New from Raffi: Dog on the Floor

Posted on July 24, 2018 at 8:00 am

Copyright 2018 Rounder
It’s always great news when there’s a new CD from Raffi, the beloved troubadour whose music has delighted families for decades, making him the perennial best-selling children’s entertainer. On July 27, 2018, Raffi’s 25th album will be released, with 15 new songs.

Raffi, who turns 70 this summer, recorded the music in his home, inspired by his dog Luna, who is the subject of three of the new songs. You can see him on tour and follow him on Twitter. He is working towards a September 2018 launch of an online course in Child Honouring-an original philosophy for redesigning society for the greatest good by meeting the universal needs of the very young. He works on behalf of children and their families in a variety of initiatives, including the Center for Partnership Studies, the Center for Children’s Health and the Environment, and the Fraser Mustard Institute for Human Development, and he is the recipient of the Order of Canada and the United Nations’ Earth Achievement Award.

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Music

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again

Posted on July 19, 2018 at 5:40 pm

B
Lowest Recommended Age: Middle School
MPAA Rating: Rated PG-13 for some suggestive material
Profanity: Some mild language
Alcohol/ Drugs: Drinking and drunkenness
Violence/ Scariness: None
Diversity Issues: None
Date Released to Theaters: July 20, 2018
Date Released to DVD: October 22, 2018

Copyright 2018 Universal
Pretty music, pretty scenery, pretty people – here they go again, my my, and how can we resist them? Lesser songs, better singers, higher platform shoes, more romance, a horse, a goat, a boat, a romantic last-minute wedding interruption, returning cast members and a whole new group to play younger versions of the older characters.

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again” finds the young woman with three fathers (Amanda Seyfried as Sophie) about to realize her mother’s dream of a luxury hotel on the idyllic island of Kalokairi (the Greek island of Skopelos in the original, in this one the Croatian island of Vis, which gave the production tax breaks).

It is bittersweet because her mother (Meryl Streep as Donna) has died. She and her step- and one of three possible biological fathers (Pierce Brosnan), conveniently an architect, miss her dearly. “It will get better,” she reassures him. “Yes, just not quite yet,” he answers. Working on the grand opening party makes her feel closer to her mother. But she also misses Sky (Dominic Cooper), who is getting training in hotel management and has been offered a dream job half a world away. She also wishes her other two fathers could be there for the opening, straight-laced British lawyer Harry (Colin Firth), who is negotiating a big merger in Japan, and Bill (Stellan Skarsgård), who is getting an award for being Sweden’s greatest person because this movie does not really care enough about minor details to Google an actual award or invent a plausible one. And why should it? This is a movie that asks us to believe Cher is Meryl Streep’s mother. And that someone could have a daughter in 1980 who would still be in her early 20’s.

While Sophie is planning “the most incredible party of all time,” the primary focus of the film is on filling in the dot, dot, dots of Donna’s origin story, from her college graduation in 1979 (the math does not really add up here, either), her friendship (and performances) with Tanya (Jessica Keenan Wynn as the deliciously acerbic younger version of the character played by Christine Baranski) and Rosie (Alexa Davies as the younger version of the tender-hearted character played by Julie Walter), and her encounters with Bill, Harry, and Sam (younger versions played by Josh Dylan, Hugh Skinner, and Jeremy Irvine).

Lily James (“Baby Driver,” “Cinderella”) plays the young Donna, wearing gold platform boots under her graduation gown as she strides to the podium to give the graduation speech, then tosses off the gown to reveal a wild mash-up of a costume that could only be found in an ABBA performance or perhaps on display at the Bad Taste Museum in the Hall of What Were They Thinking. Her friends join her on stage for a jubilant performance of “I Kissed a Teacher,” and then bid her farewell as she embarks on her adventure. In France, she meets a shy Englishman. It is Harry. In one of the movie’s highlights, they sing and dance to a rousing “Waterloo” in a restaurant. She next meets Bill, who gives her a ride on his boat

And then she meets Sam, who wins her heart and then breaks it. By then she is pregnant, and by then she knows that this island is where she wants to make her home.

There is more skill in the crystalline harmonies, rock star poses, screen saver vistas, and segues between time and space than in the storyline, which is both too sad and too silly. Pierce Brosnan still can’t sing. The script often sounds like it was badly translated from the original Swedish. But it’s a cool treat on a hot summer evening, and let’s face it — you couldn’t escape if you wanted to.

NOTE: Wynn is the latest in five generations of one of the most luminary of show business families, including actors Ed Wynn (“Mary Poppins”) and Kennan Wynn (“Dr. Strangelove”) and writer Tracy Kennan Wynn (“The Longest Yard”). And of course, be sure to stay through the end credits for a final musical number!

Parents should know that this film includes sexual references and non-explicit situations, questions of paternity, some sexual humor, childbirth scene, some mild language, and some alcohol.

Family discussion: How do you bolster your friends and family? What makes your soul shine? How do you make a complicated problem simple?

If you like this, try: the first “Mamma Mia” and “Walking on Sunshine” and read Susan Wloszczyna’s interview with Judy Craymer, who came up with the idea of turning ABBA’s songs into a play.

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DVD/Blu-Ray movie review Musical Romance Series/Sequel

Blindspotting

Posted on July 19, 2018 at 5:31 pm

B +
Lowest Recommended Age: Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, some brutal violence, sexual references and drug use
Profanity: Very strong, crude, and racist language
Alcohol/ Drugs: Drinking and drunkenness, drugs
Violence/ Scariness: Peril and violence including policeman shooting an unarmed man
Diversity Issues: A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters: July 20, 2018
Date Released to DVD: November 19, 2018

Copyright 2018 Foley Walkers Studio
Copyright 2018 Lionsgate
More than ten years ago, longtime best friends Daveed Diggs (“black-ish,” “Wonder,” Tony-winner for “Hamilton”) and spoken word poet/academic Rafael Casal began working on “Blindspotting,” inspired by their experience growing up in the uneasily gentrifying Oakland, California area long before either became successful. It took about ten years before they got the financing, and when it premiered at Sundance it was immediately acclaimed as a remarkably assured first film with exceptional performances a gripping story, and a nuanced, sometimes poetic portrayal of issues of race, class, and friendship.

Collin (Diggs), who is black, has just three more days of his year-long probation, following a two-year sentence. As long as he meets every checkpoint and follows every rule for just three more days, he will be able to leave the closely supervised halfway house and regain his freedom.

This is a challenge. His best friend Miles (Casal), who is white, is completely loyal to Collin but also impulsive and naturally resistant to any kind of rules. Collin finds himself with Miles and another friend who are smoking weed and playing around with guns. If he is discovered, it would mean an immediate return to prison. And then it gets worse. Collin, already running late getting back to the halfway house, knowing that missing curfew is a probation violation, stops at a red light and sees something he shouldn’t — a white cop killing an unarmed black man. The cop spots him and tells him to go. Terrified of getting shot or going back to prison, he does.

Collin and Miles work as movers, which gives us a chance to see the gentrification of Oakland, from the ten dollar “green juice” drinks suddenly appearing in local stores to the artist (Wayne Knight) who shows them his pictures of the trees that once gave the city its name but have now been cut down for development. A character wears a t-shirt that says, “Kill a hippie; save your hood.” The feeling of displacement is personal as well. Collin’s mother has remarried and her new stepson has moved into his old bedroom.

In some respects, the community is generously diverse. Colin’s black mother is now married to an Asian man. Miles is devoted to his partner, who is black, and their son. But racial divides persist, and this film navigates them and addresses them with a deep understanding of the history and complexity. When the friends finally get into a fight that could divide them forever, it is in large part because even the closest of friendships, even those who feel like family cannot truly understand what it is like to be black unless they are black.

At one point, a character asks Miles and Collin to stand quietly and look deeply into each other’s eyes. As much as these two men share, it is rare for them to look at each other. When they speak, they are often both staring ahead. This movie, conceived a decade ago but somehow coming out at exactly the right time, asks us to look deeply at both of them, and thus at ourselves.

Parents should know that this movie includes peril and violence, very strong, crude, and racist language, drinking and drunkenness, drugs, and family conflict.

Family discussion: What are the pros and cons of gentrification? What should Collin have done when he saw the officer shoot an unarmed man?

If you like this, try: “Do the Right Thing” and “Sorry to Bother You”

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Drama DVD/Blu-Ray movie review Movies -- Reviews Race and Diversity

Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casel on “Blindspotting”

Posted on July 18, 2018 at 8:00 am

Sometimes it takes forever to get a movie made and then it arrives at exactly the right moment. Longtime best friends Daveed Diggs (“black-ish,” “Wonder,” Tony-winner for “Hamilton”) and spoken word poet/academic Rafael Casal began working on their extraordinary film, “Blindspotting,” inspired by their experience growing up in the uneasily gentrifying Oakland, California area long before either became successful. It took about ten years before they got the financing, and when it premiered at Sundance it was immediately acclaimed as a remarkably assured first film with exceptional performances a gripping story, and a nuanced, sometimes poetic portrayal of issues of race, class, and friendship.

Copyright 2018 Foley Walkers Studio

Diggs plays Collin, three days from completing his parole and under enormous pressure to make it through without any infractions that would send him back to prison. He sees a policeman kill an unarmed black man and says nothing because he does not want to jeopardize his parole. Casal plays his best friend Miles, a loving father and husband but also a volatile man quick to fight who may lead Collin into danger.

In an interview, Diggs and Casal talked about their on- and off-screen friendship and why it was important that the movie — like life — combine comedy, drama, family issues, and poetry.

In the film, your characters play movers who come into contact with a wide range of customers, including a photographer who shows them photos about the oak trees that can no longer be found in the city named for them, and he asks the two of you to stare into each other’s eyes. Tell me what inspired that and what you were thinking about in that scene.

RC: The exercise was stolen from one of my mentors, Chris Walker, who made us do it when I was teaching at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He would have the students do that and then there were all these mimicking games and stuff. It was about getting the giggles out and establishing intimacy between two actors or two performers. That’s also just a very hippie thing to ask someone to do something you really love. I think the Bay Area is so hippie in that way and the idea of making two grown men try to connect in an intimate way was a way to display how uncomfortable that is for two guys who have known each other their whole lives. It just felt like a fun thing to do early in the script. Performing it — we have a different level of comfort than Miles and Collin do so that was easy for us. There were a few moments during the photoshoot for the film where they had us so close together it was so funny. For the photo we were within an inch away and I go, “This is alright but normally only a girl or my dog could get that close to my face.”

DD: There were all sorts of different versions of who the character was but they were all a particular Bay Area energy that we didn’t have represented other places in the film, somebody who despite being forced to interact with capitalism in the way that we all have to would much prefer to peddle understanding as opposed to paintings. He would rather give all of his pictures away and just be able to promote these moments of true honest understanding with each other. So he sees an opportunity here and one of the things he gets to bring out is that we get to see how difficult intimacy even on the basic level is for two male friends despite being friends their whole lives. There is something awkward about just being this close together and actually looking each other in the eye. Most of the time you don’t look at the person you are talking to. But that is where all of the cues for how somebody is feeling are.

Why is it that your characters can live in a community of interracial relationships that seem completely accepted but as the movie shows, the world around them is still having trouble dealing with racial differences?

RC: I don’t know that no one notices the differences. I think we’re presenting a reality where those conversations have been had already. That melting pot does not happen without a ton of talks about it. That’s why I think a lot of the conversations that do happen on screen happened a few steps into the conversation. We assume that any place that has gotten to a point where these are the kinds of relationships that are around didn’t skip forward and get to something like racial harmony. The world is not there, but they’ve had those conversations or some degree of those conversations with each other. It’s not like Miles and Ashley have never talked about the fact that she’s black and he’s not; they’ve definitely had that conversation.

DD: I’m mixed, a ton of my friends were mixed. By virtue of being mixed I’ve almost never dated somebody who was of the same race as me in a relationship, so growing up that wasn’t a thing. That was normalized to a degree that nobody batted an eye about it and so I didn’t know until I left that that it would be a thing anywhere else and I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand any of the hang-ups with it. I felt like we were having a discussion that I was born already having had and it was pressuring in me in a certain sense but I think the fact that communities exist under the fact that people are able to interact in a lot of ways within a community has really nothing to do with what’s happening in the country on a grand scale.

One of the themes of the film is the struggle with gentrification of the neighborhoods.

DD: I think it’s natural to be fearful of somebody literally taking your resources and removing you from them. That is what’s happening to a lot of the folks in that community it’s what’s happening to Miles and Colin. The green juice isn’t the problem; the fact that it is reasonable for the green juice to be priced at $10 leads you to beg the question of who is that for and why did it never exist before we started seeing these new people coming in. It’s not like nobody in this neighborhood has been health-conscious before. Val loves going to SoulCycle and she’s so excited that that is part of this community now. She uses it all the time but it didn’t exist until very recently and the thing that comes along with its existence are raised rents and a difference in policing. Police are being called to events that they would not normally be called to. That recent story about “barbecuing while black” is this beautiful example of where here is something that’s been happening in the same place for over a decade every weekend and because the neighborhood changed, somebody called the police on it, on a bunch of black people just having a barbecue.

I know you’ve been working on the film for 10 years and yet it seems like it just seems like it has come out at exactly the right moment. How did it evolve to reflect some of the Black Lives Matter events and the crucial plot element about “the talk” that black parents have with their children?

RC: Yeah the evolution that we bring up a lot is just the nature of the conversation around how communities are prioritizing issues and it’s just changed. It was shocking 10 years ago when we would hear about a police officer murdering somebody now it’s here and gone so fast. The list is just so long of names of young men and women of color who are being murdered by police officers. So the movie had to change. The movie had to become about that, about the fact that it’s not a headline anymore, that Collin is the only one who seems to care when he sees a black man being killed by a policeman. Even his best friend knows about it and doesn’t ask about it again after the first day. He sees it on the news and processes it and goes, “but we know what this is; this will not be the one that moves the needle so let’s move on from it”.

What makes Collin and Mile friends? They seem very different, more like family held together by ties unrelated to what they have in common.

DD: Oh I think they have the entirety of their lives in common. They essentially grew up with each other.

RC: The way that they joke; the way that they see the world, their shorthand of references.

DD: And they also need each other for different things. I think Collin doesn’t activate nearly as much without Miles around and sometimes over the course of the film that becomes a problem. But also think about how many times it was probably a good thing. How many jobs did Collin get because of Miles and how many other opportunities did he have?

RC: How many times did they bail each other out of dangerous and violent situations because there are two instead of one? Their whole relationship is based on massive loyalty and understanding and family; Colin is like a second surrogate father to Miles’ son. There is so much shorthand support and it’s a poor neighborhood, so survival is the key; loyalty is key. That’s why you have guys who grew up together and they’ve known each other their whole lives. Sure they’re totally different in the group but they are a group. You are only aware of their differences if you’re in the crew. But if somebody throws a bottle at them you will see how they all respond the same. It’s like a sports team — watch how quick they fall in line.

One of the things I loved about the film was the range of tone. You’ve got just outright funny stuff, you got very heightened stuff, you’ve got very realistic drama. Did anybody push back on you and say “hey pick a lane?”

DD: We heard that early on a little bit, but I think philosophically for us we wanted to portray the Bay area honestly. It had to be in the DNA of the film so it wasn’t just swinging wildly it was actually intentional. This is how we all laugh one second and cry the next and I think that is not Bay Area specific. I’ve never felt one thing at a time. Nobody has. We are often pushed in art to focus on one thing, to mine all of the available material out of one lane. For us to try in order to be true to life as we could which was the premise of us making this film I couldn’t find a way to do that.

RC: That tonal specificity is a fear-based constraint of studios, not a capacity of the audience. Our job is to push the medium. We don’t just want to make a film within a medium; we want to move the medium. The excitement was to go, “Well, the great news is we didn’t go to film school. We don’t know any of those rules. All we know is honesty.”

What is it about hip-hop that makes it so vital a part of today’s expression?

RC: Heightened language is just the mechanism that tells you how important information is. It is an attractive thing to listen to that functions the same way that musical theater does. When a feeling or idea crosses over to be too emotional to just talk about it, something elevates, so you sing. You could put it in the hip-hop bucket but that’s just songs and poetry and it predates all of that. There is a cadence to the way in which we use hip hop, as well as the concept of disenfranchised communities using verse to shout from the mountaintop when they’re not being listened to otherwise. But the idea of verse as a way to elevate language has been in the arts since the arts began. So I think we both were allied on the very contemporary mechanism that has its roots in something that has a very feeling mechanism which was creating dense and beautiful language to tell you what’s important about the moment.

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Actors

Interview: Allen Moldonado of “The Last OG” and Everybody Digital

Posted on July 16, 2018 at 1:42 pm

Allen Moldonado is a writer, performer, filmmaker, and entrepreneur, currently co-writing and co-starring in The Last OG, playing Cousin Bobby opposite Tracy Morgan. I interviewed him for The Credits and he talked about his “Netflix for short films,” Everybody Digital, creating the character of Cousin Bobby as actor and writer, and surviving the “actor’s Olympics” of daily soap operas.

Cousin Bobby is so much fun. He’s kind of the lovable idiot at times. Then there are also moments where he can be very dramatic and vulnerable and there are also times it can be intense. It’s the perfect role for an actor because you are able to explore so many different levels from drama to comedy. It’s a dream come true for me as an actor and just the type of direction I want to go in my career. I want to follow behind actors like Bruce Willis, Mark Wahlberg, and the Rock as far as being a funny tough guy. Cousin Bobby is the perfect meld of that direction. Being able to play alongside Tracy Morgan, Tiffany Haddish, Cedric the Entertainer and these comedic legends is a dream come true. It’s been a great opportunity big time to just grow and watch and perform with them.

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Actors Interview
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