I join CTV Atlantic anchor Todd Battis to talk about Spike Lee’s “Highest 2 Lowest,” the action comedy “Nobody 2,” the music doc “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley”and the crime drama “Americana.”
Watch the whole thing HERE! (Starts at 29:49)
I sit in on the CFRA Ottawa morning show with guest host Bill Carroll to talk about the new movies coming to theatres including Spike Lee’s “Highest 2 Lowest,” the action comedy “Nobody 2,” the music doc “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley”and the crime drama “Americana.”
Listen to thew whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: The documentary “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley,” now playing in select theatres, is a moving look at the unique life and ethereal music of the late Jeff Buckley.
CAST: Jeff Buckley, Mary Guibert, Rebecca Moore, Alanis Morissette, Aimee Mann. Directed by Amy Berg.
REVIEW: Jeff Buckley’s haunting, emotional and introspective music made fans of David Bowie, who called “Grace” one of the ten records he’d take to a desert island, and Bob Dylan, who called the singer “one of the great songwriters of this decade.”
With just one studio album released during his lifetime, his legacy is continued in Amy Berg’s loving tribute, “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley.”
Probably best known these days for his version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” the singer/songwriter who said his biggest influences were, “love, joy, anger, depression and Led Zeppelin,” left behind a small, yet potent collection of music.
We learn Buckley didn’t have a relationship with his father, musician Tim Buckley who died of a heroin overdose in 1975 when Jeff was just 8 years old. Although they only met once, the elder Buckley appears to have had an influence on his son. Not musically—Jeff’s influences were many and varied, everything from Zeppelin and Judy Garland to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Nina Simone—but on his impending sense of mortality.
“I have to tell you something about me,” he tells a girlfriend. “I’m not going to last that long.”
His words were prophetic. In 1997, while working on his second album in Memphis, he drowned, age 30, in Wolf River Harbor.
But Berg doesn’t define him by his early passing or the eerie parallels to his father’s life.
Instead, using archival footage, still photographs, loads of music and new interviews with the people who knew him best, she paints a portrait of a complicated artist who could write heartrending ballads and yet got his kicks crawling up a scaffold at a Page and Plant concert to place himself on top of the speakers to internalize the heavy sounds coming off the stage.
Berg essays his emergence as an artist, from the gigs in New York City’s East Village that caught the ear of record company A&R folks, to his rise to stardom and his complicated relationship to fame and the pressures placed upon him by the suits at his label.
It’s standard stuff for music bios, but this isn’t “Behind the Music.” It’s a humanizing tribute of a person who also happened to be a generational talent.
What to watch when you’ve already watched everything Part Eight! Binge worthy, not cringe worthy recommendations from Isolation Studios in the eerily quiet downtown Toronto. Three movies to stream, rent or buy from the comfort of home isolation. Today, dinosaurs, the meaning of life, the potential of the page and true crime.
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
West of Memphis, a new documentary from Oscar nominated director Amy Berg, details the efforts to find justice for Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley Jr. and James Baldwin, collectively known as the West Memphis Three.
Convicted on dubious evidence in 1994 of the murder of three young boys, they became a cause celeb, with stars like Johnny Depp and Eddie Vedder working to exonerate them.
The outcome of the 17-year crusade to earn a new trial for the trio is well known — no spoilers here — and the movie ends on a high note, with the men granted their freedom after 18 years and 78 days in prison.
A year after his release Echols talked about adjusting to life on the outside.
“At the time I got out I had been in solitary confinement for almost a decade,” he told me in September, “so I literally went from being in solitary confinement one day to the next being thrown out into the world.
“Out here it is like having to choose constantly. You make no choices in prison. It takes a lot of effort, a lot of energy. I’m having to learn things all over again. Even like how to go to the bank or use an ATM. Or use a computer.”
Despite being in “a state of deep, deep, profound shock and trauma for at least two months when I first got out,” he says life on the inside was worse.
“The level of stress, anxiety and fear that you live in is beyond comprehension to most people. You never even go to sleep all the way. Just the slightest noise wakes you up. There were times in the prison when you hear a noise and you’re on your feet, ready to fight before your eyes even open up, before you’re even conscious of what’s going on.”
These days he lives in Massachusetts with his wife Lorris (they married while he was behind bars), has written a book titled Life After Death and wants to do Tarot readings at MOMA asm performance art, but the adjustment to life on the outside continues.
“Life since then has been about learning to put one foot in front of the other. I have so much fear and anxiety just about surviving in the world that most of what I’m doing and dealing with is about coping and how to get beyond that. That’s all I’m focused on.”
