Near the beginning of a new documentary called The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, world famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma tells a joke.
A little boy says to his father, “When I grow up I want to be a musician.”
“Sorry son,” the father replies, “you can’t do both.”
It’s a subject Ma knows something about. Performing since the age of five, by seven had played for Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. Since then he has appeared with all the world’s great orchestras, released 90 albums and won eighteen Grammys.
“The idea of being a musician means that you have access to wonder,” he says. “When you become too adult-like and concerned about responsibility you tend to push wonder aside. That moment where you take a step back and look at where we are and look at what the world is about. Those are decisions we have to remake every single day, to engage, to love and care for and to recommit. It’s a form of positive will and expression. If you don’t have that you can’t do anything. To me it is the ultimate antidote to paranoia, to hate, to terror is to care about things. To care about truth and be open.”
The cellist’s openness led him on a twenty-year journey to form The Silk Road Ensemble, a loose collective of international master musicians named after the ancient trade route between China and the Mediterranean. Featuring instruments from the Silk Road region, Ma mixes-and-matches his cello with the exotic sounds of the pipa, a Chinese short-necked plucked lute, a Mongolian horse head fiddle called a morin khuur and a Shakuhachi, a Japanese bamboo flute among others to produce an otherworldly sound that blends different cultures and styles.
“It’s not so much what makes stuff different but more the fact that we work in such a connected world,” says Ma. “Part of it is that and part of it is to recognize the strength of individuality but also inherent in that strength is flexibility. It doesn’t mean that because the bagpipe is louder than the violin we should never put the two together. It’s more like, unlikely bedfellows, ‘O my gosh, there could be something extraordinary that could come from that.’”
The movie, directed by Morgan Neville, who won an Oscar and a Grammy for his 2013 documentary 20 Feet from Stardom, chronicles the evolution of the collective and the individual journeys of the players. Wrapped around those portraits is the story of the group’s most famous member. Ma is revealed to be a thoughtful man with a wandering, restless creative spirit.
“I was scared to death before doing something like this,” he says. “I’m drawn to what I don’t know versus what I do know. I think my life is kind of boring because if you ask me questions about myself you will very often get the same answers. I know the answers. What little I know I can tell you about but that is not particularly interesting. What I don’t know is, for me, the source of all knowledge, everything you know is actually very little. We are constantly trying to understand more and moving forward can actually help us reconsider old things and decisions.”
SPOILER ALERT: This article contains Orange is the New Black Season 4 spoilers!
Samira Wiley, who played fan-favourite Poussey Washington on the prison drama Orange is the New Black, wants you know one thing, “Samira is alive!”
Since her character’s shocking death near the end of the fourth season her fans have been leaving strange messages on social media for her.
“I get a lot of comments on social media when I tweet something or I post a picture,” she says. “People are like, ‘I’m really happy you’re posting so I know you’re alive.’ Yes, I am. I haven’t gone anywhere.”
The Juilliard-trained actress appeared in fifty episodes of the acclaimed Netflix series, bringing Poussey to vivid life. Dealing marijuana earned the character a stretch at Litchfield Penitentiary— “We all in here because we took a wrong turn going to church,” Poussey joked—where she was an outspoken, and caring woman who stood by her convictions.
“Poussey is really like an ideal person,” says Wiley. “I’ve said this before, she is such a great friend and a great person sometimes when I don’t know what to do or want to be better in a certain situation I think, ‘What would Poussey do?’ She had a great heart. A great moral center and a great smile. She is someone that you look up to.
“I feel so, so honoured and privileged to give her life and to give people the strong feelings they have about her.”
Based on Piper Kerman’s memoir about her experiences in a women’s prison, the series has been a commercial hit and critical success for its candid depictions of race, sexuality and gender.
“I think the show in general has ushered in a new era of television,” says the actress who will next be seen on the comedy series You’re the Worst. “Orange is the New Black shows you different kinds of women, different shapes of women, different backgrounds of people. The barriers are less and in some ways, invisible because that is you, or your mom or your sister. I feel really proud to be part of the television show that started that.
“With season four I think we really amped it up a notch in terms of reflecting not only the people we see everyday but the issues we deal with everyday, specifically Black Lives Matter. We’re showing some responsibility as artists, as creators of this television show, because we need to reflect what is going on in our time. That is our responsibility.”
As Wiley’s former cast mates gear up to begin shooting season five of OITNB, she says she’s not up to date on the storyline.
“I think it might be too difficult for me to binge,” she says. “I don’t anticipate it. After most seasons, especially the third season I definitely binge watched immediately. I thought I would be able to do that this time but I have only watched about half this season.”
She stopped before Poussey is accidentally suffocated during a demonstration in the prison cafeteria.
“I haven’t watched it yet. In way I feel like actually watching it will be me really saying goodbye and I am not ready for that yet. I can’t do that yet.”
If you believe a new animated movie from Minions main man Chris Renaud (with co-director Yarrow Cheney), drinking from the toilet, chewing up furniture and napping are not the only things pets do when their owners are gone.
Max (voice of Louis C.K.), a brown-and-white Jack Russell Terrier has a great life with his human Katie (Ellie Kemper). They live together in a nice New York apartment and pass the time taking walks and playing. At first there’s only one problem, “Pretty much every day she leaves.”
While Katie is at work Max misses her but fills the endless hours hanging out with the other pets in his complex. There’s Buddy the dachshund (Hannibal Buress) who uses a Mixmaster as a back scratch, an obese tabby named Chloe (Lake Bell) who regularly empties the fridge and a poodle who rocks out to death metal when her opera-loving roommate is out of the house.
When Katie brings home Duke (Eric Stonestreet), a big slobbering beast of a dog and “brother” for Max, the Jack Russell’s life, errr, ahhh, goes to the dogs. The ensuing battle for alpha dog supremacy brings on canine confusion as it spills out of the apartment and onto the street. Max and Duke must now contend with dogcatchers and the human-hating Flushed Pets gang—Liberation Forever! Domestication Never!—while Gidget (Jenny Slate), a white Pomeranian with the hots for Max, launches a rescue mission.
Animal slapstick has done well this year. First “Zootopia” gave us a menagerie of messages and laughs and now “The Secret Life of Pets” strolls along. Funny and charming, it isn’t as rich in subtext as “Zootopia,” but what it lacks in meaningful moralizing it makes up for in silly fun. It’s as deep as a dog’s dish, but it is, one might say, doggone funny.
Renaud brings the kind of bizarro humour that made the Minions a hit—the facial expressions of the pets are often as funny as their dialogue and there is a surreal musical number with edible singing sausages—to “Secret Life.” That, with a healthy mix of slapstick keeps the pace up for the younger kids. Older folks should get a kick out of the stereotypes, how the movie plays into them—“I’m your friend,” purrs Chloe, “and as your friend I don’t care about you or your problems.”—and against them—ie Kevin Hart as Snowball, the adorable but vicious bunny.
To bulk up “The Secret Life of Pets” short running time a new short, “Mower Minions,” is tacked on the front. As the strange yellow jellybeans try and make money to buy a new blender the age-old question, Do minions have tiny tattooed bums?, is finally answered probably to the delight of the kids everywhere.
In “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates” Dave and Mike Stangle (Zac Efron and Adam DeVine), brothers who are also “bros,” get out bro’d by two unlikely people. Based on the memoir of the same name (with the subtitle “And a Thousand Cocktails”) by the real-life Stangle brothers, the movie co-stars broettes Aubrey Plaza and Anna Kendrick.
The kind hearted but dimwitted Mike and Dave like to party. Hard. They make a living in the ultimate bro profession—tequila sales—but it’s in their off hours that they really let it rip. Their “Jackass” style exploits, including fireworks mishaps, a trampoline incident at cousin Rachel’s wedding and instigating grandfather’s bad fall, have ruined more than one family gathering. In short they are troublemakers, but to be fair, they like to think of themselves as “party creators.”
To prevent them from putting a stain on their sister Jeanie’s (Sugar Lyn Beard) Hawaiian wedding their parents insist they bring dates. ‘We don’t want you showing up stag and riling each other up,” says Burt Stangle (Stephen Root). “You to show up stag, hit on girls and ruin everything.” To find the perfect dates the guys go big when their craigslist “free trip to Hawaii” ad goes viral racking up 6000 responses in no time flat, and earning them a spot on on The Wendy Williams Show. “We’re looking for nice girls. Girls that our mom and sister would like.”
At home, in their filthy rat hole apartment two broke girls named Tatiana (Plaza) and Alice (Kendrick) are watching on television. “Let’s make these guys take us to Hawaii.” Cleaned up, the porn-loving, self-described “shoplifting floozie-ass bimbos” engineer a meeting and convince Mike and Dave to take them to their sister’s destination wedding. In Hawaii Tatiana and Alice show their true colours and leave a trail of chaos and destruction in their wake before the four young people have an epiphany and attempt to leave their bad behaviour behind.
In real life Mike, Dave, Tatiana (Plaza) and Alice are the kind of people it might be fun to hang out with before ten o’clock at night, before the tequila shots and samplings from the mystery medicine cabinet have taken effect. After that, all bets are off. On film their inane conduct and silly slapstick is a fast, funny way to spend ninety minutes. In real life their self-absorbed, co-dependent behaviour would be off-putting in the extreme. Luckily in “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates” the screen separates us and we can sit back and observe them like cultural anthropologists, as if we’re studying animals in a zoo.
Of all the cast it is Plaza who fully embraces the Tucker Max-isms on display. Her unhinged dead-eyed glare is simultaneously hilarious and disturbing. Her Tatiana is damaged goods and knows it, flaunts it even. Plaza is also funny and in a very silly movie hands in a very smart performance.
“Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates” is cut from the same cloth as “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell,” but with the addition of heart and soul. It’s the kind of millennial movie that you doesn’t want you to laugh, it wants you to lol.
Near the beginning of “Eat That Question: Frank Zappa In His Own Words,” the musician says, “I don’t think anyone has seen the real Frank Zappa.” Using a collection of archival interviews and television clips director Thorsten Schütte aims to paint a word portrait of Zappa sans any context, voice over or other documentary tricks.
Luckily there is no shortage of footage for Schütte to mine. From early appearances on “The Steve Allen Show” where he “plays” a bicycle to Jeanne Beker’s famous “bad words are meaningless” interview and a slew of others a picture emerges of an articulate iconoclast, a man who played within the borders of the music business and society, but did it in his own idiosyncratic way. Married with four kids, he says he’s the opposite of the “bearded and gross and filthy” image so often portrayed in the press and frequently complains his records don’t get played on the radio.
For Zappa art and business didn’t mesh, but the sheer volume of interviews on display here suggests he understood the power of media to get his message across. He was always good for a quote but his challenging music often took a backseat to the image of the man who made it.
Schütte uses in concert clips as pacers between the interviews, showcasing some of Zappa’s more demanding pieces. “Bobby Brown Goes Down” and “Dinah-Moe-Hum” appear, but by-and-large the film showcases orchestral and jazz-fusion freak-outs.
By the end of “Eat That Question: Frank Zappa In His Own Words’s” ninety-minute running time a picture has been painted of a man who self describes as a freak and a conservative, an out-of-the-box musician who played by his own rules. There’s nothing terribly revealing here, certainly nothing most hard-core fans haven’t seen before, but the Schütte’s no-frills assembly places Zappa and his music front and center, creating a stripped down portrait of an American original whose compositions expose as much about him as his words do. The real Frank Zappa? You’ll see him with your ears.
“The Music Of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma And The Silk Road Ensemble” is a journey through music and culture. The documentary, directed by Morgan Neville, who won an Oscar and a Grammy for his 2013 documentary “20 Feet from Stardom,” is based on the cellist’s twenty-year journey to form The Silk Road Ensemble, a loose collective of international master musicians named after the ancient trade route between China and the Mediterranean.
Featuring instruments from the Silk Road region, Ma mixes-and-matches his cello with the exotic sounds of the pipa, a Chinese short-necked plucked lute, a Mongolian horse head fiddle called a morin khuur, the gaita bagpipes, played by a woman known as the Jimi Hendrix of Galicia and a Shakuhachi, a Japanese bamboo flute among others to produce an otherworldly sound that blends different cultures and styles.
Wrapped around the individual journeys of the players is the story of the group’s most famous member. Ma is revealed to be a thoughtful man with a wandering, restless creative spirit. A child prodigy, it’s interesting to hear him sum up his career with the words, “I never committed to being a musician,” says Ma, “I just fell into it.”
Most interesting, however, is the otherworldly music. It’s a cultural democracy of sounds that shouldn’t mix and yet blend together beautifully to create music that sounds simultaneously alien and familiar. The filmmaking is basic, staying out of the way of the music, but the message of harmony in diversity is clear and anything but mundane.
Newfoundland director Stephen Dunn’s feature debut is an odd movie. “Closet Monster” pays tribute to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and features a talking hamster spirit animal voiced by Isabella Rossellini. It’s also a beautifully made, eclectic film that breathes new life into the coming-of-age-and-out-of-the-closet genre.
Oscar (played as a youngster by Jack Fulton) is a child of a broken home who witnessed a grim act of gay bashing which left a young man paralyzed from the waist down.
Years later memories of the violent attack and his father’s (Aaron Abrams) homophobia—when he asks his father why the boy was beaten, the old man says, “Because he’s gay.”—have left Oscar (now played by Connor Jessup) feeling repressed, as though being gay was something that should never be talked about, let alone acknowledged. An imaginative kid, he has aspirations of leaving Newfoundland, moving to New York and becoming a makeup artist for horror and fantasy movies.
As a teen when Oscar develops a crush on hardware store co-worker Wilder (Aliocha Schneider) he finds himself still scarred from the trauma of his youth. His conditioned response is to filter his newfound feelings through a blend of aggressive fantasy flashbacks. His friends, Gemma (Sofia Banzhof) and Buffy (a hamster voiced by Rossellini) help ground him as he searches to find himself.
Perhaps because the story is loosely autobiographical Dunn is able to take what may have been a gimmicky story—talking hamsters! Gory make-up fever dreams!—and ground it, if not exactly in reality, then in a world that feels heightened but authentic. He’s aided by a great, naturalistic performance from Jessup who manages to keep the character earthbound and relatable even when the story takes off on existential flights of fancy.
“Closet Monster” confronts its issues head on, whether it is death—“Your parents replaced me,” says Buffy, “like, four times.”—grappling with sexuality or homophobia and does so with style and guts.
Richard chats with “The BFG” giants Chris Gibbs (Gizzardgulper), Daniel Bacon (Bonecruncher), Jonathan Holmes (Childchewer), Michael Adamthwaite (Butcher Boy) and Paul Moniz de Sa (Meatdripper) on working with Steven Spielberg and bringing the bigger-than-life giants to reel life!
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada
