Ed Koch died this morning, at the ripe old age of 88. And that is a tragedy, to be sure. But it is also rather fitting, giving it occurred just a few spare hours before a feature film about this most private of public figures hit the screen.

Koch, a sprawling documentary some 40 years in the making, starts off on a high note – zipping through Ed Koch’s ascension to the New York City Mayor’s Office during the ill-fated Summer of 1977. The film touches on major media events including the Son of Sam killings, rolling blackouts throughout Harlem, and – of course – that nationally televised moment in October when the Bronx, quite literally, began to go up in flames. It was out of those ashes that Candidate Koch would arise, ultimately triumphing to preside over not one, but two crucial eras, from 1978 right on up until 1989 (at which point he was defeated by David Dinkins in the Democratic primary).

Did Mayor Koch have his detractors? Why, yes, you can bet your sweet ass Mayor Koch had his detractors. But Koch was also indicative of Churchill’s stance that enemies are a good thing, in that they prove a person stood for something at some point in his life. Ed Koch would often claim he was immune to base intimidation, and – true to form – he stuck to that word. As a candidate, Koch battled through the ugliness of “Cuomo, not the homo,” before moving on to confront both the labor unions and a sweeping political scandal anchored deep inside his own administration (most of which was set against dual epidemics of crack cocaine and HIV).

Koch, a Neil Barsky film which was both shot and cut in classic Ken-Burns style, does a remarkable job of chronicling one man’s ascension, as well as the unforgettable scars that will forever haunt his legacy. Cries of racism, back-door deals, opportunism … These were all considered occupational hazards, so far as Mayor Koch was concerned. In that spirit, Koch offers a fitting – if not all-but-perfectly timed – homage to the man who was forever asking voters, “How’m I doing?” just before swinging both arms wide to say, “Good bye.”

(Koch opens in limited release in New York and Los Angeles today, with the possibility of a wider rollout to follow.)  Continue reading →

“The movies have been so rank the last couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets I sometimes think that the movies aren’t drawing an audience – they’re inheriting an audience. People just want to go to a movie. They’re stung repeatedly, yet their desire for a good movie – for any movie – is so strong that all over the country they keep lining up. ‘There’s one God for all creation, but there must be a separate God for the movies,’ a producer said. ‘How else can you explain their survival?’ An atmosphere of hope develops before a big picture’s release, and even after your friends tell you how bad it is, you can’t quite believe it until you see for yourself. The lines (and the grosses) tell us only that people are going to the movies – not that they’re having a good time. Financially, the industry is healthy, so among the people at the top there seems to be little recognition of what miserable shape movies are in. They think the grosses are proof that people are happy with what they’re getting, just as TV executives think that the programs with the highest ratings are what TV viewers want, rather than what they settle for (a number of the new movie executives come from TV). These new executives don’t necessarily see many movies themselves, and they rarely go to a theatre. If for the last couple of years Hollywood couldn’t seem to do anything right, it isn’t that it was just a stretch of bad luck – it’s the result of recent developments within the industry. And in all probability it will get worse, not better.”

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All roads lead back to The Bicycle Thief, one way or another. Vittorio De Sica’s cinematic homage to daily life in post-war Italy represents the pinnacle of Neorealism – a landmark piece of cinema that still exists upon the primary plane between before and after.

The Bicycle Thief endures, in large part, as a result of its rich subtleties – the plight of a poor woman who is (quite literally) reduced to carrying water for her husband, the migrant worker whose only income goes toward paying off a fortuneteller, the honest man who needs to steal in order to keep his dreams afloat. These are timeless – perhaps even transcendent – metaphors, as broad and meaningful today as they might have been 60 years ago. Collectively, they lay the groundwork for a series of unexpected twists and turns that’ll more than likely lead viewers to question whether De Sica was really that far ahead of his time, or whether Hollywood has since taken to treating all of us like Pavlov’s dog.

The pace of The Bicycle Thief is slow, the tone is bleak. And yet, there is a buoyancy to this film that keeps the mood lighthearted throughout. Somewhere in between, De Sica manages to guide you through a stilted tour of Roman strata – the yes men, the radicals, the street merchants and socialists; the priests, the pimps, the lawyers and lawbreakers; the barbers, the artisans; the gypsies, tramps, and thieves; la pezzonovante, la famiglia, la Polizia e Mano Nera … each group fully present and accounted for. None of which is easy, given Cesare Zavattini’s screenplay was adapted from a novel largely hinged upon morality.

If Shoeshine was De Sica’s springboard, then The Bicycle Thief was his capolavoro. This film is still ranked No. 33 on Sight & Sound’s Top 50 Movies of All-Time. It’s been cited as a major influence by every director from Woody Allen to Federico Fellini. And certain sequences have even been revisited by the likes of Steven Spielberg and Bruce Springsteen (among others).

Bottom Line: The Bicycle Thief was, is, and probably always will be the charming little indie people look to in order to understand how and why every other charming little indie still needs to be made. Please do check it out. It’s even better than you know.

(The Bicycle Thief is currently streaming on both Netflix and YouTube.)  Continue reading →

“It is not that Los Angeles is altogether hideous, it is even by degrees pleasant, but for an Easterner there is never any salt in the wind; it is like Mexican cooking without chile, or Chinese egg rolls missing their mustard; as one travels through the endless repetitions of that city which is the capital of suburbia with its milky pinks, its washed-out oranges, its tainted lime-yellows of pastel on one pretty little architectural monstrosity after another, the colors not intense enough, the styles never pure, and never sufficiently impure to collide on the eye, one conceives the people who live here – they have come out to express themselves, Los Angeles is the home of self-expression, but the artists are middle-class and middling-minded; no passions will calcify here for years in the gloom to be revealed a decade later as the tessellations of hard and fertile work, no, it is all open, promiscuous, borrowed, half bought, a city without iron, eschewing wood, a kingdom of stucco, the playground for mass men – one has the feeling it was built by television sets giving orders to men. And in this land of the pretty-pretty, the virility is in the barbarisms, the vulgarities, it is in the huge billboards, the screamers of the neon lighting, the shouting farm-utensil colors of the gas stations and monster drugstores, it is in the swing of the sports cars, hot rods, convertibles, Los Angeles is a city to drive in, the boulevards are wide, the traffic is nervous and fast, the radio stations play bouncing, blooping, rippling tunes, one digs the pop in a pop tune, no one of character would make love by it, but the sound is good for swinging a car, electronic guitars and Hawaiian harps.”

If you are either from or of the Philadelphia area, chances are you know much better than to bring up Mumia Abu-Jamal in mixed company. From a distance, the Mumia case might appear to be a harsh study in race politics … completely polarizing along surface lines. But a closer inspection reveals there’s something much deeper at work here; something indicative of the ongoing struggle between institutional thought and revolutionary opposition.

Was Mumia Abu-Jamal guilty? Was he a victim of the system? Should Mumia be afforded the right to a new hearing? Despite the fact Mumia was both tried and convicted more than 30 years ago, the public outcry – ringing out across both bows – has not quieted one smidgeon in the three decades since. At the center of it all is Mumia himself, left to rot in Mahanoy Prison, after his death sentence was commuted in early December, 2011.

As a result of his incarceration, Abu-Jamal has come to symbolize much more than he ever might have on the outside. Yet, the man is still considered an irrepressible scourge by local critics, many of whom (e.g., Buzz Bissinger, Michael Smerconish, and Ed Rendell among them) refused to be interviewed for Revolutionary, a documentary which – despite some effort on the part of Stephen Vittoria – falls decidedly pro-Mumia.

Long-Distance Revolutionary does not concern itself with whether Mumia is innocent or guilty. It does not dawdle over evidence, nor devote more than a few spare frames to the early morning hours of December 9, 1981 – hours during which Mumia was subsequently convicted of shooting Daniel Faulkner at close range. Instead, the film tends to focus on who and what Mumia was in the years leading up to his arrest, and – more importantly – who and what he has become in the years since. Vittoria covers Mumia’s induction into the Black Panthers, his affiliation with the MOVE Organization, as well as his rise to become President of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, and his well-documented fall from grace. Revolutionary plays that off the strong-arm tactics of Frank Rizzo, a pair of ultra-violent confrontations between Philadelphia Police and the MOVE Organization, and the ongoing prevalence of white supremacist beliefs originally outlined in The Philadelphia Negro.

If Long-Distance Revolutionary is striving to make any case, it is the case for what Mumia Abu-Jamal could have been … would have been, had it not been for violent waves of hatred; had Abu-Jamal continued his ascent, had he not been black-balled by bureaucracy, spurned completely by white colleagues … had he not been parked along the dark side of 12th & Locust on that cold and fateful evening; or – perhaps better still – had that cold and fateful evening never happened altogether.

The only real sticking point being, it did.

It did.

And, depending upon your perspective, that is either the eternal shame or the eternal rub of it.

(Mumia: Long-Distance Revolutionary opens this Friday, February 1st, at New York City’s Cinema Village.)  Continue reading →

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Somewhere – and I mean somewhere deep – inside the movie Knife Fight, there is a well-constructed, albeit infinitely retold, play on morality. Unfortunately, the screenplay feels so bloated, it completely fails to make the point. Here we find some slick pol’s wife, refusing to let his team of handlers “Kobe Bryant” a young girl. There we find the slick pol himself, uncertain whether to go “Sonny or Michael” on said young girl’s ass.

In one way or another, the screenwriters of this film (Bill Guttentag, Chris Lehane) are guilty of stealing from just about every worthwhile movie or TV show that’s come along during the past 40 years. “You have to be the one who’s prepared to bring a gun into a knife fight.” (The Untouchables). “I once dreamed of playing shortstop for the Giants.” (The Sopranos).  “Zero. That’s my offer.” (The Godfather, Pt. II). “This is a no-spin zone.” (The O’Reilly Factor). Combine that with an entire rogue’s gallery of caricatures built out of presidential composites dating back to 1920, and it all adds up to a grossly unoriginal screenplay, written with unoriginal flair, starring unoriginal actors, many of whom are more than game to reprise hybrids of their roles from a long-deceased TV series.

Not good. Not good at all, I’d say. Perhaps even worse when you consider this alphabetized list of 15 completely over-the-top metaphors Knife Fight uses to describe what running an average political campaign might feel like:

1. A bare-knuckle brawl
2. Blood sport
3. Bringing a gun into a knife fight
4. Jihad
5. A legal colonoscopy without anesthesia
6. Major League Baseball
7. Making kings and queens
8. Making the news
9. Making the world a better place
10. A military guy in Virginia piloting a drone over Afghanistan, launching a missile
11. The NFL
12. Running a con
13. Running a Red Sox flag up Yankee Stadium
14. A steel-cage death match
15. A video game.

Despite all of this, I would be remiss if I did not mention how utterly fantastic Carrie Anne-Moss is in this film. She somehow manages to rise above the mediocrity, delivering a delightful turn that is both welcome and refreshing, to say the least.

(Knife Fight opens in select cities this Friday, January 25th, and will also be available via the majority of OnDemand platforms as of January 28th.)  Continue reading →

You know that friend whose tastes are highly suspect? Whose interests run afoul? Who laughs out loud at subtitles? Who loves Norwegian death metal?

This, this is the friend who Don Coscarelli made John Dies at The End for. What is John Dies at the End? Glad you asked. John Dies at the End is a good old-fashioned mindfuck; a psychotropic leap into the rabbit hole, complete with parallel planes of being and bad guys built out of lunch meat.

Is it good? Why, no, it sure isn’t. Not by any reliable standards, at least. The lead acting is abysmal, the comic timing’s even worse, and the dialogue’s trying way too hard to force something in between. In fact, the only bright spot here would have to be Paul Giamatti – a full-on Oscar nominee whose reasons for agreeing to appear in this film are actually more intriguing than the film itself.

John Dies was both adapted and directed by Coscarelli, whose previous claim to fame was Bubba Ho-Tep. This allows for a key distinction, in that Bubba Ho-Tep is a cult classic, while John Dies is really nothing more than a cult film.

Believe me when I tell you there’s a whole world of difference between the two.

(John Dies at the End arrives in limited release this Friday, January 25th. It is also currently available via Video OnDemand.) Continue reading →

“The British satirist Auberon Waugh once wrote a letter to the editor of the Daily Telegraph asking readers to supply information about his life between birth and the present, explaining that he was writing his memoirs and had no memories from those years. I find myself in the opposite position. I remember everything. All my life I’ve been visited by unexpected flashes of memory unrelated to anything taking place at the moment. These retrieved moments I consider and replace on the shelf. When I began writing [Life Itself}, memories came flooding to the surface, not because of any conscious effort but simply in the stream of writing. I started in a direction and the memories were waiting there, sometimes of things I hadn’t consciously thought about since. Hypnosis is said to enable us to retrieve past memories. When I write I fall into the zone many writers, painters, musicians, athletes, and craftsmen of all sorts seem to share: In doing something I enjoy and am expert at, deliberate thought falls aside and it is all just there. I think of the next word no more than the
composer thinksof the next note.“