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Isn’t This a Time! A Tribute Concert for Harold Leventhal

Oh to be over 80 and relevant!

Octogenarian music groups are fairly rare. Sure the Rolling Stones might look older than The Weavers but they’ve actually got at least 20 years to go before they catch up. What makes The Weavers even more impressive is not their talent, though talent they certainly have. It’s their continued passion for both folk music and social justice that impresses the most. Pete Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert, Erik Darling and Fred Hellerman got back together for a Thanksgiving performance at Carnegie Hall in 2003. The concert was a tribute to legendary folk producer Harold Leventhal who also earns an executive producer credit for the film. Isn’t This a Time! A Tribute Concert for Harold Leventhal doesn’t offer much in the way of biographical details about Leventhal which is a pity as his life was an interesting one.

Leventhal died in October, 2005 at age 86 after overcoming mountainous difficulties early in life. His efforts on behalf of progressive and radical folks artists are well known amongst folk circles. When The Weavers were blacklisted during the McCarthy years it was Leventhal that booked them for a performance at Carnegie Hall in 1955, thus beginning a tradition of Thanksgiving shows. In the 2003 version Peter, Paul & Mary, Arlo Guthrie, Leon Bibb, Theodore Bikel and others all came along for the ride. If a bunch of aging and elderly folk musicians coming together for a reunion show as a tribute to their producer sounds like a familiar idea it’s no surprise. ITAT! for all real purposes is Christopher Guest’s A Mighty Wind, minus the fiction and some of the entertainment. For those that saw Guest’s film, it’s going to be impossible to avoid having Eugene Levy and Harry Shearer pop into one’s head while various talking heads come across the screen. Most of the participants are joy to see and listen to, the lone exception being Arlo Guthrie. He has a lot to talk about without saying anything so it’s bothersome that he carries much of dialogue himself. He’s good for a few one-liners but his contributions, both musical and anecdotal, are the weakest part of the film.

ITAT! doesn’t spend much time building up to the concert itself and there’s not really much of a story told in the film. It’s just some people talking about Leventhal & folk music and some musicians playing. What’s surprising is how well this works for the most part. The music is generally fantastic. Leon Bibb does a gorgeous version of “Shenandoah” while Theodore Bikel excels with Eastern European folk songs. Peter, Paul & Mary do a few good numbers but drop the ball horribly with the single sappiest version of “Don’t Laugh at Me” ever laid down. It’s a damn corny song to begin with but when Paul Yarrow ends it by solemnly listing various groups or peoples with “troubles” it loses any remaining welcome it might have had. The low point though, is Guthrie’s terrible ballad “Patriot’s Dream”. Guthrie has rarely been a commentator worth mentioning and his song offer no insight to anything, and also sucks musically. Lucky for us that The Weavers are the ones to end the show. They sing and play with an energy that many rock bands a quarter their age would envy. Ronnie Gilbert in particular is invigorating with her statements against the state of affairs in the United States. She and the other members call for action time and again, seemingly at every chance they are given for dialogue (that’s not a criticism!).

ITAT! has good and bad moments and is certainly on the whole worthwhile. What is most unfortunate and peculiar about the entire affair is the location of the show itself. It’s not too unfitting a metaphor for radical political action in many parts of the United States today. At one point Peter, Paul & Mary do an exceptionally energetic version of “Wayfaring Stranger”. One can only imagine the vibe that would have come from that in other places. Highlander Folk School would have have been swinging! The thing is, at Carnegie Hall, nobody is dancing.

Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World

“You’re the Henry Kissinger of comedy.”

On January 31, 1971 Albert Brooks made an appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show where he did a bit about a ventriloquist who conspicuously moves his lips, “breaking the illusion” that the wooden dummy was real. It was a brilliantly subversive piece of standup that made fun of an entire subgenera of comedy. Brooks’ career is filled with such original comedy and on paper his new film Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World fits right in. In practice it doesn’t work out quite as well.

Brooks, in the film, is an actor struggling to get good parts. He auditions unsuccessfully for a part in a new Penny Marshall project and is taken to task for his participation in 2003’s The In-Laws. He is surprised then, when the State Department invites him to carry out a special project aimed at winning the hearts and minds of the Muslim world. After having tried “spying and fighting, all the normal things,” the US government wants to take a different approach. Brooks is to take one month and visit India & Pakistan then write a 500 page report on what makes Muslims laugh. This sounds like a very good premise. Send someone who doesn’t know anything about Islam, Pakistan or India to Pakistan and India to find out about Muslim comedy. Laughter ensues, right? Brooks arrives first in New Delhi, a city of about 12,000,000 with less than one in six being muslim. This sounds like it could be a funny error of ignorance by the State Department to send Brooks to a predominantly Hindu city in a predominantly Hindu nation. It’s not though. Well, it is an error of ignorance but it’s not funny.

Brooks is assisted in his efforts by two State Department lackeys Mark (Jon Tenney) and Stewart (John Carroll Lynch) and Maya (Sheetal Sheth) a local hire in India. The roles of Mark and Stewart exist only to allow plausibility for Brooks’ ignorant fish-out-of-water character. They’re written like that as well so they have approximately zero depth. Only Maya turns out to be interesting though her character ends up involved in subplots that detract from the story. The perceived interference from Brooks in Maya’s love life is probably supposed to be a micro reflection of the US’s interference in the lives of other people in the world, which is what Brooks’ character is doing on a larger scale. Since that subplot is neither funny nor insightful it should have been left out. Though if one left out all the inessential material in LFCITMW, one would have a short film indeed. There are other ideas that are much better that still do not pan out. Instead of Daisy Cutters, Brooks bombs a different way in New Delhi. Again, a concept that seems like it should be entertaining but it’s not. The joke is supposed to be about American ignorance of the rest of the world but it plays like Brooks is using India & Pakistan as straight men for his performance.

LFCITMW is a great idea that turned out a weak mediocre. There are several very funny lines like when Al Jazeera offers Brooks the lead role in a new sitcom to be titled, That Darn Jew. Most of the material falls flat though. Brooks’ daughter Laura (Emma Lockhart) asks her dad, “Are you making the Muslims laugh?” His answer is purposefully delusional. A better question would have been, “Are you making the audience laugh?” The answer to that would not be comforting to the author.

House of Fury

The family that kicks together, sticks together.

The majority of Hong Kong action cinema, post Bruce Lee, that has made it to the United States has been in the way of comedies with only a couple of relatively unseen Jet Li films as the exceptions. Jackie Chan’s slapstick action comedies have become commonplace but his earlier works like Police Story are lesser known. This is unfortunate because Stephen Fung’s dynamite film House of Fury relies a little bit on audience familiarity with Asian action cinema to bring all the jokes to fruition. It’s not a matter of whether the film will be enjoyable, it’s just the difference between a certain scene being just silly and being silly and satirical. HOF is like the improperly maligned Last Action Hero in that it makes a lot of fun of action cinema, but also is one of the top examples of the genre being satirized.

Yue Siu Bo (Anthony Wong) is widower father of two with most of the problems that single dads in cinema have. Most prominently, he doesn’t connect with his children well. Their main complaint seems to be that he tells too many tall tales. His fantastic tales of adventure and intrigue are a continual source of embarrassment to Nicky (director Stephen Fung) and Natalie (pop star Gillian Chung). Their peers don’t seem to mind their dad’s eccentricities but they themselves are horrified about the story of pops taking down ten, twelve, or maybe thirty ninjas all by himself with not even a weapon beyond his physical being. Well not much more. Certainly he had no more than eighteen weapons. Anyway his tall tales lose a bit of height when he’s kidnapped by Rocco (Michael Wong) a crazed Chinese-American combat vet. He was on an antiterrorism mission of some sort for the USA when his spine was busted by a British counterintelligence agent in Hong Kong. Rocco sends a team of four baddies to capture Yue in order to extract certain information from him about the location of the fellow that put him in a wheelchair.

One thing dad did right by the kids is to train them how to defend themselves. That they do not use their fighting talents exclusively for defense or high-minded causes would likely be a source of stress for any Shaolin master. Nonetheless it makes for a very entertaining fight over the remote control. They show even more skill when villains try to steal their lucky charms. Those fights and countless others go to extreme lengths to poke fun at action movies. It’s probable that HOF breaks more individual glass items than any other film in history. If it doesn’t, it’s not for lack of effort. Sometimes when something breaks it acts as a catalyst for a style change. Such a thing happens when a broken sign turns into an instigation for a Bruce Lee impression. That the impression is carried off passably is compliment enough. What’s even more impressive is how Fung manages to simultaneously pay tribute to the various people and genres that he is busy spoofing.

With John Woo’s symbolic white suits and Jackie Chan’s proptastic fight choreography HOF does well to provide the audience with a hilarious and engaging film. There’s a bad joke or two and at least one gag, a theatrical send-up of Bollywood epics, falls flat on its face. All the rest is so relentlessly silly and fun that it would be a shame to pass it up. Most of the messages the film has that refer to anything other than cinema are superficial at best. There is one lesson is taught that all audiences would do well to learn. Don’t ever, ever get between a white kid and his gameboy.

As always comments and discussion are welcome. peace, JJ