Dan Lybarger's Open Salon Blog

Three days to save a worthy film

Sun, 13 May 2012 22:05:50 -0400

Mica Jarmel-Schneider is an activist who has smuggled contraband to Cuba and by doing so has forced us to reevaluate our policy toward the island nation. What makes Jarmel-Schneider’s feat even more astonishing is that he conducted his subversive activities as part of his bar mitzvah and the forbidden items he smuggled into Castro’s Cuba are baseballs.

Got Balz? is a new documentary that chronicles Jarmel-Schneider’s unusual but poignant quest. His grandfather fled to Cuba to escape the Nazis, and the San Francisco teen wouldn’t be with us today if it had not been for the hospitality of the Cubans. Because Jarmel-Schneider, like a lot of Yanks and Cubans, loves baseball, he thought sending balls and other equipment would be a way of thanking the current residents of Cuba for their ancestors’ kindness.

Unfortunately, for five decades it’s been illegal to send even innocuous items like baseballs to Cuba. The film documents how Jarmel-Schneider and his allies had to leap through, around and over seemingly innumerable obstacles to get the baseballs to eager players. In these sequences, Got Balz? plays like an oddly entertaining combination of a farce and an espionage thriller.

In my career as a film critic, I’ve found that endorsing a film before it is finished is foolish and unethical. For this project, however, I am not a critic. I’m an investor, albeit one who has made a paltry contribution.

The story is near and dear to my heart, in part, because my Missouri-born girlfriend’s ancestors came from Cuba. Fifty years of the trade boycott has done nothing but strengthen the oppressive regime of the Castro brothers and inhibit potentially useful cultural exchanges like the one Mr. Jarmel-Schneider has accomplished.

The filmmakers are trying to raise $40,000 through Kickstarter.com and have only a week to meet the goal. They need the cash to finish paying for the music and to rework the sound that so that it’s presentable outside the festival circuit. If they don’t get the cash before May 16, Jarmel-Schneider’s inspiring story may not reach the wider audience it richly deserves.

Having sat through hundreds of films that wasted far larger sums of money (can we say John Carter?), I’d like to think that it’s not too much to ask for others to show a little of the initiative and courage that Jarmel-Schneider took to say a simple, but heartfelt “gracias” to the people of Cuba.

Review: Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness

Fri, 8 Jul 2011 20:07:26 -0400

Despite the fact that he’s been dead for nearly a century and that the language in which he wrote his stories, Yiddish, is fading, it’s hard find a more relevant or entertaining writer than the fellow who dubbed himself, “Sholem Aleichem.”

The pen name for Solomon Rabinovich roughly translates into, “Hello, how are you?” His stories have the informality of a casual greeting, but they also reveal some of the unfortunate truths about human beings that the last hundred years haven’t been able to correct. His stories about would be entrepreneur Menachem Mendel are both celebrations of and warnings about capitalism.

Furthermore, because people often migrate from their homes in hopes of better work only to find new places that offer neither fortune nor safety, the fictional businessman’s frustrations are astonishingly universal. Just about any father would be able to identify with Tevye the Milkman and his confusion about how he should deal with his daughters’ maturity. It hasn’t gotten any easier.

Joseph Dorman’s new documentary Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness is a remarkably thorough and fascinating look at Sholem Aleichem’s life and how his writing has continued to flourish. Essentially, Dorman provides a “just the facts, ma’am,” Ken Burns approach to the material, but that’s hardly a problem because the writer’s own story was as intriguing as the tales he’s written.

Because he wrote almost all of his adult life, there’s a surplus of material to discuss in the film, and Dorman chooses his samples wisely. He also has talented thespians like Peter Riegert, Rachel Dratch and Jason Kravitz reciting the stories and delivering them in roughly the same style people would have heard them when they were new. As the photographs that Dorman presents indicate, people would read the tales aloud at family or religious gatherings.

One of the joys of the doc is that Dorman continually finds archival photographs that vividly describe the dying shtetl life that informed Sholem Aleichem’s stories. He also arranges fragments of the tales in ways that beautifully illustrate how the stories fit into different ages. Early in the film, viewers get to hear Tevye’s “If I were a Rothschild” longings. Later, the film includes the only known audio recording of Sholem Aleichem, where he recites the same passage. Broadway lyricist Sheldon Harnick later explains how he adapted the same passage into the song “If I Were a Rich Man” from the stage play and movie Fiddler on the Roof. Thanks to the popularity of that musical adaptation of his Tevye stories, Sholem Aleichem’s stories will probably be with us a good deal longer.

As Dorman explains, the author’s work might have disappeared. When he came to America for the first time, two of Sholem Aleichem’s plays debuted in New York on the same night to hostile reviews. Because his stories were written in Yiddish, they were initially considered beneath the literary and liturgical value of Hebrew literature. Conversely, because they were written in Yiddish, his stories could be enjoyed from Odessa to Paris to New York.

Dorman includes testimony from both academics who can put Sholem Aleichem’s work in context and from the author’s granddaughter Bel Kaufman, who’s a formidable writer, too. She’s best known for writing Up the Down Staircase. As a result the movie is scholarly but also personal. Kaufman recalls how her grandfather was known as a writer of working class stories (the early Soviets who came to power after he died in 1916 loved him), but he was fond of the nice things that money can buy.

That said, Sholem Aleichem’s work has still proven to be world class and can be applicable to just about any culture imaginable. Dorman has crafted a tribute that is reverent and guaranteed to make others share his own fascination.

Uncommon Sense: Buck Brannaman on Horses, Movies and Life

Fri, 1 Jul 2011 10:07:51 -0400

Even though horse trainer Dan M. “Buck” Brannaman is as skilled with his tongue as he is in the saddle, Cindy Meehl’s new documentary on him Buck implies there is still more under his cowboy hat than he initially lets on.

Brannaman is a master of natural horsemanship, where a rider trains a horse, not by breaking it, but by looking at the relationship the way the animal sees it. To a casual observer, it’s almost

as if Brannaman can telepathically communicate and command the horse. Nicholas Evans consulted with Brannaman while he was writing The Horse Whisperer, and director-actor Robert Redford relied on the horseman’s skills when he made the film adaptation of the book.

From listening to him talk about the discipline he practices, however, it quickly becomes obvious that his equestrian magic comes more from pragmatism than potions. The techniques he and his predecessors Ray Hunt and Tom Dorrance use are based in simple logic: If you can think like the horse, it’s a lot easier to interact with it.

This technique also requires compassion on the part of the rider and earning the horse’s trust. As Buck demonstrates, Brannaman’s gift for empathy in some ways belies his difficult upbringing. As a youngster, he and his brother were rodeo stars, but their father used savage beatings as part of the boys training. Eventually, the lads had to be moved to a loving foster home, and as the film documents, both grew up to be stable adults with solid families of their own.

From listening to Brannaman on a phone call from Oklahoma City, it’s quickly obvious that as good as the film is, Buck only captures a portion of the man’s life and philosophy. While he speaks quietly, he’s certainly got a lot to say about how horses can be the mirror images of the people they encounter.

You’ve not a stranger to documentaries. You’ve made a series of training videos, so what was it like to make a film with somebody else in charge?

Well, really it was easy for me because I had told Cindy from the beginning that if she was going to do this, she needed to understand that I wasn’t going to change anything about my days, that my loyalty had to go with people that go to my clinics.

So in that, she had to be pretty clever in how she filmed it because I said, “I’m not going to position a certain way. I’m not going to be standing somewhere you want me to stand and do anything. I’m going to go about my day, and you’re going to have to anticipate when something kind of neat is going to happen with the horse. You’re going to have to plan ahead and be there.”

With horses, when something kind of neat does happen, it doesn’t happen again. That moment’s gone, and if you missed it, and you weren’t there, it’s gone forever. So it was quite a challenge for her, but the longer she went, the better she got at. When pretty soon, once in a while, I’d look over at her because I knew something kind of neat just happened with the horse or with somebody else. I’d look over at her, and she’d be kind of “thumbs up” and she’d be saying, “I got it.”

That reminds me of working with children because my nephews were little, my brother would try to videotape the moment, and the kids would immediately clam up. Is it the same way with horses?

The horse is indifferent to that thing other than if you’re around horses that haven’t been handled a bunch, once a fellow with a camera walks into an arena, it looks pretty odd to a horse. You have to figure if a horse survives by being really attentive and keen on those things and noticing things that might turn into a threat.

They’re used to seeing a human in one form, and then they see a human with this thing on top of his shoulder, every once in a while, a horse will give it a long look.

When Nicholas Evans, the author of The Horse Whisperer, or others describe you, they almost make you sound like a Zen master, but hearing your own voice describing your training techniques, it seems like a lot of what you’ve done is more based on practicality or noticing something that’s obvious.

It really is. A lot of people used the term “common sense approach.” And that doesn’t sound too bad to me. But it’s interesting that they call it common sense, and that would infer that it happens all the time.

I don’t know what it is, but it’s logical. It is a sensible approach to working with horses, and obviously it’s about practice. It’s about how much time you spend at it and how much devotion you have for it.

With the techniques that you and fellow natural horsemanship trainers Ray Hunt and Tom Dorrance have developed, don’t they demand more of a person in the relationship with the horse?

They do, and really, that’s in the essence of this. You realize if you’ve been at this awhile the changes you have to make within yourself to get to the point to where you are appealing to horses, to where you’re not threatening to them and they accept you, and where they even prefer to be around you. There are a lot of changes you have to make within yourself to get to that point. And that’s what people are looking for when they go to my clinics. And it was interesting to me how our goal from the very beginning from this documentary was that it would have an appeal and that it would touch the hearts of people that are from town, that don’t have horses or have no background in livestock that they would still get the point to what this is all about.

And that was the challenge, and Cindy did a great job. It’s been really well-received in urban areas.

You’re talking to someone who writes computer instructions for a living. When I heard you describe equestrian terms to newcomers, I said, “This guy’s going to put me out of a job.” You did such a fine job explaining these concepts for people who are new to animals.

It is true. There are so many parallels in relationships that people did get the point in this. Some would think, “I could have a different point of view about my kids.” Maybe someone else would think it would apply to their wife or their husband or their aunt or their dad or their mom. It’s interesting how there’s a message for everybody if it’s important to you.

Not everybody is searching to improve on themselves, but it’s surprising to me how many people are, actually.

One particularly haunting bit from the film is the old footage of a horse being broken.

Yeah.

And me being a lily-livered city person, it kind of shocked me. It struck me that wouldn’t the techniques that you, Tom Dorrance or Ray Hunt used result in better longevity for a horse?

Oh, absolutely. You know there was a time, it sounds funny, but years ago when Tom Dorrance was just getting on to these things that he taught all of us, that there were people who thought that he literally hypnotized horses, that he was practicing some sort of witchcraft. It was that out there to people.

And isn’t it crazy that all he was advocating was just finding a way to work with a horse as if you got to make up the rules to help him understand? That in a nutshell was really what motivated him. And it was sort of the foundation for his life’s study: find a way to get the horse to cooperate with you and work with you and not be troubled.

And yet he was so remarkable with what he could accomplish because instead of kind of forcing his will on the horse and trying to make it happen, he’d fix it up so that his idea would become the horse’s. Things do look easy then, but that isn’t any different with people. If you’re wanting someone to do a certain thing, and you can shape it up to where it’s them thinking it was your idea—that they think they’ve come up with this stroke of genius—and you’ve shaped it up that way, they all you have to do is tell them, “You’ve really got it going on. I wish I had thought of that.”

And yet, it’s the direction you wanted him to go to begin with while everybody wins.

In the film, it’s impressive how open you are about the difficulties you and your brother had as children. Was it tough in both your book The Faraway Horses and in this documentary to talk about this stuff?

You know, I think it was harder in the book because in that I was not a trained author by any stretch, so I had to rewrite the book quite a few times before I was satisfied with it. It seemed like every time I’d go over it, through all these years of working with horses, I’ve learned how to live in the moment. As I would be rewriting my book, that would sort of require me to immerse myself in the past again and tell the story and put myself there. I’d get done with the rewrite, and for two or three days, I’d be kind of melancholy, just kind of bummed out, you know.

And then I’d shake it off and get on with my life. So, every time the publisher would say, “We need to know you,” I’d think, “Oh, no.” So I was pretty relieved when it was all done.

But I’ve found that over the years in these clinics that people will come the first day of the clinic, and they’re intimidated because they know who I am, and I’ve been around a long time. And they think because you have something of a reputation, that you’re not approachable, that you’re something other than what you are.

I’ve found that being able to share with people my vulnerabilities and my imperfect life and my personal experiences seemed to lead them to feel that I obviously trusted them to share something very intimate about myself. And that really opens people up to where they’re open to me.

Well then the teacher-student relationship is off and running, so I can get something done. In small doses over the years, I’ve done quite a bit of stuff like that with folks, so it wasn’t so unnatural for me to do it once we started doing this documentary.

Buck is coming out at an intriguing time because bullying and its consequences are coming back into the headlines again even though the phenomenon never really went away.

Right. Believe me, I got bullied when I was a kid. I don’t often tell people this but—you’d probably find it hard to believe because I talk for a living—I stuttered so horribly when I was a little fellow in school. So it was especially surreal when I saw that movie with my family the other day, The King’s Speech. Hey, man, I feel you brother.

It was a hard thing for me to work through. I know now looking back, you could probably attribute most of it to the stressful environment I was living in that caused me to stutter. Every night, I would say words over and over again, thousands of times. I’d usually take two words a night. And I’d fall asleep with those two words until I could say them. It seemed once I had done that, then I kind of owned those two words. I could say them and then nothing else. Over a period of a few hundred nights, my vocabulary started to grow in terms of words that I could get out without stammering and stuttering.

But it was tough. I got made fun of, and it wasn’t cool.

Wow! But with stammering, there’s no relationship with intelligence because Thomas Jefferson, for example, stammered.

Well, it’s interesting you’d say that because back in the day, when they first decided that I couldn’t speak, they would put me in, for the lack of a better term, like a special ed class. And then their entire therapy would be that they’d just plop me down to the table, and we’d all have to read out of a book aloud.

Well, crap. I already knew I couldn’t speak. And then reading to everybody made it worse. And then being in front of other kids reading and stuttering made it worse yet. And then the teacher would just look at me and shake her head. Here I was a third or fourth grader, and even then I was thinking, this is stupid. This isn’t working. I was a bright kid. I got good grades.

And the some of the other kids, we’d been put together, and let’s just say they weren’t so bright. So then it really was demeaning to me because I thought, you know what? They’re not helping me at all. That’s when I just starting practicing on my own.

I actually thought the scenes in Buck where the violent horse was brought in were really helpful. As a viewer and as a film critic, it seems as if so much of what you is easy. It helped to see two things: 1. Owning an animal is a huge responsibility. 2. What you do takes serious discipline, so not just anybody can pull it off.

I’m pleased to hear you say that, and I’ll tell you why. It’s because in this: I had hoped by this piece being in there on this horse—granted, that situation with that horse is sort of an anomaly. That’s one in 50,000 horses. That started out with brain damage. So he was already going to be mentally handicapped, no matter what happened.

And then if you were going to write a book on all the wrong things you could do to ruin a horse, well, that had already pretty much been done. It was a perfect storm for making the horse the way he was. But I’d hoped that through this everybody, be they horse people or people from the city, would get the message and the point that with this, whether you’re going to have horses or dogs or children, comes great responsibility, and not just to give them food and shelter. But to teach them right from wrong and to guide them and to show them the right thing from the very beginning, so that you’re sending them on the course to success through their whole life.

Thank goodness, people have gotten the big picture to this. And interestingly enough, another fellow who was interviewing me the other day, made a fairly astute point. He said, “You know what I thought?”

He said, “Having seen your foster mom on there, I was looking at that horse thinking, that could have just as easily been you, Buck.” And I thought, “You’re right on, bud.”

Speaking about your foster mom, the film shows that movie stars can come in all shapes and sizes. She’s such a charmer. I’m so glad they put her in.

She's the best. Still, as many times as I've seen it, I can't watch a screening without crying. I just can't. She's such a great person.

It's really professional when you go into a question and answer session after a screening where you've been bawling (laughs).

But I think it takes a real man to admit vulnerabilities.

I think so.

How long did it take you to get Robert Redford to where he could imitate some of the things that you do?

Of course, when you're shooting a film like that, you look at how short all the scenes are by the time it gets cut up into a feature film, you don't have to have long bursts of brilliance. You know what I mean (laughs)?

I doubled for him on some of the harder stuff, and they could shoot it in a way that looked like Redford. But Bob Redford is a real athlete. He's done some really athletic things in his life, so he's a handy guy. And his personality is such that he could really kind of connect with me when I'd be explaining something to him.

There are some actors who may be good in certain character roles. There are some actors who have way too much ego or are too macho and way too full of themselves to adapt to something different. It fit Redford to a "T" because he's not one of those guys. He's not what most folks would expect even though he's so famous, and he's like the big king in that business. But he's a good guy, and he's the kind of guy you'd enjoy spending time with him regardless of if he was famous.

I write computer documentation for a living. One of my biggest challenges is keeping my patience with people because there are still folks out there who aren't comfortable with computers. Is it tough for you when you're dealing with newcomers? I noticed that you try to be good humored around these people.

It is very much the same, you know. You can't approach them the same way because you've said the same thing 100,000 times. You can't approach them like it's their fault. They're there, and they've stepped up and admitted that they need to know more. They've shown the courage to even get out there in front of everybody with their horse. So you have to respect that. Nobody's trying to look inept. They'd all like to look as good as they could.

You always have to remind yourself of that. You have to be open enough with the ones who are trying to get some education. The ones you should be frustrated with, with anyone, would be the ones that are still at home.

Did you once play polo with Prince Charles?

Yeah. Not a serious polo game. When he used to come to West Palm Beach to play, I got to know him a little bit, as much as you're going to get to know a prince. You know how that goes.

You could have been an accounting student. Is that correct?

Yeah, it's funny I went to school for a while. I got good grades. I was a 4.0 student, and my counselor, the advice he gave me was that the best thing I could do when I left his office was dump my books in the garbage and don't look back. He said, "You're at the top of the business school. I find it really weird telling you that, but I know about you. Some folks have told me that we may be the very thing that's holding you back right now." He said, "You've already had all the serious accounting classes already, so you've got that background. You need to move on. You're not going to be an accountant."

So I did. I walked out of his office and dumped my books in the garbage. So in my last quarter, I got all Fs.

90 Years of Cinematic Confections:

Fri, 8 Oct 2010 17:10:36 -0400

An Interview with Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker

by Dan Lybarger

Documentary filmmakers Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker may not be household names, but their films have captured Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton and future senator Al Franken as their stars were rising. Because the two have been making movies together and apart since 1954, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve seen some of their footage without even knowing it.

Donn Allen “Penny” Pennebaker was born in 1925 and has been making films since 1953. He edited the 1960 breakthrough documentary Primary, which captured the Wisconsin Democratic primary where Kennedy took on Hubert Humphrey. His 1967 documentary Don’t Look Back featured Bob Dylan touring England and giving reporters who hadn’t done their homework a much-needed scolding, while Monterrey Pop had star-making performances by Joplin, Hendrix and the Who.

DA Pennebaker filming Bob Dylan for Eat The Document

Pennebaker started working with Hegedus in the late 1970s and has been married to her ever since. The two have collaborated on The War Room, which chronicled Bill Clinton’s successful pursuit of the White House in 1992 and Moon over Broadway, which features Carol Burnett attempting a stage comeback. She also co-directed Startup.com, which unknowingly followed the demise of the dot.com bubble and Al Franken: God Spoke, which features the comedian becoming a forceful pundit.

Together the two have 90 years experience of making movies and have received an Oscar nomination for The War Room. They’ve also created thousands of indelible moments such as Dylan flipping signs to “Subterranean Homesick Blues” in Don’t Look Back and George Stephanopoulos calmly dressing down a Ross Perot operative in The War Room or David Bowie giving his last “Ziggy” concert in Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

Their latest film Kings of Pastry proves that even cooking can be oddly engrossing even if you can’t try the dishes on screen. The two follow 16 chefs as they compete in the challenging Meilleurs Ouvriers de France (or Best Craftsmen in France) bake off. The event is held every four years, and only admits the best of the best as participants. The MOF is so prestigious that French President Nicolas Sarkozy is on hand to help reward the winners with a coveted red, white and blue collar. If you see a chef wearing one of those, your mouth may never recover from the joy of what you’re about to eat.

These chefs don’t make mere cakes. These are often delicately crafted sculptures that take an astonishingly amount of practice and precision.

To read the entire article, click here.

Walking in Lennon’s Shadow: Aaron Johnson on ‘Nowhere Boy.’

Fri, 8 Oct 2010 12:10:27 -0400

by Dan Lybarger

Because the music and legacy of John Lennon is so formidable, any actor wanting to portray him in a movie is almost inviting ridicule. This is especially true because tomorrow would have been the murdered singer’s 70th birthday.

In addition to having to meet the expectations of millions of Beatle fans, a performer risks comparison with the way Ian Hart played the role in Backbeat.

Aaron Johnson approaches John Lennon with a new angle in “Nowhere Boy.”
Photo courtesy of the Weinstein Company.

Thankfully, 20-year-old Englishman Aaron Johnson easily fits into Lennon’s Teddy Boy clothes. For one thing, he’s no stranger to iconic roles. He played a young street urchin who would grow up to be Charlie Chaplin in Shanghai Knights.

He’s also playing a Lennon who’s not as well known as the later peace activist and superstar. In director Sam Taylor-Wood’s Nowhere Boy, which opens today in New York and Los Angeles, Johnson’s Lennon is rebellious teenager who seems headed to prison or an early grave instead of greatness.

His equally free-spirited mother Julia (Anne-Marie Duff) has left him in the care of her straight-laced sister Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas). Lennon loves both of them, but both siblings war over his affections. Thanks in part to Johnson’s committed performance and Taylor-Wood’s creative direction, the film has earned raves. As of opening day, the film has an 80 percent approval rating on RottenTomatoes.com.

For the full interview, click here.