Colin Farrell, Christopher Walken and Sam-Rockwell in ‘Seven Psychopaths’
The really brief review of the new film from In Bruges writer/director Martin McDonagh, Seven Psychopaths would be: Trust me, go see it.
The not quite so brief review would be: This is a clever, sharp, intriguing film you will thoroughly enjoy. Go see it.
But neither would be fair.
Seven Psychopaths is a large ensemble cast performing at the top of their game, in a story that pokes fun at Hollywood while not having that “insider” feel that some films lampooning the film industry often contain.
“Marty” (Colin Farell) is a screenwriter who drinks too much, mistreats the woman he’s involved with (Abbie Cornish), and has a great title for a screenplay. But aside from the title, Seven Psychopaths, he has little else in terms of ideas or characters. His good friend “Billy” (Sam Rockwell), who is an actor that doesn’t work as a waiter or barista, wants to help. Billy has suggestions of psychopaths that Marty can use in the project and actually wants to co-write the screenplay. That’s an idea that Marty isn’t comfortable with, but he is willing to listen to Billy’s ideas.
Woody Harrelson in ‘Seven Psychopaths’
Billy supports himself with a dognapping business he runs with “Hans” (Christopher Walken). Walken is not focused on business at the moment because his wife “Myra” (Linda Bright Clay) is sick and may be dying. But the business pretty much runs itself. Take a person’s dog when they aren’t looking and hang onto the dog until the owner posts a reward. Then one of them returns the dog and collects the reward.
The problems start when they take the ShihTzu that belongs to “Charlie” (Woody Harrelson), a crime boss with problems. He’s upset with his girlfriend “Angela” (Olga Kurylenko) and orders two of his thugs to kill her. But they are killed themselves by a psychopathic killer known as the “Jack of Diamonds” (because he leaves that card with every one of his victims. Stranger still is that all of his victims are members of crime gangs.
This leads to Charlie and his remaining thugs searching to locate the dognappers and recover his “Bonny”, while Marty and Billy try to flesh out this screenplay idea.
Seven Psychopaths is multi-layered and McDonagh peels those layers back like they were the thinnest sections of an onion. One by one, the layers are revealed beneath one another until all is revealed and the final confrontations take place.
The actors are terrific. Great dialogue and characters with subtext allow them to perform without having to reach over the top to make themselves heard. The story sags in places, and sometimes the dialogue is almost too hip for the room. But those moments are rare enough that they don’t really detract from the experience.
Argo builds on Ben Affleck’s most recent films to continue to cement his reputation as a director of high quality movies.
Here he uses the central elements of a true story from the late 1970s/early 1980s to create a film that tells the story in an engaging way. Is there some poetic license? Affleck admits there was, saying “because we say this is ‘based on a true story’ rather than ‘this is a true story’ we’re allowed some dramatic license. There’s a spirit of truth.”
The actual story and the film center around the history of the U.S. involvement in Iran prior to the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Decades earlier, the U.S. had installed the Shah, Reza Palavi, into power and he was a cruel ruler given to enormous excess in his personal lifestyle. The Savak, his secret police, routinely made people disappear and murder/torture was commonplace while the Shah continued his life of opulence. The film describes this at the open. Then the Shah was given refuge in the U.S. as the revolution swept through the nation of Iran, installing the Ayatollah Khomeini in power.
On November 4th, 1979 the demand for the Shah to be returned for trial and execution reached a new height and supposedly “students” seized the U.S. Embassy, taking hostages. Six employees in the visa division managed to sneaked out in the chaos and eventually took refuge in the home of the Canadian ambassador. Word of their escape made its way back to the U.S. State Department and the CIA. Plans began to be discussed to get them out of the country, as if they were to be captured, they would undoubtedly be executed.
The State Department has the lead on the project, but asks the CIA to help as they are the experts as so-called “ex-fils” (it’s the insiders way of shortening the phrase exfiltration) and their best expert is Tony Mendez (Affleck). There are no suitable ideas at the first meeting and he goes home that night and calls his son. Mendez and his wife are on a “break”. The son is watching a movie that Affleck switches on and the idea is born. An idea he presents to his boss “Jack O’Donnell” (Bryan Cranston) the next day.
Ben Affleck with John Goodman (left) and Alan Arkin in ‘Argo’
The six will be working with Mendez as a Canadian film crew. He will set up a cover story in Hollywood to back up their claims and walk them right up to the departure gate at the airport in Tehran and just fly right out of there. It’s not the best idea but there are no options for best ideas and his plan quickly gains support. Including that of his long-time friend John Chambers, a famous Hollywood make-up artist who’d won a special Academy Award for his artistry. They find a producer, “Lester Siegel” (Alan Arkin) and quickly they have a production company and a movie in pre-production. Titled “Argo” it’s a Star Wars/Planet of the Apes rip-off that requires desert scenery, making Iran the perfect place to shoot it.
Approval comes and Mendez is off to Iran to put the plan to good use. Security at the airport has been increased several times as members of the Shah’s former staff have tried and failed to sneak out of the country. The six themselves don’t think the plan will work. But their lives depend on it working and time is running out. The Canadian Ambassador, “Ken Taylor” (Victor Garber) has been ordered to close the embassy and come home.
This is superior moviemaking. The story captures the attention of the viewer through the use of both footage from the actual events involved and detailed re-creations. Someone really did their homework in getting the little things right. The kind of things you only notice when they’re done wrong. The best available typewriters were programmable correcting IBM Selectrics and there’s one on the desk of the secretary to the Secretary of State. The cars are right, the clothing, appearance and mannerisms. Perhaps only those of us who lived through the era as young adults will remember and recognize it so vividly, but the filmmakers did this very well.
They also did everything else well. Music. Story. Making an edge-of-your-seat spy thriller without “shaken, not stirred” martinis and elaborate gunplay is difficult, but Affleck and his crew pulled it off.
Arkin and Goodman provide just the right of comic relief without going overboard. Affleck delivers a very fine performance, as does Cranston. Behind the lens, Affleck also delivers, keeping the film tight and filled with tension right through the third act of the film, leaving viewers wondering how it will end even if you already know the outcome. It is an ending that is definitely worthy of seeing on a big screen to get the full effect.
After having seen the film myself, I disagree with my colleague’s conclusion that the film should be rated only a 1. While I agree that this can be seen as an instance of racism in Hollywood, I can’t agree with his contention that the film automatically deserves a rating of 1 for this reason alone.
Casting Ben Affleck as Tony Mendez in Argo isn’t the same as someone having tried to cast Dustin Hoffman as Jaime Escalante in Stand and Deliver. The ethnicity of the central character in that film is far more ingrained into film’s story than the actual ethnicity of Tony Mendez in Argo.
Ultimately, this is a tempest in a teapot. Making a movie and choosing the actors to portray the roles is first and foremost about casting actors who will put “butts in seats” and make the film profitable. If producers take a character whose race in ingrained in the psyche of the audience, then casting someone not of that race may be a very bad decision and cost them money. Acting is a craft and not always about the race of the actor.
My worst fear when going to see a film that’s supposed to be a comedy is that I’ve already seen the best parts of the film in the trailer. Aside from two or three good, but minor laughs in Here Comes the Boom, this fear came to true.
Kevin James is “Scott Voss”, a biology teacher who was teacher of the year ten years ago and apparently went into an immediate and rapid decline. Now he sits in his classroom, reading the newspaper and waiting for the days to end. But when the school’s principal, “Principal Betcher” (Greg Germann) announces that severe budget problems will cause the school to cancel all extracurricular programs, including the music program run by “Marty Streb” (Henry Winkler), he wants to take action.
Salma Hayek is the world’s sexiest school nurse in ‘Here Comes the Boom’
So Scott commits to raising the $48,000 needed to keep Marty’s job. He looks for a solution to this problem while at the same time trying to woo the school’s very attractive nurse, “Bella Flores” (Selma Hayek), who shoots him down repeatedly.
Suddenly he finds an idea while tutoring his friend “Niko” (Bas Rutten), who is studying to take the test to become a U.S. citizen. Niko and friends are watching a UFC fight on TV and when Scott hears that the guy who lost the fight got $10,000 for the effort, dollar signs light up in his eyes. He begs Niko to train him and the odyssey is on. Scott begins fighting at the very bottom of the MMA food chain and hopes to lose enough fights to earn the money needed, turning his cash in after every fight to a sympathetic assistant principal.
You can predict what will happen from here. There’s a sub-plot about chasing your dreams involving his brother “Eric” (Gary Valentine) who has an unhappy marriage, isn’t happy in his work and has a passion that he wants to pursue. The bad marriage jokes are among some of the film’s least funny bit.
The notion that a once awesome teacher might be inspired to once again excel in the classroom and inspire his students suffers from believability. The really good teachers rarely lose that passion and once it is gone it usually stays gone. If that’s not bad enough, Here Comes the Boom will shamelessly attempt to manipulate your emotions through other implausible events. I won’t spoil the film’s most unbelievable moments except to say they take place during the film’s climatic fight and there is more than one of them.
Director Frank Coraci, who is a frequent collaborator with both Kevin James and Adam Sandler, usually evokes more laughs in his films than we get here. While some didn’t like his last movie with James, Zookeeper, it was at least very funny. This one is not.
Kids sure are a lot more together than they used to be.
Take the class of 2016 at fictional East Coast school Barden College, almost all of whom seem to be consumed by an informed life in music by the time we meet them in Jason Moore’s Pitch Perfect. Beca (Anna Kendrick) attends out of force; she promised her estranged father, Dr. Mitchell (John Benjamin Hickey), that she would try college for a year before heading to Los Angeles in search of a career in music. In fact, when she arrives – via taxi – to her dorm on move-in day, she doesn’t even tote any clothes, just some expensive computer equipment with which she mashes up songs.
Then there’s Jesse (an impressive Skylar Astin), a singer who already has all the moves and notes down to be as good as a professional singer (the actor playing him has proven himself in musical theater). There’s also Aubrey (Anna Camp) and Chloe (Brittany Snow), the Heathers-like heads of the Bellas, one of the two dominant a cappella groups at Barden. Their enemy? The Treblemakers, who won the national singing tournament at which the Bellas face planted the year before. Begrudgingly, the sour Beca joins the Bellas, while Jesse takes the Treblemakers by storm.
This would seem to be the entirety of the college experience, according to Perfect, which 30 Rock writer Kay Cannon adapted from Mickey Rapkin’s boo, a non-fiction look at the world of a cappella. Beca and Jesse’s entire freshman year is covered by their love of all things music. They, and everyone they meet, including a tiresome role for Rebel Wilson as a plus-size Bella who calls herself Fat Amy before the bitchy women she meet can, are totally savvy and hyper-articulate about music. And they have an amazing amount of savoir faire and self-prepossession for 18-year-olds.
Cast of ‘Pitch Perfect’
Which means Moore’s movie is essentially done right when it begins. These kids are more than all right; there is nowhere for it to go, as hard as Cannon tries to thread a plot together with a clunky romance build between Beca and Jesse and some sorority-esque in-fighting among the girls (Barden apparently has no Greek life, one of many college culture shock tenets eschewed by the film. There’s also very little depiction of experimentation with alcohol, drugs, or sex, or even roommate friction). Also, Moore never shows anyone attending class. And a lot of jokes, including the odd acceptance of Lilly (Hana Mae Lee), a quiet Asian girl who no one can hear when she talks, could have been excised.
For such an adult character, Beca isn’t a fully-formed dramatic creation. She’s abrasively myopic, and though Jesse even calls her behavior out, Perfect doesn’t really justify her attitude and penchant for pushing people away. Additionally, Kendrick lands many of her lines improperly – they feel rehearsed, stagy, a bit too pronounced for the intimate lens of the film camera. (Also, on a purely cosmetic matter, when Chloe accosts Beca in the shower after hearing her sing, Beca is in full makeup. Why?) Camp, on the other hand, fine-tuning her conservative alpha bitch persona, is hilarious, and Ester Dean is memorable as a background Bella.
What Perfect does have going for it is a cast that can sing, which they do again, and again, and again as both a cappella groups race towards the national competition. (John Michael Higgins and Elizabeth Banks, a producer on the film and undergrad a cappella alum herself, appear awkwardly as competition commentators.) Their performances are the highlights of the film (Moore directed the terrific Tony-winner Avenue Q), though since Cannon uses the numbers for punch lines and surprise purposes, we never get to see how songs are chosen or numbers rehearsed and choreographed.
Perfect also comes off a bit like a “Now That’s What I Call Music!” memento for 2012, as the Bellas almost exclusively choose modern hits for their numbers, like David Guetta’s “Titanium.” Between that and Jesse’s obsession with The Breakfast Club, Perfect comes off as derivative. A film so wrapped up in touchstones can never become one of its own.
This is a film that Liam Neeson said he wasn’t interested in making until he read what he felt was a terrific script from Robert Mark Kamen and Luc Besson. Apparently it was better in his hand than the final product that was delivered to the big screen, although it is by no means awful.
Taken 2 reunites retired CIA operative (at least we assume he was CIA) “Bryan Mills” (Neeson) with his daughter “Kim” (Grace) and his ex-wife “Lenore” (Janssen). The new husband of Lenore we meet in the original Taken is not seen, although he does figure in the story we’re told. Just in case you missed the original, Kim went to Paris to follow a rock band across Europe, but was kidnapped to be sold into sexual slavery within a few hours of her arrival. Fortunately she was on the phone with her father when the kidnappers came and somehow he managed to track them down and rescue her, killing most of the kidnappers in the process.
Now he’s teaching Kim to drive and about to leave for a security job in Istanbul. When the new husband, who is separating from Lenore, churlishly cancels a trip to China that Lenore and Kim were about to depart on, Bryan invites them to join him in Istanbul for a few days after his security job is over.
Melissa Grace goes on the run in ‘Taken 2’
Meanwhile, “Murad Kraniqi” (Serbedzija) is plotting revenge against Bryan Mills. He is the father of one of the men Mills killed in saving his daughter and worse yet, Mills tortured him for information.
The plan is to grab Mills and the two women important to him, but Kim escapes capture by a fortunate series of events. That’s a familiar theme here, a fortunate series of events. But Bryan and Lenore are taken. Naturally Bryan manages to contact Kim and escape and the struggle is on. Can Bryan rescue Lenore? Can he keep Kim safe? Can he manage to find a way to settle things with Kraniqi once and for all, without having to kill every relative he has anywhere?
The action is decent. Kamen and Besson have constructed characters with substance in Mills and the two women he loves. But Krasniqi is a cliché as are all of the thugs who work for him. They’re brilliantly competent in locating Mills and family, but can’t capture them or hold on to them worth a damn. Worse yet, the action and violence is toned down, probably to get the film’s final rating of PG-13. Better a hard, R-rated film that’s more honest than a toned-down piece that draws a larger audience, but is nowhere nearly as satisfying.
Beyond The Black Rainbow is a horror/science fiction fever dream. More stream of conscious than narrative, director Panos Cosmatos creates a film inspired by midnight movies and those horrifying VHS boxes that decorated mom-and-pop video stores in the 1980s.
The film focuses on a young woman, Elena (Eva Allen), who is an unwilling patient in the outwardly New Age, yet actually oppressive Arboria Institute. Through the institute’s use of a strange crystal pyramid and the observation by the creeptastic Dr. Barry Nyle, (Michael Rogers), Elena is subjected to a series of painful mental (possibly psychic) tests. Director Panos Cosmatos tells a tale of loss and escape set in a Stanley Kubrick/Ridley Scott inspired 1983.
The color pallet inside the institute is opaque. Covered in red, orange, white or black, the walls inside Arboria allow for nothing but themselves. The captive Elena is constantly under surveillance and never says a word. The very thought of escape triggers and invisible force, emanating from a crystal pyramid beneath the Arboria Institute that paralyzes her. Dr. Nyle taunts her in their sessions, trying to get her to speak. She doesn’t know who she is. She doesn’t even know who her parents are. Dr. Nyle taunts her with this during their sessions.
Everything about the institute is closed off from the outside world. Indeed, the only glimpse we see outside the institute (for most of the film) is Dr. Nyle’s home life and his commute. He is the only character to ever leave the institute, and he returns nightly to a woman who is either his mother or wife – the relationship is never expressly stated. Even at home though, Nyle only thinks of Elena and the Arboria Institute.
Elana makes her escape in ‘Beyond The Black Rainbow’
The film feels as if it’s about loss and unintended consequences. Dr. Arboria, who is rather old in the film’s present, is an aging drug addict, seemingly blind to the complete and utter failure that is his institution. He wanted to help people become better, happier versions of themselves. Instead, his heir, Dr. Nyle, masks his own dark desires – desires originally set loose in a disastrous 1966 acid trip that now seem to be focused on Elena. She is no better or happier. Elena is a prisoner.
Composer Jeremy Schmidt writes a score full of 70s and 80s inspired synth that is reminiscent of John Carpenter, Vangelis and even Barry de Vorzon’s main theme from The Warriors. The film is like a composition of music and the score compliments every purposely constructed frame. It’s like a synthy dirge. The close-ups (and there are many) are tight. The wide shots show a beauty in the banal.
For all the film’s strengths, it moves at a very slow, but very deliberate pace. As the film reaches its climax, the pace suddenly changes. It’s like a crescendo that appears suddenly, then disappears before the listener catches on. It’s deliberate, but it feels a little off, especially considering how well constructed the rest of the film is.
Beyond The Black Rainbow feels like a midnight movie produced in the late 70s or early 80s – a dystopic vision of New Age philosophy and the hippie movement gone horribly wrong. He pulled it off.
Allison Janney is an controlling mother in ‘The Oranges’
The Oranges is a good idea gone wrong.
The basic idea is interesting. Take two families that have lived next door to one another in the same suburban neighborhood (West Orange, NJ in this case). Both have daughters the same age, and one couple also has a son.
The couples are “David” and “Paige Walling” (Hugh Laurie and Catherine Keener) and “Terry” and “Carol Ostroff” (Oliver Platt and Allison Janney). David markets alcoholic beverages. Paige runs the local Christmas caroling group with an iron fist. Terry is a gadget nut who was part of the group that invented ultimate Frisbee and Carol spends her life giving her daughter “Nina” (Leighton Meester) grief whenever possible.
But it turns out that Carol doesn’t get to do that nearly as much as she might like. Nina was the daughter who left home not long after graduating to see the world outside of the suburbs. “Vanessa Walling”, who is the same age, had a plan to leave as well, but she’s been living at home and working locally while figuring out plan B. Her older brother, “Toby” (Adam Brody) has a government job and did leave home, although he’s home before going off to China.
Alia Shawkat in ‘The Oranges’
Thanksgiving is coming up and the Ostroffs want Nina to come home for the holiday. But when they call her to wish her a happy birthday, she makes it clear she’s not coming home and worse yet, she’s marrying her boyfriend Ethan, a pierced-lip slacker. But she catches him cheating on her at her birthday party and is suddenly winging her way home.
Meanwhile, the Wallings are having trouble in their relationship, and one thing leads to another and we find David and Nina sharing a kiss. The kiss then turns everyone’s lives upside down.
There are a few laughs here, but not really enough to be considered a full-fledged comedy. There’s drama here, but not enough for it to be considered a full-fledged drama either. The result is a pastiche of a film that has some decent moments but on the whole leaves the viewer unsatisfied. It’s like a full course meal that looks great on the menu board but when the plates of food arrive, the final product just doesn’t measure up.
It doesn’t help that the romance between Nina and David seems very forced, as Meester and Laurie have almost no chemistry at all. It’s easy to swallow Laurie and Keener as a troubled married couple, that particular chemistry works quite well. Platt is always strong and Janney brings the prototypical over-involved mother to life. But good acting usually can’t save weak writing and that’s the primary problem with The Oranges.
Butter is one of those brilliantly written films that is a joy to watch. Screenwriter Jason Micallef’s script was so good, it won him a prestigious Nicholl fellowship in 2008, one of only five such awards handed out to writers by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Now his script has been brought to the big screen and the finished product is a real winner.
Jennifer Garner is “Laurie Pickler”, an Iowa woman who is very proud of the fact that her husband “Bob Pickler” (Ty Burrell) has won the State Excellent in Butter Carving Competition for 15 straight years, with amazing sculptures like his “Last Supper” and “Schindler’s List” that are simply breathtaking. But after fifteen years, the panel of judges feel that he should step down and let someone else have a shot at the glory.
Olivia Wilde is a sexy stripper in ‘Butter’
Laurie doesn’t like this idea. She believes the championship belongs to her family and if Bob won’t compete, she will. Hopefully alone, but three other women show up to enter the competition. “Carol Ann” (Kristen Schaal) is a “friend” of Laurie’s and of butter carving but her talents with a trowel are an unknown. Then there is “Destiny” (Yara Shahidi) who is a foster child that’s been bounced from home to home. Currently she’s living with “Ethan Emmet” (Rob Corddry) and his wife “Julie” (Alicia Silverstone) and they’ve made it clear they want to keep her. She says she isn’t good at anything but it’s obvious she has a gift for butter carving. And for understatement about the flaws of “white people”.
The fourth contestant is a woman named “Brooke Swinkowski” (Olivia Wilde) to whom we are introduced when Bob storms out of the Pickler house and goes to a local strip club where she rocks his world. They move into the back of his van and they’re getting it on when they are rudely and violently interrupted. Brooke is very angry with Laurie for the interruption and because she didn’t get paid. So she’s making it her goal in life to ensure Laurie loses this competition.
Destiny wins the local event but Laurie gets help from her old boyfriend “Boyd Bolton” (Hugh Jackman) a local car dealer and as a result of the machinations, Laurie and Destiny will face off in a carve-off at the State Fair in front of witnesses and so no one can tamper with the event.
Yara Shahidi charms in ‘Butter’
Jim Field Smith’s direction of Jason Micallef’s inspiring script is excellent. Garner shines as the flawed Laurie Pickler who appears as the perfect wife and partner to everyone, while being a profane Machiavellian sort who will stop at nothing to achieve her goals, because she’s convinced that in the end, all she has is butter. She’s Sarah Palin but worse and Garner’s portrayal is just hysterical. Burrell’s hapless Bob, who ought to have “whipped” tattooed on his forehead is also an excellent performance. Silverstone and particularly Corddry also deliver strong turns as the loving couple who want to take Destiny not just into their home, but into their hearts. “Ethan” is almost a perfect father.
But it’s relative newcomer Shahidi as “Destiny” who manages to steal every scene she’s in. Not just with the wonderful dialogue that was written for the role either. She is a natural and while she has stated her goal is to be a historian, that would be a waste of terrific talent in the arena of acting.
Butter is biting satire that entertains throughout.
“L’enfant d’en haut” (English title: “Sister”), set to hit U.S. theaters on Oct. 12, is the second feature film from writer/director Ursula Meier, whose first film Home was fairly well received. This second effort, which stars Kasey Mottey Klein (the main child in Home) is sadly not an improvement. It has a very interesting premise but struggles to present it in its best light.
Klein is “Simon”, a 12-year-old boy who lives with his sister “Louise” (Seydoux) in a small apartment inside of a tall building in a city at the base of a mountain. Atop the mountain is an expensive ski resort where tourists spend freely and there are plenty of opportunities for Simon to pilfer. He runs his own cottage industry stealing goggles, sunglasses, gloves, and especially skis from the resort’s patrons. His mindset is that they have so much, they’ll just run out and buy replacement equipment and lose no sleep over what he has taken. He will sell his stolen goods and uses the money to help keep himself and Louise in food and toilet paper. It is a good thing that he is able to generate this income as Louise struggles to remain employed, among her other problems.
The brother and sister are alone as their parents died in an accident some time ago and one is left to wonder through most of the film why Louise chose to to stay with Simon since she appears to consider him a burden. Simon, however, is obsessively devoted to his sister.
Gillian Anderson in ‘Sister’
Simon meets an English man who is working in a restaurant at the resort and who also appears to make money by taking from others. “Mike” (Compston) offers to buy the skis that Simon can deliver and for a time it looks like they will work well together, but Simon soon realizes he can’t depend on Mike.
Meier’s premise about a boy who is really the adult and an adult sister who is more or less the child is interesting, but there are inconsistencies that just don’t make sense. If Simon is the organized, self-sufficient adult, why is he so dependent upon Louise? He makes decisions that make no sense, refusing to allow one of his neighbor children to come stealing with him at one point and then allowing him to do so later on. The same reasons for saying no were still in play, but he said yes.
More curious is why Simon pretends to be a patron of the resort when he joins “Kristin Johnson”, a wealthy tourist who is skiing with her sons when she and Simon first encounter one another. He tells her a story that his wealthy parents are busy running a big hotel they own and tries to buy the meal she and her kids are eating. They will run into each other later on in a much different situation and why this earlier encounter was staged seems to have been only to serve to make their later meeting more difficult.
There are images that Meier uses of crossing a highway and speeding trains passing in the background that are clearly intended to have some meaning, but whatever the intent was lost on me. In the end, I enjoyed the performance of Klein as “Simon”, but overall, the film was disappointing.
‘The Wrecking Crew’ is making the festival rounds and is worth checking out
If you’ve never heard of a documentary called The Wrecking Crew, I’m not surprised. Even though the film has won 10 film festivals including four Audience Awards, and been an official selection in at least 28 others all over the world, if you weren’t at one of those festivals you probably don’t know it exists.
On top of that, I’m betting that you’ve probably never heard of the film’s subject matter by the same name either. The Wrecking Crew was a group of young studio musicians who played on nearly every top 1960s pop hit recorded in Los Angeles. They were the creators of the “West Coast Sound” popularized by bands such as the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, the Monkees, and the Mamas & the Papas. They laid down the tracks for superstars such as Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Joe Cocker, Glen Campbell, Elvis, Simon and Garfunkel, and Nat King Cole.
Producers would pull together a group of these musical geniuses, record some tracks, and if a track became a hit, the group would get a name and go on the road. The following week, a different producer might put the same musicians together under a different name and do the same thing. Often the band members that toured weren’t the ones that played on the original record, and some of the touring band members weren’t good enough to play the licks that the Wrecking Crew had recorded, so the songs never sounded the same live as they did on the albums. It was the Wrecking Crew, and the innovative minds of producers such as Phil Spector, that drove the record industry to the west coast.
‘The Wrecking Crew’ included many talented men and women
The documentary, directed by Denny Tedesco, the son of legendary studio musician Tommy Tedesco, offers an insightful journey into the lives of this core group of musicians and the birth of West Coast Sound. For these musicians that were seldom given credit for their contributions, the days were long and taxing. Many had children they rarely saw, others went through a string of marriages. But back then, the contracts were good, the money flowed in, and the Wrecking Crew members were doing what they loved.
The Wrecking Crew is told solely through interviews with 1960s icons such as Cher, Micky Dolenz of the Monkees, and Glen Campbell, as well as with the Wrecking Crew musicians themselves. They tell the stories you’ve never heard about the singers and bands we all grew up with. Some are funny, others are tragic, and together they weave together a realistic, and sometimes poignant picture of the music that shaped a generation. Along with spit-fire Tommy Tedesco, one of the most interesting members was Carol Kaye . As the only woman in the group, and undeniably one of the best bass players in history, she climbed right to the top of this exclusive group when, as she puts it, “Back then, it was more important for a woman to put that ‘Mrs.’ in front of her name than it was to have a career.”
‘The Wrecking Crew’ never got the credit they deserved
The documentary has been a long time in the making. Denny Tedesco began working the project back in 1995 when his father, Tommy, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Faced with the impending loss, Tedesco decided to use the documentary as a way to capture a series of snapshots that depicted his father’s life and career as a studio musician, as well as the lives of the others that changed the future of the music industry.
If you love music, The Wrecking Crew is a great way to spend an hour and a half. This documentary offers an honest, and for the most part lighthearted view into a world that few know about. It’s like being a fly on the wall of a studio session with some of the most talented musicians you’ve never met. And even if you don’t remember all the artists and songs, the stories about eccentric music producers and the personal experiences of these musicians will leave you grinning.
For screening dates and times, to watch clips, and read exclusive interviews, visit www.wreckingcrewfilm.com or visit the film’s Facebook page.
