PRIVATE LIFE: DIRECTOR TAMARA JENKINS AND STAR KATHRYN HAHN PHONE IN

** "I feel like if anything, this is about connecting to the humanity of other people....I think filmmaking is an empathy machine."

Private Life: Director Tamara Jenkins and star Kathryn Hahn phone in together to the show -  to talk about their bittersweet infertility drama, and the alternating heartbreak and humor in the struggle to have a child. Screening at the NY Film Festival.

** "Social change was in the air, and that definitely informed the music - there was a definite anger to some of the music that was being made, and directly commensurate with what was happening in society at that time."
 
Fire Music: A History Of The Free Jazz Revolution. Filmmaker Tom Surgal phones in to discuss his documentary shedding light on the improvisational jazz movement breaking out alongside the Civil Rights era, the rise of black militancy, and the Beat Generation literary renaissance.
 
With connections in the film to Karl Marx; a music movement known as the October Revolution; the Composers Guild; unionizing musicians and nightclub boycotts; and the New Mainstream attempting to erase those innovations since the 1980s. And what it had to do with Reagan and the Republican Party, trading in dashikis and sandals for designer suits and ties - and frozen consciousness regarding the past. Premiering at the NY Film Festival.
 
** "NBC has staked its fortunes on figures in uniform: fire, medical and police. If these shows dealt with actual declining circumstances of those workers' lives, they would be interesting - but instead they just celebrate the romance of the uniform." 

Bro On The Global Television Beat. Birth Of The Binge: Serial TV And The End Of Leisure - Digital Accumulation And Distracted Audiences.
 
Arts Express Paris Correspondent, Sorbonne Professor Dennis Broe dissects his latest book. Touching on new developments in resistance cinema, strip mining in Appalachia, multi-national predatory practices to distract audiences, the new corporate personality, and same series different day.
 
** "I think my thoughts about that are yes, Wilde did have an anti-capitalist philosophy. And um, I don't really have any thoughts about it. Because on the one hand, he's like that - but on the other hand he's a crashing snob." 
 
The Happy Prince: Rupert Everett On The Hot Seat.  Uh oh - The British actor embarks on his first directing venture, starring as Oscar Wilde as well as the writer of this biopic. But tending to focus mostly on Wilde's decadence and persecution, and his imprisonment as a gay man back then.
 
But as for the 19th century esteemed writer's idealistic, ideological beliefs penned in his Soul Of Man Under Socialism - and figuring so prominently in his enduring anti-capitalist tale The Happy Prince that is the chosen title of this film - not at all. While referencing Freud, Benedictine monks, The Prince Of Wales, King Charles I and II, Jeremy Corbyn, and Twitter.


ReRun Review  

Veteran time traveler on screen Christopher Lloyd - Back To The Future and many more -  is at it once again in ReRun. Never disappointing and in this case lending new meaning to the notion of 'in the closet' - though with more metaphysical implications - Lloyd is George Benson, the rather glum grandfather of a vivacious, multi-generational brood at one Christmas holiday family gathering .

Somewhat reluctantly following his insistent young grandson into his bedroom closet which the young child insists is actually a portal into a myriad of alternate realms - and it apparently is - Benson finds himself tumbling down a metaphorical rabbit hole. And with an ambivalent return to his youth, and assorted romantic conflicts and entanglements that include his late wife, Benson awkwardly seeks to right various wrongs on reset, while simultaneously figuring it all out and how in the world he got there again.

ReRun, directed by Alyssa Rallo Bennett and written by spouse Gary O. Bennet in a clearly intimately conceived family affair, borrows generously from It's A Wonderful Life, but with a dark, bittersweet tone, occasionally laced with whimsical humor. The movie opens at the Woodstock Film Festival, and more information is online at Woodstockfilmfestival.org.

Prairie Miller


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