Danny Collins

Posted on March 19, 2015 at 5:50 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language, drug use and some nudity
Profanity:	Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking and drugs
Violence/ Scariness:	Tense family confrontations, illness
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	March 20, 2015
Date Released to DVD:	June 29, 2015
Amazon.com ASIN:	B00UZJO7UA

Movie stories often begin with the hero or heroine having everything and then losing it or having nothing and then finding it. But some of the best combine them both, as Writer/director Dan Fogelman (“Cars,” “Tangled,” “Crazy Stupid Love”) has with “Danny Collins,” a heartwarming story of a one time rock star (Al Pacino) who can fill a stadium with his baby boomer fans but has an empty life that even a hot young fiancee and constant partying cannot hide.

And then he discovers that 40 years ago, when he admitted in an interview that he was afraid of becoming successful because it might impair his integrity as an artist, John Lennon sent him a letter saying that it did not have to happen that way and encouraging him to call. The letter never reached him until four decades later, when Collins’ longtime manager and best friend (Christopher Plummer) found it from a collector and bought it as a surprise birthday gift. (This part of the story is inspired by a real-life musician in the UK who did find out 34 years after it was written that John Lennon had sent him a letter almost identical to the one in the film, as we see in the closing credits.)

The letter serves as a wake-up call, instantly connecting Danny to the musician he once was. He cancels his tour, breaks up with the fiancee, and orders his private plane to New Jersey, where he moves into a suburban hotel managed by Mary (a deliciously crisp Annette Bening). He buys a new piano and has it delivered to his hotel room so he can start composing. And he reaches out to the son he has never met (Bobby Cannavale), who lives in New Jersey with his pregnant wife (Jennifer Garner) and young daughter (the delightful Giselle Eisenberg).

It is a treat to see the flamboyant rock star being checked into the numbingly generic hotel by an agog college student (Melissa Benoist of “Whiplash” and the Supergirl TV series) as stunning a transition for him as if he was Alice through the Looking Glass. Pacino is not entirely convincing as a rock star on stage but his genially raffish charm is as endearing to us as it is to the civilians he charms along the way. The highlight of the film is what he calls his “patter” with Mary, a sparkling throwback to the kind of romantic banter that might have been tossed back and forth by Tracy and Hepburn.

Immune to his charm, at least at first, is his son, even after Danny performs some rock star magic to help the family. But that’s what movies are for — to let us see Danny overcome his son’s efforts not to give in, all to the tune of some of Lennon’s most moving songs. And to wonder what we might do differently if we got a long-lost letter from Lennon.

Note: Danny’s catchy song, “Hey Baby Doll” was written by INXS replacement frontman Ciaran Gribbin, selected in a competition with top Hollywood songwriters for a tune that could sound like a real hit from the 60’s.

Parents should know that this film includes rock star behavior including sexual references and nudity, drinking and drug use, and very strong language, as well as family issues including abandonment and illness.

Family discussion: Who would you most like to get a letter from and what would you want it to say? Why did getting the letter make Danny decide to change his life? How often do get to enjoy patter?

If you like this, try: “One Trick Pony” and “The Last Waltz”

The Gunman

Posted on March 19, 2015 at 5:43 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for strong violence, language and some sexuality

Stars too often produce the kind of movie they want to star in, instead of the kind of movie anyone wants to watch. Co-writer/producer/star Sean Penn is clearly trying to make The Gunman a thinking person’s thriller. You can hear the pitch: a serious look at the exploitation and corruption of emerging economies with lots of slammin’ action! And a chase scene/shootout set at a bullfight!

Unfortunately, it fails as both political drama and action movie. The romance isn’t much, either. Its primary interest is in the many opportunities to see how buff Penn has become. If he had applied as much attention to beefing up the script as he did to beefing up his arms and abs (and showing them off in a surfing scene and a shower scene), the movie would have been much more than this week’s AARP action thriller. Instead, he hired Liam Neeson’s “Taken” director to stage a lot of shootouts in various locations. Been there, seen that, it was better.

Penn plays Jimmy, part of a team providing security in 2006 for humanitarian relief workers in the Republic of Congo, where we are informed that corruption and unrest are rampant in “the world’s deadliest conflict since WWII.”

Jimmy is very much in love with a gorgeous doctor with a beatific smile and gloriously tousled curls named Annie (Jasmine Trinca). She is so beautiful and adores him so completely that we know the moment she says, “See you later,” something will intervene. In case we missed that portent, Jimmy says, “I got a feeling we’re going operational.” He and his team have what we will learn is a “parallel contract with the mining interests.” Machete-wielding marauders create terror everywhere. But corporations with huge revenues at stake are sometimes the beneficiaries of unrest, and sometimes the cause of it. Jimmy is soon “into the wind” following assassination of a political leader who was cancelling all existing agreements with corporations extracting valuable minerals.

Eight years later, Jimmy is back helping to dig wells when three killers come after him, and he realizes that the powerful people who hired him to murder to protect their interests may now have decided to hire someone else to protect their interests further by making sure he never tells anyone what he did for them.

There is some potential in the premise, but it is quickly jettisoned for mind-numbing run-with-a-gun shoot-em-up scenes as battalions of Kevlar-vested guys with automatic weapons come after him. Somehow, he always manages to not only run between the bullets but overpower and outsmart the bad guys, even though he is suffering from brain damage and headaches, except when he isn’t.

He visits his former colleagues so that they can either help him out or try to kill him. Meanwhile, Annie serves the retro girlfriend role: unquestioning adoration, taking her clothes off, hiding behind him, and being taken hostage. And Idris Elba is wasted in a small role that primarily consists of a speech about building a treehouse, but at least he gets to talk about something, which is more than you can say about the Africans in the film. For a movie that is supposed to be politically significant, it’s awfully retro-colonialist.

In the closing credits we are helpfully informed that despite the climactic bullfighting scene, Barcelona no longer allows bullfighting within its jurisdiction. No such disclaimers are made about the various atrocities — political, corporate, or cinematic.

Parents should know that this film includes very strong violence with many characters injured and killed, assorted different weapons, torture, execution and assassination, references to rape, a sexual situation, drinking, smoking, pharmaceuticals, and constant strong language.

Family discussion: How did Jim, Cox, Felix, and Stanley respond differently to the choices they made? What efforts are underway to provide more transparency in the impact that multinational corporations have in emerging economies?

If you like this, try: “Blood Diamond” and “The Constant Gardener”

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Interview: Dan Fogelman, Writer/Director of “Danny Collins”

Posted on March 19, 2015 at 3:55 pm

Dan Fogelman wrote “Cars,” “Tangled,” and “Crazy Stupid Love,” and now for the first time has directed with “Danny Collins,” starring Al Pacino and Annette Bening. Fogelman told me he was wasting time on the internet because he did not know what he wanted to write next when he came across a headline about a musician who did not find out that John Lennon wrote him a letter until 34 years after it was sent.

I had just finished the movie Crazy Stupid Love and I was trying to figure out what to do next. And I was just completely stumped and procrastinating and sitting in front of the blank computer for months on end and looking at the Internet as you do when you are procrastinating and I came across this musician who receives a letter from John Lennon forty years too late. I called him that day. I tracked him down immediately and I told him I heard his story which became the jumping off point of this story the letter, and the receiving of the letter. That’s exactly what happens in the film “Danny Collins.” Literally we wrote out pretty much the same letter. So that is all absolutely true, he was a young musician in the early, early 70s. They said, “We think you are the next big thing”. He said, “I’m terrified of what fame and fortune might do to me,” and cut to 34 years later John Lennon had read that interview had written him a letter offering him advice and he didn’t get letter until the present day. It got sent to him care of the magazine and somebody saw a handwritten letter from Lennon, it got sold to collectors and just never came across his bow until 40 years later. So I couldn’t stop thinking about that, the what-if of the entire situation.

Pacino plays Danny Collins, an aging rock star who can still fill a stadium with his baby boomer fans, who are happy to sing along when he plays his hits. But it feels stale and empty to him, and when he sees the letter from Lennon, he realizes he could have taken a different path and been truer to himself as an artist and a man. Fogelman said,

His life has become everything he feared that it would become. And when I first talked to Al about the character, we talked about the dark place that this guys is in. He is alone, he is very lonely, he is very alone and he is very unhappy with the way his musical career, the direction it has taken. And who he is as a person. He is a drug addict and a drunk and he is dating well beneath his appropriate age range and who he is. And he doesn’t have a family which is a big part of this. He doesn’t have that human connection with people. And so he gets this letter at 65 years old, and that kind of sends him on this course correction.

Lennon’s letter was written to reassure a young musician that success and fame do not have to be corrupting, but in the case of Danny Collins, his concerns about that were justified.

Any form of art is also commerce nowadays. I mean some art becomes popular posthumously but any artist who becomes famous in their own lifetime learns that art starts becoming commerce and vice versa. You are making your living off of it. Your identity is defined by it, your legacy is defined by it, whether it’s music or writing or acting or television or film or journalism. I think when you are defined by your art it is a weird line.

A central image of the story is Collins’ arrival at the very ordinary kind of place he has not seen in decades — a small chain hotel in New Jersey. The design of the hotel had a very specific inspiration.

When I first heard the story of the real guy, Steve Tilston, I knew exactly what I wanted the story to be about. I knew I wanted it to be about family and reconnection. And so I got a couple of images in my head. I said, “Where would be the craziest hotel in the world for Al Pacino to just check into indefinitely?” And I pictured the Woodcliff Lake Hilton which was the hotel in New Jersey that I went to every eighth grade party. I was actually a best man four different times in that hotel. If Al Pacino walked in, they would be ill-equipped to handle him. It would be such a disconnect. We had to shoot the movie in LA but we recreated the Woodcliff Lake Hilton in California and we actually screened it back in that neighborhood and nobody realized that we weren’t actually in New Jersey. New Jersey felt like the most normal place in the world to me because it is where I am from. So the street we had for Bobby Cannavale and Jennifer Garner, with that neighborhood we tried to paint that kind of picture like when I go and visit my friends – the issues they are dealing with, and the kids, that kind of picture.

As Collins, Pacino wears heightened, rock-star attire in the early part of the movie, a striped jacket, scarf and pocket square. And then, as his life becomes more normal, connected, and authentic, his clothing is toned down. He even mentions shopping at Banana Republic.

Danny was a bit of a dandy which I like. When you see Al, in real life, he is kind of vagabond. He has a very cool bohemian look and he is always in black, a sloppiness but it is kind of a put-together sloppiness. That carried over to Danny Collins because for him it is all an act. It is all performance for him to seem really sharp and dandy. He is referred to numerous times in the movies as a ridiculous man and the outfits needed to be able to be both ridiculous in palette but also really precise in the cut and the fit and the accessorizing. And so he always has a scarf and he also has varied vibrant prints and stripes. And we start taking that down as the movie goes on. He is never going to be a guy who walks around in jeans and a T-shirt. By the end, though, he has a black shirt, but he is still wearing it wide open. He has become a fully formed regular human being as much as he is capable of.

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Watch These Stunning Winners of the Drone Film Festival

Posted on March 19, 2015 at 3:13 pm

Drones will literally change our view of the world and it is very exciting to see the possibilities in the winners of this year’s New York City Drone Film Festival. You can get a Superman’s-eye view:

https://vimeo.com/121669160 https://vimeo.com/121674745

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Interview: Maria Awes of ABC’s New Series “In an Instant”

Posted on March 18, 2015 at 3:47 pm

A grizzly bear attack; a bridge collapse; a plane crash… It can happen anywhere at any time — in an instant, life can change forever and that moment will define who you are. “In an Instant” does more than just re-tell heart pounding first-person accounts of the world’s most harrowing tales of survival, it brings them to life with breathtaking dramatizations of the moment before and after life was forever changed. The powerful new series features the trials and triumphs from every angle, and includes gripping first person interviews with the people who lived to tell their stories – and those who were instrumental in helping them survive. Ordinary people who have watched their lives flash before their eyes, stared certain death in the face and overcame it. What key decisions did they make to save their lives? “In an Instant” is a new series on ABC that tells these real-life stories.

I spoke to producer Maria Awes about what she has learned about courage and the will to survive from telling these stories.

What quality do you find in those who are able to survive the most dire circumstances?

I would say that based on everything we have learned in talking to some of these amazing people it has a lot to do with your own will to survive. How you feel this need to make it through and that carries you through. I guess that is kind of what I would say.

How do they get changed by these experiences?

I think that the various events change people in very different ways. I think that they are cathartic experience for sure for these people. Some of the folks for example from the bridge collapse episode dealt with PTSD other people look back on it and just reflect. I think absolutely everybody has changed by their experience but what that change is varies from person to person.

What do they experience as they re-live some of what happened to them for your show?

Oh, it is emotional. Seeing people describe the horrific events that they went through, some of them have expressed to us it’s really good to talk about these things again. They may not have talked about them, certainly to as large as an audience as this. You know I think that it is touching to see them discuss how much their loved ones mean to them. That’s definitely something that comes across in every episode no matter what the story was. As a journalist, to have one interview as striking as these are in your whole life would be amazing. To have as many interviews with amazing people as we do for In An Instant is just unreal. Everybody is so well spoken and so good at putting you in their position at the time these event occurred.

The very earliest stories that we know going back to the Iliad and the Odyssey are about people surviving or sometimes not surviving great danger. What is it that we look for in those stories?

I think that all of these stories make us ask questions of ourselves. Would I have survived? Could I have done it? What would I have done? It offers you the chance to take a look at yourself and see what you know about yourself, how would you react in these different situations? I think it’s always appealing to see how people persevere. This is a very inspirational show. This is not a show that is just gloom and doom and horrible events. This is about what it takes to rise above something that is tragic in some way. And it’s really a little bit genre breaking I think, in terms of combining scripted reenactments with first-person interviews for two hours. It’s like a movie that plays out with real people interspersed in there telling you what’s happening. So I think it’s a unique way to blend entertainment and journalism in a really compelling new way. It is a very different kinds of storytelling that really deals with factual events in a factual way but with the cinematic style has never been given to this type of content. It’s very, very different from other shows whether it’s Dateline or 48 Hours or shows that may deal with real life events. It is very different because we’re still doing it differently, to bring these things to life in a new way. Viewers will definitely want to talk about the people themselves, the survivors of these things because they are truly amazing people.

How do you put the re-enactments together in a way that is sensitive and authentic?

We did countless hours of pre-interviewing, interviewing the people who would be participating in the show to make sure we had all of the facts as they went down before we planned our reenactments. We also looked through police reports if that was pertinent or rescue reports, different files that were created as parts of these events, photos, for the bridge collapse in particular we painstakingly went through the process of making sure the shots matched the photos of the bridge as it collapsed that day. So we really did as good of a job I think as possible to make these scenarios appear as they did, made them as real as they were for the people who were living through these events.

Have any of these stories changed your own thoughts about how you might respond in a crisis?

That’s a good question; I mean I think we all would like to think we have what it takes to power through and to do everything we can to survive. I think that it is inspiring for me to see how everyday people have managed to become heroes, how everyday people managed to survive things that seem impossible, to beat impossible odds. And I would like to think that if I was in their situation I could do the same.

How do you find the stories?

We go through quite a process to find the stories. We work with ABC to have them take a look as well and we are looking for everything from events that received a lot of coverage perhaps in the news to events that received little to no coverage but are no less compelling. We are looking for both the known and unknown stories to share with people because they all speak to different aspects of humanity and how we are able to persevere.

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