 The stagecoach finally delivered last season’s six episodes of the re-booted “X-Files”. I’ve seen every episode of every season, so I was pretty jazzed to watch these. I couldn’t help but notice that Gillian Anderson looks better than ever. Perhaps she’s had “work done,” but if so, it looks good and I’m all for it! In any case, she exudes a mature, natural sensuality that I hadn’t noticed in the ‘90’s heyday of “The X-Files.”
Ms. Anderson was born in Chicago, but lived in London from ages 2 to 11; hence, her English accent. She returned to the U.K. in ’02, and has stayed there since, working in many BBC mini-series productions: Charles Dickens’ “Bleak House” and “Great Expectations”, “Moby Dick”, “War and Peace”, “The Crimson Petal and the White”, and the addictive crime thriller “The Fall”. In “The Fall”, she’s a high-level police investigator matching wits with a devilishly clever serial killer who, ultimately, gets to her in a mind game. She’s plays a bit of a libertine, sometimes recklessly. But whether she’s commanding her officers or flirting with a sexy colleague, she’s oh-so-cool. Now she’s re-teamed with producer Bryan Fuller (“Hannibal”) for Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods”. It’s shooting now, and was previewed at last week’s Comic-Con. I can’t wait to see it!
0 Comments
I missed three music biopics when they were released to theaters earlier this year, but now they’re out on disc, and I’m catching up. Tonight I’ll watch “Miles Ahead” with Don Cheadle. But after screening “Born to Be Blue” with Ethan Hawke as Chet Baker, and “I Saw the Light” with Tom Hiddleston as Hank Williams, I was struck how similar their stories were. If neither movie was as moving as the Ray Charles biopic, “Ray!”, I still found them fascinating as history. Hank Williams had a career only six years long. He wrote and performed 36 hit records (an average of one every other month!) and toured constantly. He was alcoholic, and probably used other drugs. Women loved him, and, while he married, the road and inebriation lured him to serial unfaithfulness. A jealous boyfriend knocked him down, injuring his weak back, which led to chronic pain and over-medication. He died on the road, from heart failure, on New Year’s Day 1953. He was only 29. But he never lost the ability to craft a hit song, and his combination of hillbilly and folk styles electrified country music and made him a legend. About alcohol, he reminds a friend that “Grant was drunk every day by three, and still took Vicksburg.” Tom Hiddleston, who most of us know as Loki in the Thor and Avengers films, is alternately charismatic, petulant and sickly as Williams. His performance scenes, when Williams is in his power, are very convincing. Like Williams, once Chet Baker hit the scene, he rocketed to popularity. He was part of a new West Coast jazz wave, and being a handsome young white man gave him publicity and popularity that his black peers in New York, especially Miles Davis, no doubt resented. The film uses two occasions, first in 1954 and later in 1966, when Miles showed up to check out two of Chet’s live performances in New York, as bookends. On the first, Chet has won the Downbeat Jazz Poll as best trumpet player, topping Miles and the great master Dizzy Gillespie. Miles tells him to come back after he’s lived a bit; Chet’s cool tone and easy phrasing isn’t impressing Miles. Cut to Chet’s heroin addiction. This is central to the story, because an unhappy dealer beats Baker, purposefully smashing his mouth and knocking out his teeth so he won’t be able to play again. It takes years for him to re-learn his instrument, during which he works menial jobs and has to deal with a parole officer. (The movie cleverly uses the gorgeous Carmen Ejogo and suave Callum Rennie as composites for several of Baker’s women and managers, respectively.) When his chance comes for his comeback at Birdland, he gets high. It works for him. He says that heroin allows him to “get inside the notes.” Baker chooses heroin and music over relationships. And, by this time, he has lived a bit. His playing is arguably better, more soulful, than before. (He will go on to 20 years of recording and touring in Europe; this isn’t covered in the film. He died falling out a window in Amsterdam; was he high, or was another unhappy dealer involved?) I recommend watching the extra’s comments first. Ethan Hawke reminds us that, whatever our judgements of Chet’s choices of lifestyle, his records still sell very well. He, too, is a legend. We’ve mourned the loss of Jim, Jimi, Janis, many others. Now it’s Prince, to opioids. Great artists may make terrible sacrifices when their drive to create requires altered states, or the pain of constant touring becomes unbearable. We can only listen and marvel.  |
Archives
June 2017
Categories |
RSS Feed
