Keith David – Cinema of the World

Ken Burns – Jazz (2001)

admin — Sat, 31 Oct 2020 09:55:00 +0000

Quote:

A worthy documentary on the first 60 years of jazz with an emphasis on Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and swing.

Episodes
1. Gumbo – Beginnings to 1917
2. The Gift 1917-1924
3. Our Language 1924-1928
4. The True Welcome 1929-1935
5. Swing – Pure Pleasure 1935-1937
6. Swing – The Velocity of Celebration 1937-1939
7. Dedicated to Chaos 1940-1945
8. Risk 1945-1956
9. The Adventure 1956-1961
10. A Masterpiece by Midnight 1961-2001

Reviews
Epic Jazz
The opening note of Jazz, Ken Burns’ new 10-part series for PBS, comes from trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who’s not playing but lecturing. “Jazz music objectifies America,” he tells us, then offers a lesson about what jazz really is. The form’s great power emerges from musicians who “negotiate their agendas with each other.” According to Marsalis (he’s Lincon Center’s artistic director for jazz), that negotiation, that handing off and passing around of inspiration – that jam – is jazz’s transcendence.

Most jazz musicians would agree. As the clich� goes, it’s one thing to do a show for your paying customers, playing what they expect and have paid to hear, but after the squares go home, you can stop blowing shit and make another kind of music altogether. Yet many musicians would also agree that, more often than not, it’s a lot more satisfying to play that personal kind of music than it is to sit and listen to it. Jazz musicians involved with each other in intimate creativity may well be negotiating their way to improvisational sublimity, but they’ve often left the audience out of the musical deal. This is a central but rarely acknowledged tension in Burns’ documentary treatment.

Neither Burns nor PBS would be presenting nearly 19 hours of archival footage and contemporary performances and interviews unless the series could claim, as it does repeatedly, that jazz is a fundamentally American art form that reveals much about the culture from which it has sprung. But it would reveal nothing if jazz had not been a commercial form to begin with, if – to put it in Marsalis’ terms – its original makers had not hungrily included the customers in the negotiation. For all its knowing (and legitimate) commentary about expressive artistry, for all the context of romantic creation, Burns’ film actually works best when it showcases jazz as an opportunity for its audience’s ecstatic pleasure.

Albert Murray, one of American culture’s greatest critics (because his work is broadly instructive, rather than narrowly judgmental), puts the matter directly in one of his appearances. Playing a contrapuntal riff to Marsalis’ Professor of Negotiation Studies, Murray says simply, “Jazz is dance music.” That doesn’t mean jazz isn’t also a lot of other things. But it does mean that jazz’s artistry is deeply rooted in sensual pleasure. The farther jazz has strayed from those roots, away from breathless, sweat-beaded ecstasy, the more clubs have closed, the more radio stations have switched programming (often to its rhythm-and-blues-based offspring), and the nearer it has approached its appointment with public broadcasting. PBS has fallen into the role of cultural memorializer, the celebrator of dead genres.

Yet Burns’ series, its self-conscious gestures toward epic notwithstanding, is filled with rewards, many of them proffered unintentionally. Jazz is indeed an American story, which means that art and commerce need not be separate and opposing forces. Indeed, the former triumphed through the latter, rising from whorehouse scorn in such places as New Orleans and Kansas City to find an enthusiastic audience despite the original dismissal of gatekeeper critics (Gilbert Seldes notably excepted), editorialists, and even doctors, before eventually falling into the suffocating embrace of Lincoln Center itself.

Burns doesn’t set out to tell that tale, but that’s the story that emerges, over and over again. Burns’ documentary gifts are not visionary, analytical, nor even properly historical. Rather, he is a talented biographer, and his films are most effective when he is able to present an overarching narrative in terms of the biographical detail of that narrative’s participants. The approach worked especially well in his Civil War series, because it unexpectedly humanized the war. It didn’t work so well in his baseball series, because the mass of detail tended to obscure the game itself; few sports fans really want to know their heroes out of uniform.

But as Vasari might have told Burns, biography – even when it’s legend – is a good way into culture. Thus we have a century’s worth of the lives of the jazzmen and women, told sequentially and profusely illustrated. (The rap against Burns is that he has left some important people out of his group portrait, a charge he invites by claiming epic comprehensiveness.)

What has Burns revealed? Given 19 hours in praise of every kind of jazz, viewers will be able to take away every kind of moral. But one lesson that seems hard to ignore is that jazz was at its strongest when its makers embraced their audience and used their popularity to develop the audience musically, even leaving themselves open to learning something from that audience. Anybody can play the contemptuous bohemian, a type that was eventually to overwhelm the world of ever-more isolated jazz makers. The real artistic work lies in forging a connection with the audience, inviting it to share in the innovation. That’s actually a rhetorical skill as much as it is a musical one, and is on display in every frame Burns includes of Louis Armstrong. Armstrong was as immensely influential as he was not only because he was a great trumpet player, but because he embraced his audience, was anxious that it enjoyed itself, and was thus able to take it with him, note by soaring note.

Perhaps the most instructive sequence in Burns’ series involves Armstrong’s character opposite, Duke Ellington. Ellington’s whole career was built on a remarkable marriage of jazz , elegance, and dignity (traits embodying the cultural longings of Ellington’s black Washington, D.C. milieu). Yet in 1956, with jazz receding into elitist taste and his own career in the balance, Ellington jump-started his creative life by nearly starting a riot at the Newport Jazz Festival. Characteristically, Ellington had composed a long, serious suite for the occasion. But when he saw his audience heading early for the parking lot, he broke the band into “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,” a hard-driving work he’d written in 1937. The crowd turned back. Famously, one beautiful woman started to dance, and the crowd gathered around her. Ellington dug into the number, even when the worried festival impresario signaled for him to cut it off before the usually polite Newporters got violent. Saxophonist Paul Gonsalves did 27 choruses, and the band followed with four encores. “I was born at Newport,” Ellington liked to say afterward.

There’s also a cautionary tale for this theme of audience embrace: the career of Miles Davis. Davis had enjoyed success as a musician of aloof cool, but started to chafe when pop groups like Chicago used his riffs to get very rich. Davis actually asked his label to stop calling him a jazz player at all, having concluded that it was a barrier to reaching a larger audience and making real money. He eventually was to find that audience, at least for a while, by playing the rock-jazz mix known as fusion. But many people agree that this was a dead end for both Davis and his listeners.

Why? The answer again has to do with the issue of musical negotiation. Davis’ musical identity was originally built on artistic distance, on insisting that the audience come to his music. But when he switched strategies and went in search of a larger audience, he made the (perhaps inevitable) mistake of staying aloof: He never learned how to teach his new audience what he wanted it to appreciate, or for that matter to learn from it either. In the albums that follow 1969’s Bitches Brew, Davis doesn’t seem to know what he wants to play. Sustained success is not just about a happy, buying audience. It’s an ongoing dialogue – a negotiation.

The same is true for many other forms, of course. But jazz’s lesson is especially valuable because, for one thing, its compressed history is a fractal of these other cultural histories, and for another, that history is suffused with unmitigated pleasure. Burns gives his audience 19 hours of that history, a lot of time for a lot of extraordinary people to play and find (posthumously, in many cases) another generation of admirers to talk with.

Never mind the lectures: What a concert.
Charles Paul Freund, Reason.com, March 2001

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Ken Burns – Jazz (2001) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

John Carpenter – They Live (1988)

admin — Fri, 15 Nov 2019 06:00:00 +0000

Quote:
John Nada (Roddy Piper) is a quiet loner, a drifter who gets work where ever he can find it. While working on a construction site in L.A. and sleeping in a vagrant community at night, John stumbles upon a secret society of alien beings who pose as wealthy and powerful people in human society. John joins a rebel group commited to exposing this conspiracy, and becomes their reluctant leader and the only hope of the human race. Former wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper is outstanding as the unassuming hero, playing the role with understated shock at what he uncovers and stubborn courage when he confronts it. Director John Carpenter laces the film with his trademark blend of humor and horror, making aliens that are hideously arrogant, greedy, and easy to hate, while the humans are confused and desperate in their struggle against them. The world looks a little different at the end of THEY LIVE, and one will never look at billboards, money, or sunglasses the same way again. The film contains the longest, and perhaps most realistic, fist fight in film history. Paying homage to INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, the film was based on the short story EIGHT O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING by Ray Nelson.

2.01GB | 1 h 34 min | 1024×456 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/3D16AA40D653ACA/John_Carpenter_-_%281988%29_They_Live.part1.rar
https://nitroflare.com/view/34030A70E108879/John_Carpenter_-_%281988%29_They_Live.part2.rar
https://nitroflare.com/view/4AB05A7D00980C9/John_Carpenter_-_%281988%29_They_Live.part3.rar

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post John Carpenter – They Live (1988) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Ken Burns & Lynn Novick – The War (2007)

admin — Tue, 18 Jun 2019 06:42:07 +0000

Quote:
THE WAR, a seven-part documentary series directed and produced by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, explores the history and horror of the Second World War from an American perspective by following the fortunes of so-called ordinary men and women who became caught up in one of the greatest cataclysms in human history.

Quote:
Creating epic documentaries about war is nothing new for Ken Burns, nor is the subject of the Second World War, which never ceases to be a popular subject of films and TV shows. Yet with The War, Burns has definitely succeeded in breaking new ground, exploring in depth the effect of the war on common Americans, and not just the soldiers of The Greatest Generation that fought it.

As the narration says at the beginning, “The war affected people in every house, on every street in every town in America.” This is nothing less than an attempt to show how the war altered the lives of an entire nation through the portrayal of four individuals from four communities–Waterbury, Connecticut; Mobile, Alabama; Luverne, Minnesota; and Sacramento, California–that could represent any town in the country that went through the war. The result is another stunning achievement for Burns and co-director Lynn Novick.

Together the film-making team succeeds in bringing the war home through the testimonies, letters, and footage of the people from these towns. The storytelling is compelling–Burns and Novick manage to find the most vivid, intimate, and personal dimensions of a global catastrophe–and brought to life with exceptional voice work from marquee stars like Tom Hanks, Alan Arkin, and Samuel L. Jackson. Much of the footage is brilliantly restored; even the most die-hard History Channel buff will see clips here that they’ve never viewed before.

Many old grainy family films look almost as clean and bright as if they were just shot using a modern camera with black-and-white film (keeping in mind that most of the footage was shot without sound, the audio effects work on The War is particularly impressive and should bring attention to the under-appreciated work of the foley artist). It took Burns and Novick six years to make this seven-part, 15-hour film–not surprising, really, considering the miles of footage they must have accumulated in the course of their research–and the time and effort shows in the results.

13.72GB | 14 h 37 min | 849×478 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/7715E2969940F4D/The_War(2007)_Ep1.mkv https://nitro.download/view/8BA37DC5CC0D7F3/The_War(2007)_Ep2.mkv https://nitro.download/view/070928AF5260E7A/The_War(2007)_Ep3.mkv https://nitro.download/view/5176170D3731BF6/The_War(2007)_Ep4.mkv https://nitro.download/view/ECA7C406F2C323E/The_War(2007)_Ep5.mkv https://nitro.download/view/2A131EF460696E0/The_War(2007)_Ep6.mkv https://nitro.download/view/2E84D1DDD5FFDAC/The_War(2007)_Ep7.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:English

The post Ken Burns & Lynn Novick – The War (2007) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

John Carpenter – The Thing [+Extras] (1982)

admin — Thu, 20 Dec 2018 01:24:41 +0000

Synopsis
Based on both the short story by John W. Campbell, Jr. and the 1951 film produced by Howard Hawks, THE THING is John Carpenter’s stunning masterpiece of horror. A group of weary scientists enduring the winter in an isolated camp deep in Antarctica chance upon an alien spacecraft buried in the ice. Near the strange craft is the body of an alien being, frozen solid. Thinking they have made the find of a lifetime, the scientists bring the alien body back to camp and thaw it out. The alien awakens, not in the best of moods, and proceeds to take over the identities of the scientists, one by one, body and all. Helicopter pilot MacCready (Kurt Russell) must lead the surviving men in discovering who among them is human and who is not and how they can destroy “the thing” before it takes them all and moves on to the heavily populated mainland and the rest of humanity. Rob Bottin supplies the awe-inspiring special effects of the creature in its many, ever-changing forms. The effects were groundbreaking at the time and hold up flawlessly over the passing years. But Carpenter does not rely solely on special effects, utilizing his spectacular cast, which includes Wilford Brimley and Richard Dysart, to create three dimensional characters enduring an unthinkable situation. The score from Ennio Morricone is understated, yet increases the tense mood tenfold. Shooting was difficult and done in below freezing conditions, but despite the discomfort the cast and crew produced a truly terrifying film that will stand the test of time. THE THING is surely one of Carpenter’s definitive films and a true horror classic.

The Thing – Terror Takes Shape

http://nitroflare.com/view/81D6125CBECE610/The_Thing.part1.rar
http://nitroflare.com/view/F27C9B11B008FBE/The_Thing.part2.rar

Language:English
Subtitles:English, French, Spanish

The post John Carpenter – The Thing [+Extras] (1982) first appeared on Cinema of the World.