Born to Be Blue
Trumpeter Chet Baker was at low ebb by the late 1960s, the setting for Born to Be Blue. Ethan Hawke stars as Baker, emulating his sunken appearance as a jazzman who never escaped the slavery of heroin for long. Baker’s playing was as sad and lonesome as he was; Hawke plays the role in aggrieved hipster mode without illuminating Baker’s unfathomable melancholy. Carmen Ejogo co-stars as the woman who tried her best to keep him straight.
Anesthesia
Knots of unhappy people in Manhattan and New Jersey separately go about their lives and eventually converge in this thoughtful, moving film. Sam Waterston plays a philosophy professor who delivers his Nietzsche with a twinkle in his eye. He doesn’t want to believe the world is meaningless, but many of Anesthesia’s characters fear the worst and suffer from addiction, infidelity and the imminence of death. Anesthesia suggests that the opiate of the masses is compassion.
Elstree 1976
No one on the set of London’s Elstree Studio, where much of Star Wars was filmed, had any idea they were helping make a mega-blockbuster, epochal in scope. “It didn’t seem anything special to me,” says one of the extras interviewed here. Elstree 1976 recounts memories of stormtroopers and fighter pilots, mostly working-class Brits and Canadians who went on to modest acting careers and an unexpected afterlife signing autographs at Star Wars conventions.
A Perfect Day
Benicio Del Toro and Tim Robbins star as aid workers in the civil war-wracked former Yugoslavia of 1995. They need a rope to haul a corpse from a well before it contaminates the village drinking water, and embark on an odyssey across the rough, ruined landscape in search of a strand long enough for the job. Director Fernando León de Aranoa’s A Perfect Day is a rambling movie, occasionally mordantly funny, about the absurdity accompanying war.
