Leslie Ann Coles' enchanting 2016 music documentary, MELODY MAKERS, finally arrives

Forget Rolling Stone. The music magazine you need to know all about -- and will find out plenty via this new film -- is the no-longer-published British weekly, Melody Maker, which ruled the music roost for most of its 75-year run, ceding its deserved dominance to rivals only when its owners insisted on major coverage going to popular boy bands and that ilk, rather than to the folk who actually made the music worth keeping.

As written and directed by Leslie Ann Coles (shown at left) and expertly edited by Mark Sanders, the film spends just the right amount of time with the many talking heads rounded up to speak about this marvelous magazine and its storied (even if many times accidental) scoops and articles that could and usually did goose the careers of the musical artists involved -- sometimes into overdrive.

We hear from former editors and journalists/ critics and especially from one particular photographer, Barrie Wentzell, whose resonant work (shown below) is also redolent and utterly defining of a time long gone -- and much missed by many of us.

The thing -- other than the subject itself -- that makes this documentary so special is how very speedy is the dialog, together with the ideas tossed around here. Similar to the fast pace of another recent doc, Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché, the movie assumes its audience to be intelligent and quick-thinking and so neither drags along nor grows repetitive (à la Ken Burns), as it drops its many bons mots and makes us think, assess and often laugh along the way.

What all these interviewees have to say, and what we learn about the bands, individual musicians, music politics and just-plain gossip of the day should delight and surprise anyone who lived through and paid attention to the music scene of this day (particularly the 1950s, 60s and 70s).

For instance: As there were few to no teachers of guitar in Britain at the time, rock musicians had to learn the instrument, along with what it could be made to do, all by themselves. Once something new was achieved, it was often shared, as the musicians moved on to yet another new chord or challenge. (You'll also discover what the Mafia had to do with why a magazine as popular as Melody Maker never saw U.S. distribution.)

As all this occurred well before the internet appeared, the relationship between the magazine and the musicians it covered was more than a little "chummy," which had both positive and negative effects. While it's hard not to recall this time as a kind of golden age, the tone of the doc is never self-congratulatory. These folk look back on things with an eye both distanced and melancholic. Still, when at the end of the movie, the workers tell us that these were the best jobs they ever had, you'll be hard put to disagree. Once you've seen this film, you'll understand why, had you been young in Great Britain back in the day, Melody Maker would have been your must-read.

From Cleopatra Entertainment and running just 78 minutes, Melody Makers opens in Los Angeles today, Friday, November 29, for a week-long run at the Arena CineLounge Sunset, 6464 Sunset Blvd, Hollywood CA, followed by the Apple iBook debut on the same day -- with a DVD Release scheduled for December 17. 

All about an amazing personality and career: Lisa Immordino Vreeland's LOVE, CECIL

Back in 2012, the granddaughter-in-law of the fashion maven Diana Vreeland, Lisa Immordino Vreeland, co-directed a documentary about the more famous Vreeland's life and work. It was a resounding success in many ways (even, to some extent, at the box-office), and in 2015, the younger Vreeland followed this up with another well-received documentary about Peggy Guggenheim. Now, Ms Vreeland has turned her attention to one of the fashion and photography icons of the mid-20th-Century, Cecil Beaton. The result -- LOVE, CECIL -- is yet another documentary home run.

Sure, Cecil Beaton was, as one of the interviewees admits rather far along in the film, a social-climbing snob. But he was also a supremely talented photographer, writer and designer, as so much of the work we see in this rapturously beautiful documentary thoroughly proves. And Ms Vreeland (shown at left), along with her editor, Bernadine Colish, and cinematographer, Shane Sigler, using a wealth of archival photographic treasures and a running narrative taken from Beaton's own witty and delightful diaries (read superbly by Rupert Everett), interspersed with amusing, telling and intelligent interviews with a wide range of prominent people, whips all this into an informative, entertaining and, yes, brittle (just as was Mr. Beaton) froth that allows this 98-minute movie to speed along quite nicely.

Gay and barely closeted (at a time when homosexuality was still a criminal offense in Britain), Beaton (shown above and below) managed to avoid any consequences from this (save perhaps his inability to latch on to any even vaguely permanent love relationship).

What got him most in trouble, stalling and nearly ending his career, turns out to be an anti-Semitic slur he buried, hardly able to be noticed, into some published art work for Conde Nast. Why this even happened remains a mystery (it seems to have been so to him, as well), as he was not noticeably anti-Semitic -- though god knows, plenty of his famous friends certainly were: the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, for instance, along with other Hitler worshipers in the extended "royal family."

How and why he survived this event and quite literally "worked" his way out of it provides one of the more interesting episodes in a documentary chock full of them. His initial success in the USA and New York City enabled him to return to England with enough fame to build on and garner even more. His photographic work during World War II (for which he seems less known now) helped him regain his stature, as did his photography of the Royal Family and the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth.

As we learn what happens to his brother, father and mother (his two sisters disappear from the narrative early on, never to return) weight and sadness are added to Beaton's tale and life. Yet the man himself remains witty, charming and cleverly self-deprecating throughout.

Thanks to Vreeland's smart pacing and to Beaton's rather incredible life, nearly everything we see and hear proves a kind of "highlight." What a career this man had! By the time we get to the section in which an interviewer asks him to name some of the folk he does not like -- and why -- his bitchy, funny answers scorch the screen. (His take-down of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, in particular, seems absolutely on the nose.)

Among the interviewees, artist David Hockney's reminiscences prove especially fond and thoughtful. As old age approaches we meet Beaton's much-loved white cat and see the man himself struggling against the dying of the light. Once that cat has departed, it is but a matter of a very short time until Beaton does, too.

Vreeland's documentary is like a trip back to a time long gone -- one that perhaps is not so much missed (it's the mid-20th-Century, after all). Compared to our current times, however, and what looks like a world approaching corporate/wealthy Fascism leading a citizenry made up of far too much right-wing, racist scum, those days seem a paradise lost.

From Zeitgeist Films, Love, Cecil opens this Friday, June 29, in New York City at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and in Los Angeles on July 20 at the Landmark NuArt. Overall, the film is scheduled to play some 25 cities across the country, including, here in South Florida, the Living Room Theaters in Boca Raton on July 27 and the Coral Gables Art Cinema in Miami on August 10. Click here (then scroll down) to see all currently scheduled playdates, cities and theaters

QUEEN AND COUNTRY: His current retrospective ends, and the new John Boorman film arrives

There are but a few days left to see on the big screen at New York City's Film Forum a selection of the work of British filmmaker John Boorman, an auteur whose films are always worth seeing (often the least regarded of which -- Zardoz, The Tiger's Tail -- offer the most surprising rewards). One of Boorman's most popular films, and the one that brought him the largest arthouse acclaim, as well as a bunch of Oscar nominations and BAFTA awards (Deliverance brought him his first batch of Oscar noms and mainstream popularity), was 1987's Hope and Glory. Now, nearly three decades later, arrives the sequel-of-sorts to that earlier biographical film that covered the filmmaker's days as a child during World War II. This new one, QUEEN AND COUNTRY, tackles the character's young manhood in the British military during the Korean War.

What a pleasure and a joy this new film is! Wonderfully funny, gorgeous to view (the period details are scrumptious and on-mark) and finally quite moving, too, Queen and Country proves there is still immense life and talent to this now 82-year-old filmmaker. The love -- of family, of country (with an often ironic and telling eye) and of the men and women in his life -- that Mr. Boorman (shown at right) conjures here is likely to find a hugely empathetic audience in English-speaking countries, surely, and perhaps far beyond those borders, as well.

Utterly accessible yet absolutely specific in its grasp of details concerning time, place and person, the movie's great achievement -- as is so often Boorman's too -- lies in how it shows us life in its rich comic/sad complexities and its characters as complicated and problemed people who are sometimes simply impossible to set right.

The filmmaker's beautiful tapestry includes his stand-in, Bill Rohan, wonderfully played by Callum Turner (above) and his best pal Percy Hapgood (a firecracker performance by Caleb Landry Jones, below).

Around these two revolve the rest of the wonderful cast of oddball, important characters -- from the beautiful, troubled young woman Bill encounters one evening at a concert (Tamsin Egerton, below)

to the discipline-crazed officer and bête noire of the boys, Sgt. Major Bradley (David Thewlis, below center, in yet another of his amazing, scary and deeply-felt performances)

to the no-one-does-more-with-less Richard E. Grant (below) as the superior officer, Major Cross

and a simply terrific performance from Pat Shortt (below), as the company's supreme grifter, Redmond, a role that even Phil Silvers' Sergeant Bilko might envy.

Add to this a first-class (though not upper class) funny and disparate family for Bill, and you have the makings of a hugely memorable hit that should delight arthouse audiences (perhaps into repeated viewings) before moving into even some mainstream venues, too.

The scene of that family (and friend) watching the coronation of the current Queen Elizabeth on their new television set -- a similar scene occurred in the little-seen (you really ought to) but excellent remake of The Scapegoat -- and who they suddenly see in the background provides yet another surprising twist and jolt to this splendid movie.

How it all comes together -- anything but perfectly, but believably and with a fine mixture of revelation and rue -- makes for one of the year's loveliest movie gifts. And one that just might find itself in memory when it comes time for next year's flock of awards-giving. (The movie ends, by the way, with a perfectly delightful nod to the career that will come.)

Meanwhile, Queen and Country -- via BBC Worldwide North America and running a never-too-lengthy 115 minutes -- gets its U.S. theatrical premiere this Wednesday, February 18, at NYC's Film Forum and in Los Angeles the following Friday, February 27 at Laemmle's Royal, Playhouse 7 and Town Center 5. In the weeks to come the film will open across the country in most major cities. To see the entire list of playdates, with cities and theaters, simply click here.  (To view the schedule for the remaining Boorman films in the current Film Forum retrospective, click here.)