with a wide cross-section of those who knew him best: his late mother, Sally Marr, ex-wife Honey, daughter Kitty, friends and colleagues, lawyers and managers -- even the assistant district attorney who helped prosecute him. The entertaining narration is provided by Robert De Niro, no insignificant cultural icon himself.
"Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth" gathers force in its final segments, when it depicts Bruce's mental, physical and emotional decline as his career was systematically destroyed. It tells an important story, and it does so with insight and intelligence.
LENNY BRUCE: SWEAR TO TELL THE TRUTH
A Whyaduck Prods. release
in association with HBO Documentary Films
Producer, director, screenplay: Robert B. Weide
Executive producer: Sheila Nevins
Editors: Geof Bartz, Robert B. Weide
Narrator: Robert De Niro
Color/black & white/stereo
Running time -- 94 minutes
No MPAA rating...
This cogent, well-organized, informative and engrossing documentary is a must-see for anyone interested in how Bruce changed the face of comedy and led the way toward today's anything-goes culture. Produced by HBO, it is receiving its premiere engagement at New York's Film Forum.
The film breaks no new ground stylistically; it is a conventional documentary, a chronological portrait of Bruce's life as told through archival footage and talking heads. But when the story is this powerful and the central figure so dynamic, there is no need for fanciness.
The project details Bruce's evolution from a conventional, shtick-ridden comic to a taboo-busting social commentator whose use of profanity and thoughtful but hilarious explorations of such subjects as race, sex and religion led to his downfall. Weide's thesis is that Bruce's social criticism, much more than his use of explicit language, is what led the authorities to crack down on him, and he makes his case with conviction. He also doesn't neglect to chronicle the less attractive aspects of Bruce's life, including his drug addiction, but neither does he dwell on them.
Included is much fascinating rare footage. Assembled are home movies; clips of Bruce's appearances on television shows that haven't been seen in decades (and in one case, never, since it was deemed too controversial for broadcast); scenes from a grade B crime movie that Bruce directed, wrote and starred in; a television interview with Nat Hentoff in which Bruce was clearly stoned; and news footage in which Bruce's naked corpse is surrounded by police and photographers. We also get to see and hear many examples of Bruce in his prime, with excerpts from many of his classic routines.
There are also interviews with a wide cross-section of those who knew him best: his late mother, Sally Marr, ex-wife Honey, daughter Kitty, friends and colleagues, lawyers and managers -- even the assistant district attorney who helped prosecute him. The entertaining narration is provided by Robert De Niro, no insignificant cultural icon himself.
"Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth" gathers force in its final segments, when it depicts Bruce's mental, physical and emotional decline as his career was systematically destroyed. It tells an important story, and it does so with insight and intelligence.
LENNY BRUCE: SWEAR TO TELL THE TRUTH
A Whyaduck Prods. release
in association with HBO Documentary Films
Producer, director, screenplay: Robert B. Weide
Executive producer: Sheila Nevins
Editors: Geof Bartz, Robert B. Weide
Narrator: Robert De Niro
Color/black & white/stereo
Running time -- 94 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 10/29/1998
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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