Jazz Odyssey: Round Midnight
This 1986 drama stars saxophone giant Dexter Gordon as a drug-addled saxophonist in 1950s Paris. Named after a Thelonious Monk composition, based on the life of Bud Powell and featuring […]
Monthly Archives: November 2019
Jazz Odyssey: Bird
This is a 1988 biopic of Charlie Parker (Forest Whitaker) directed by one-liner comedian and arch nemesis of Tim Westwood, Clint Eastwood. Bird fits in the Elephant Man/Gandhi category of […]
Jazz Odyssey: All That Jazz
A renowned choreographer and director Joe (Roy Scheider) is working on a brand new stage play set to be his finest yet. But as he struggles to balance work, family […]
Jazz Odyssey: The Miles Davis Story
Produced for the 10th anniversary of his death, this 2001 documentary recalls the many milestones in the life and works of trumpeter Miles Davis, the jazziest jazz ever got and […]
Jazz Odyssey: Odds Against Tomorrow
Three desperate New Yorkers (Harry Belafonte, Robert Ryan and Ed Begley) plan a bank job in Robert Wise’s 1959 film noir. If you’re wondering what this heist movie is doing […]
Jazz Odyssey: All Night Long
Welcome to Jazz Odyssey, a week of jazz-related film reviews because this blog isn’t nearly alienating enough as it is. No spoilers but these include a thriller, a documentary, a […]
Blue Story
Marco and Timmy (Micheal Ward and Stephen Odubola) are best friends at school in South London, but are driven apart by a brutal postcode-based gang war, in this semi-autobiographical story […]
Bananas
Separating the art from the artist sounds great in theory but there’s something about Woody Allen that makes it difficult in practice, though I can’t quite put my finger on […]
Regarding Henry
A high-flying workaholic lawyer (Harrison Ford) is shot during the least convincing convenience store hold-up in movie history. With serious brain damage he’s forced to piece together his past, and […]
The Grateful Dead Movie
When the late, great Robert Hunter wrote the Grateful Dead lyric “Such a long long time to be gone, and a moment to be there” he was probably describing life […]
