A REAL TEAMSTER PLAYER

Happy Friday everybody!

Check out my "Friday Flicks" column, online at Phoenix Magazine, this week featuring reviews of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood...

...and Martin Scorsese's The Irishman.

The Scorsese flick was of special interest to me, as my Dad was a Teamster, and had seen Jimmy Hoffa speak to his local (and was unimpressed, he said), but I was never able to get him to tell me where the body was.

RIP to Michael J. Pollard, passed on at 80. Out of his vast body of work, I have a favorite moment: When he remarks "You sure are good, Melvin" after Paul LeMat, who is driving, refuses his flask in Melvin and Howard.

Happy Thanksgiving week next week everybody!

For nearly twenty years, it’s been a Thanksgiving tradition in our house, once the massive portions of food have been ingested and we’ve collapsed on the couch, to watch the 2000 film What’s Cooking? It’s an ensemble piece, set on Thanksgiving in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Fairfax, which cuts between four families of different racial and ethnic backgrounds—Vietnamese, Hispanic, African-American and Jewish—as they prepare the big dinner and navigate family drama and revelations. Funny, sweet and poignant, the movie is at least as refreshing and meaningful now as it was when it was made.

What’s Cooking? was directed and co-written by Gurinder Chadha, a Kenyan-born Brit of Indian descent. Needless to say, cultural diversity is a recurrent theme in her work. This week another film directed by Chadha was released on video: Blinded by the Light...

...an exuberant coming-of-age comedy-drama-musical set in Luton, England.

Based on the youth of writer Sarfraz Manzoor, it’s the story of teenage boy, Javed (Viviek Kalra), in a traditional British-Pakistani family in the ‘80s who was inspired to a career as a writer through his enthusiasm for the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen. Despite the film’s modest budget, Springsteen allowed the filmmakers to use his music, and Chadha ingeniously turned the Jersey legend’s work into the soundtrack for a Brit adolescence.

I had the chance to chat with Chadha when she visited the Valley recently in connection with the release of Blinded by the Light, and she described the balancing act of her directorial approach:

“I’ve always worked with music a lot in my films; I love music. The challenge here was in making a film about a writer, and making that cinematic. But at the same time I had a big responsibility to Bruce, not only because he gave me carte blanche on his catalog, but also because all those songs mean something to him, and Bruce fans. So my challenge was to direct a movie where I used the music so that it stood up to what the intention was of the songs in the first place, so I didn’t disappoint Bruce, and didn’t disappoint Bruce fans. But at the same there are a lot of people who aren’t Bruce fans, so I had to make sure it wasn’t just about the music.”

Even though she was there to talk about Blinded by the Light, I couldn’t resist asking Chadha about the scene in What’s Cooking? that brings tears to my eyes every year, when we hear a nearly a cappella version of the Beach Boys song “Wouldn’t it Be Nice?”; in the movie’s context the lyrics take on an unexpectedly moving, emotional cultural resonance. Said Chadha:

“I found that version, and I really wanted to play it at the end of the movie. Everyone was like, it’s never going to happen. You’re not going to be able to afford a Beach Boys track. You’ll have to get permission from Brian Wilson…so I wrote him a letter, based on what my movie was about, what I was trying to do. I was trying to show different communities in L.A. Movies show people not getting on; I saw people getting on around me in L.A. It was my first time in L.A., and I saw that and I was struck by that. The letter went out as a fax, and everyone was like, you’d better have a Plan B, and blow me down, I think it was like an hour later, not even a day, we got a fax back saying sure, she can use it. It was incredible. It turned out he’s from L.A., and he really liked the sentiment.”

It seems like a Thanksgiving showbiz miracle, but the current Chadha project experienced a similar generosity; notes Chadha: “The way that Brian responded to my letter was similar to the way we got permission from Bruce on Blinded the Light.”

If you’re looking for a pleasant after-dinner Thanksgiving video double feature, What’s Cooking? and Blinded by the Light might just leave you thankful.