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 […]
Author Archives: Dan Meier
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: 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Amazing Johnathan Documentary
When is a director not a director? And I don’t mean M. Night Shyamalan; I’m talking about films with misleading director credits, such as Poltergeist secretly being directed by Steven […]
Species
An alien hybrid escapes containment and hits the LA clubs for some procreational activities in this 1995 sci-fi/horror that they should have called Sex Predator. Itself a hybrid of Rabid […]
Little Monsters
A kindergarten trip to a petting farm is gatecrashed by a zombie outbreak in this Australian zom-com, or perhaps a zoombie movie. You don’t have to be Edgar Wright to […]
