Forty years ago, it seemed for one brief moment as though a disastrous, mud-soaked music festival that attracted so many people it had a larger population than all but one city in the state could be the beginning of a new world of peace and cooperation. That dream was quickly battered but still lives on in the magic that its name and its songs still evoke: Woodstock. This week, a new movie from Ang Lee covers the impact of the festival on the community that was its not-entirely-welcoming host. But the truly indispensible memento of the three days of peace and music is the award-winning original documentary from director Michael Wadleigh. A new 40th-anniversary edition is being released this week with additional footage from from Paul Butterfield, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Grateful Dead, Johnny Winter & Mountain and interviews from participants including Wadleigh and concert producer Michael Lang. Whether you remember the warning about the brown acid and the interview with the porta-john guy and the nun flashing the peace sign or whether you have yet to experience the “Fixin’ to Die” rag or Hendrix’s stunning “Star Spangled Banner,” this is a brilliant film about an extraordinary moment.
One of my favorite films of the summer is “Cold Souls.” Paul Giamatti plays an actor named Paul Giamatti who is anxious and depressed as he prepares to play Chekov’s Uncle Vanya. When he reads in the New Yorker about a place that stores souls, he decides to try it. The immensely inventive writer-director Sophie Barthes has concocted a world just slightly off-register from the one we know and Giamatti’s literal and spiritual journey is funny and provocative and always surprising. So was talking to Barthes. I have some bigger questions, but I want to start with one small one. We see Paul Giamatti rehearsing “Uncle Vanya” under very different conditions — with his own soul, with a borrowed soul of a Russian poet, and without any soul at all. How did you and he work together to create three very different versions of Vanya?
That was the trickiest part of the film in terms of acting but we were nervous for different reasons. He thought he could act badly but not play Vanya well. I could certainly imagine him playing it well but thought it would fall flat to play it badly. It shows you how modest and humble he is. We had both seen “Vanya on 42nd Street,” and he knew his version would not be like Wallace Shawn’s. He doesn’t like rehearsal much. He is very intuitive. But when it came time to do it badly, for those we took time and rehearsed them. I said, “Let’s not make it robotic, but let’s be the opposite of whatever is called for. Confidence is something Vanya doesn’t have, so show confidence. Take directions very literally.” On the DVD extras we will have some other versions. In one he starts to mimic the wind, taking the direction he is given very literally. The one he does with Elena, he did unconsciously a William Shatner interpretation.
That is the beauty of working with such a talented actor. He is not someone to talk about technique and method. You roll the camera and he delivers and he is excellent — in a different way — in the first three takes. I read an interview where he says he is always being asked to play the anxious man.
Directors keep asking him to play the anxious man because he is so good with it, so vulnerable, such a sad sack, so funny. Jerry Lewis says that comedy is a man in trouble. That’s what Paul is. He always looks like he is carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. He is very human and vulnerable and has the skills of a comedian. He can go from total slapstick to very melancholic. As a film-maker he is like a grand piano. You can play any note and he gives you this performance. We didn’t know how to choose from the takes. They were all interesting in a different way. He can do deadpan and ultra-emotional. One of your other actors, David Straithairn, who plays the man in charge of the soul storage, was in a role that was quite different from his usual characters.
David was a bit anxious. He has not done much comedy and this is a melancholic kind of comedy. How much larger than life should this doctor be? It was very different from “Good Night and Good Luck.” But he and Paul had played in a Chekov play together and had chemistry like old buddies on set, very playful. One of my favorite moments in the film is when Paul looks into his own soul. One of the images he sees is of a toddler, walking and crying.
It is a completely absurd moment and it came about by accident. We had a part in the movie that was a dream I had a long time ago about a baby factory where babies are manufactured. I’m going to put that in another film because it did not work out this time. When the casting agency came with the babies I was expecting four or five month old babies. But they brought toddlers who could walk, so we gave up on the factory idea and used the set next door with the white space. Tell me about shooting in St. Petersburg.
Russia was a very surprising and pleasant experience. We had heard it was tough but from a logistical point of view the crews were super-professional and we never had a problem. Aesthetically, we decided not to shoot it as a postcard and turned the camera the other way. Now a bigger question, maybe the biggest. Paul Giamatti is very distressed in the film to find that his soul looks like a chick pea. What would your soul look like?
My soul would change every day, maybe liquid. I go through all those moods.
Many thanks to my pal Brandon Fibbs for sharing this adorable video from the Japanese pop group Sour. This was filmed entirely with webcams and the participants are Sour fans from around the world. Think of it as a high-tech version of stadium fans doing the wave.
Another unexpected pleasure I came across on cable recently is a light romantic comedy with some shrewd and audacious commentary on race and gender, whose full title is “I’m Through with White Girls (The Inevitable Undoing of Jay Brooks).” Anthony Montgomery (Ensign Mayweather on “Enterprise”) plays an African-American man who creates graphic novels and uses a cigarette holder. After a series of bad experiences dating white girls (they break up with him and berate him for being inconsiderate), he decides that he should date an African-American girl, calling his quest “Operation Brown Sugar.” The first group of contestants don’t seem right. And then he meets Catherng (Lia Johnson), a writer with magnificent dreds who turns out to be “Halfrican-Canadian.”
What makes the usual romantic comedy complications so fresh and engaging here is the way all of the characters subvert stereotypes. Though Catherine’s book is very successful due to her voice as an author, her literal voice, which she describes as sounding like a Valley Girl, especially when she is nervous, makes her afraid of promoting the book at readings. Jay creates graphic novels (he keeps correcting people who refer to them as comic books), a field with few African-Americans. Meanwhile, his white roommate has to pretend to be (and then become) an expert in hip-hop in order to impress the girl he likes.
Johnson (who co-produced) and Montgomery are enormously appealing performers with real romantic spark. The conventional structure and understated tone help the racial and gender issues a part of the story rather than a political statement. But both the romance and the themes make this a neglected gem, well worth watching.
Parents should know that this movie has some mature material including sexual references and non-explicit situations.
If this hadn’t really happened, Disney would have had to make it up. But a high school science teacher did tell the baseball team he coached that if they won the division title he would try out for the major leagues. And they did and he did and Jim Morris did become the oldest rookie in 40 years. And then, when he went in as relief pitcher in his first major league game, he struck out the first player at bat. Sometimes, life just is a Disney movie.
And this story turns out to make a very nice movie indeed, thanks to not one but two irresistible underdog-with-a-dream stories, dignified-but-heartwarming direction by John Lee Hancock, and a hit-it-out-of-the-ballpark performance by Dennis Quaid.
A leisurely prologue sets the scene. After a mystical fairy tale about some nuns and wishing and rose petals, we meet a boy who lives for baseball. It is the one constant in his life as his family moves from one Army base to another around the country. When they finally find a place to stay, it is Texas, where the only game anyone cares about is football.
Fade into the present, when Morris (Quaid) is happily married, with deep roots in that same dusty Texas town. He had his shot at the big leagues, but didn’t make it. We don’t learn the specifics, but we see a big scar twisting around his shoulder. And as he tells his son, “It’s never one thing” that derails you.
Morris is the high school baseball coach. But it is still a football town, and no one pays much attention to the team. One day, Morris throws a few balls to the catcher and the team is impressed with the power of his arm. When he challenges them to try harder, they challenge him back. If he wants them to dream big, he will have to show them the way. So he promises that if they win the division title, he will try out for the major leagues.
He never expects it to work. But the boys turn into a team and they start winning games. And so Morris ends up going to the try-outs, though he has to take his kids along. It turns out that despite what had always been thought to be the incontrovertible rule that pitches slow down as pitchers get older, Morris is throwing faster than ever, up to 98 miles an hour.
But dreams ask a lot of us. The success of the team has brought a coaching offer from a bigger school. Morris can take it and give his family a more comfortable life. Or he can accept the offer to play on a minor league team, with the slim hope that he might get picked up by the major leagues.
His dream asks a lot of him, but it asks a lot from his family, too, perhaps more than is fair to expect.
Well, we know what happens next. We probably even predict that at some point Morris will think about quitting but will rediscover the simple joys of baseball by watching some kids play. And we might not care too much about some dramatic embellishments, like the awkwardly inserted reconciliation with his father and the way the minor league coach tells Morris the big news, which would be unforgivably torturous if it happened in real life. But the dream is so pure and Quaid is so good that most audiences will be happy to go along.
Parents should know that although the movie is rated G, it will not be of much interest to younger kids. And some children might be upset by the scenes of Morris with his father, who is cold and unsympathetic, or by the financial problems faced by the family. There are references to divorce and remarriage.
Families who see this movie should talk about our responsibility to help those we care about try to make their dreams come true and to share the dreams of those we love. It was the way Morris believed in his team and the way they believed in him that made both their dreams come true. Morris’s father tells him that it is “okay to think about what you want to do until it is time to do what you were meant to do.” How do you know when it is time to put a dream aside?
