There’s a unmarked, modest building in the vicinity of Disney’s Los Angeles studios that doesn’t look like much from the outside. Yet, behind its doors lie temperature-controlled vaults housing a treasure trove of animation history. It isn’t accessible to the public, but for creatives who work at the Walt Disney Company, this is a resource unlike any other— a place to learn about, and be inspired by, some of the most iconic animation ever made. It’s all gathered in the single largest animation collection in the world: 65 million pieces of art, from the first pre-Mickey sketches to Moana. And I got to go inside – me, someone who doesn’t…
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Amazing Grace – the Long-Awaited Aretha Franklin Documentary
“She can sing anything. She can sing Three Blind Mice. Any-thing,” the Reverend James Cleveland tells the congregation gathered at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in South Los Angeles. It’s January 1972, and Cleveland is welcoming the congregation to the 2-day recording that Franklin is about to begin — a recording that will go on to become the best-selling album of her mighty career. The late Cleveland, who died in 1991, was the best person for the job of introducing Franklin and setting the scene for the recording. As Franklin’s father — he, too, no longer with us — will later relay towards the end of the session, Cleveland…
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Free Solo
File this one under Movies That Simply Must Be Seen on the Big Screen. If you were a fan of Meru, the 2015 documentary from Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi about Chin’s ascent to the 21 000 foot-high Meru Peak in the Indian Himalayas, you’ll definitely appreciate the magnificent feat Free Solo achieves. This one turns the thrill level up a whole dozen notches more, following climber Alex Honnold, as he seeks to make it to the top of El Capitan in Yosemite – without the kind of traditional gear that Chin and his crew, and basically most climbers, usually use. For that is what it means to free solo,…
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Of Popstars and Addicted Boys – The 2018 Toronto International Film Festival
This year’s Toronto Film Fest overlapped in theme for more than a few movies. There were tales of addiction and rehabilitation in Ben is Back, Beautiful Boy, Boy Erased — and yes, about boys. There were tales of female pop singers – from Vox Lux to Teen Spirit to the much-anticipated A Star is Born. Then there were films we need, and want, to see more of: the female-fronted heist drama with a touch of social commentary from Steve McQueen in Widows, the understatedly brilliant tale of Black love in the face of incarceration in Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk, the of-our-times The Hate U Give, the exquisite this-is-why-we-have-movies…
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It’s Janet. Miss Jackson, if you’re Nasty.
When I first moved to New York, Prince was playing at Madison Square Garden. I wanted to go. A friend who had been living here for years before I did, told me not to bother because I’d be paying $200 and he’d be too tiny to see anyway. He didn’t tour New York again before his death. Never seeing Prince in one of his legendary 3-hour concerts will forever be a major regret in my life. Thing is, seeing concerts is also a major planning operation in New York. You have to be on top of when the tickets go on sale, so they don’t sell out. You have to…
