Robert Trujillo Presents Jaco
Jaco Pastorius made his name as a jazz-fusion bassist but his influence reverberated well beyond those circles. Along with home movies and concert footage, Jaco includes testimonials by everyone from Herbie Hancock and Joni Mitchell to Ian Hunter. Flea claims Pastorius “changed the rules of what could be done on the bass.” Metallica’s Robert Trujillo, producer of this documentary, describes hearing Pastorius as “like being slammed in the face.” From him, that’s a compliment!
The Captive City
“This can’t happen here,” the protagonists reassure themselves despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Kennington is the pleasant, middle-size heartland American setting for The Captive City (1952), a film noir concerned with the Mafia’s fluorescence as a covert corporation with branches everywhere. The city’s worthiest citizens are co-opted, the cops look the other way and only a courageous journalist (John Forsythe) stands up to corruption. Anxiety is pervasive in this Robert Wise-directed film.
Two for the Seesaw
Robert Mitchum, playing a lonely stranger in Greenwich Village, trudges into a loft where the Beats are having a party. He encounters a young dancer (Shirley MacLaine) and begins an unlikely affair. In a typical 1962 Hollywood movie, a kooky romance would ensue, but Two for the Seesaw is complicated, an emotionally naked story about two people tied in their own psychological knots. Andre Previn’s jazz score suffuses this black-and-white film with melancholy.
Hate Crimes in the Heartland
Emmy-winning director Rachel Lyon uses the 2012 “Good Friday Shooting,” in which three blacks in Tulsa were murdered by two white men on a shooting spree, as the gateway to a largely forgotten incident. In the 1921 race riot in Tulsa, Okla., a white mob burned down the city’s prosperous African American neighborhood as police looked on. As with many unpleasant events in America’s history, the Tulsa riot has been ignored even as the past continues to haunt the present.
