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When Paul Simon Bombed at the Movies
The musician’s new documentary In Restless Dreams briefly mentions his failed 1980 film One-Trick Pony. But that muted, uneven drama deserves a second look for what it says about the man who made it.
The musician’s new documentary In Restless Dreams briefly mentions his failed 1980 film One-Trick Pony. But that muted, uneven drama deserves a second look for what it says about the man who made it.
Jessica Ritchey answers the Movie Love Questionnaire.
A tribute to the late Carrie Fisher.
The latest and greatest on Blu-ray, DVD and streaming, including "Spotlight," "The Danish Girl," and "The Graduate."
"Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune" plays Monday, January 23, at 10 pm EST/PST on PBS American Masters. It will thereafter be available via PBS On Demand, and is currently on Netflix Instant and DVD.
"Mistakes are lodged like harpoons and fish hooks in an intelligent person's soul," says one friend of political folk singer Phil Ochsof the deep depression that eventually led him to suicide in 1976. Och's friends are like that, eloquent and insightful. His mentor Pete Seeger, in particular, speaks like he sings, modulating his voice to give anecdotes a mythic luster and heartbreaking resonance. But after watching "Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune" take a measure of the man's adult life, it seems that some friends put too much emphasis on generic therapist's reasons for his downward spiral -- schizophrenia, alcoholism, declining popularity. It seems that Phil Ochs' fall was inevitable, given the fact that his singing career began when he was barely out of his teens, when JFK's assassination was a couple years off, and crashed after every progressive movement for which his protest songs provided spiritual fuel was crushed.
This is not a standard pop star rise-and-fall story. Ochs was physically involved in the antiwar and social justice movements he sang along with. He headlined, organized and even spontaneously showed up at a staggering number of rallies for various causes. His investment was evident in his performances, presented here with shocking audiovisual fidelity. Even though it's captured on a black-and-white kinescope, a performance of his song "When I'm Gone" feels as clear and urgent as a live event. So, too, is his strumming and crooning at the 1964 Newport Music Festival. (Simply amazing sound and image restoration here.) The sonorous voice and wide, earnest eyes could just as easily belong to a Wall Street occupier serenading Zuccoti Park.
"Chicago" waited 27 years to make the transition from stage to screen, but finished strong, winning 13 nominations Tuesday as the 75th annual Academy Awards nominations were revealed. After last year's best-picture nod for "Moulin Rouge," the movie's front-runner status signals a rebirth of the movie musical.
LOS ANGELES - "What the neighbors say," Shelley Duvall confided to me, "is that when Yvette Mimieux lived here, she kept leopards up here on her property and all sorts of other animals and a monkey that escaped and conducted a reign of terror against the poor people living down the hill." Yvette was an animal lover?
