I CALLED HIM MORGAN details the complicated relationship between jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan and his common-law wife, Helen
I CALLED HIM MORGAN (Kasper Collin, 2016)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Francesca Beale Theater
144 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Opens Friday, March 24
212-875-5601
icalledhimmorgan.com
www.filmlinc.org
On February 19, 1972, during a massive blizzard, thirty-three-year-old jazz trumpeter extraordinaire Lee Morgan was shot to death by his common-law wife, Helen, in Slugs’ Saloon on the Lower East Side. Swedish director, writer, and producer Kasper Collin takes viewers behind the scenes of the tragedy in the sensational documentary I Called Him Morgan. The Philadelphia-born Morgan was a young prodigy, studying with Clifford Brown, playing with Dizzy Gillespie’s orchestra when he was eighteen, and joining Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers at twenty. Preferring the term “black classical music” to “jazz,” Morgan was caught up in a lifestyle of fast cars and drugs, ultimately hitting rock bottom until he was rescued by Helen Moore, thirteen years his elder, a farm girl from North Carolina who loved throwing parties in her adopted hometown of New York City and was a beloved fixture in the jazz community. Collin amasses an impressive roster of jazz greats who share their insights, including saxophonists Wayne Shorter, Bennie Maupin, and Billy Harper, drummers Albert “Tootie” Heath and Charli Persip, and bassists Larry Ridley, Jymie Merritt, and Paul West, along with Morgan neighbor Ron St. Clair, Helen’s son Al Harrison, and Morgan’s very close friend, Judith Johnson, many of whom are going on the record for the first time. “There was never no doubt in anybody’s mind: Lee was gonna be a star, Persip remembers. “They cared about each other. They loved each other,” Maupin says about Lee and Helen. There are also rare audio clips from an interview British writer and photographer Val Wilmer conducted with Morgan in October 1971 in Lee and Helen’s Bronx apartment. The film is anchored by a remarkable interview Helen gave writer, teacher, and jazz radio announcer Larry Reni Thomas in February 1996, a month before she died. “I will not sit here and tell you that I was so nice, because I was not,” she tells Thomas, speaking often in broken phrases. “One of the . . . will cut you. I was sharp. Yeah . . . I had to be. And I looked out for me.” It all culminates in a spellbinding, detailed account of the murder itself, told by numerous eyewitnesses with “Stagger Lee”-like swagger.
Jazz greats Lee Morgan and Wayne Shorter take a break in Kasper Collin’s I CALLED HIM MORGAN
“He knew how to tell a story,” 2016 Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame inductee Shorter says of Morgan, who released more than two dozens albums (among them The Sidewinder, Search for the New Land, and Lee-Way) in his too-brief career, primarily for Blue Note, while also appearing on records by John Coltrane, Blakey, Gillespie, Quincy Jones, and many others. With I Called Him Morgan, Collin (My Name Is Albert Ayler) proves that he knows how to tell a story too. Initially inspired by a YouTube clip of Morgan performing, Collin spent seven years putting the documentary together, combing through archives and convincing people to participate. The film unfolds like an epic jazz composition as Collin and editors Hanna Lejonqvist, Eva Hillström, and Dino Jonsäter interweave amazing archival footage, a wide range of personal and professional photographs (mostly by Wilmer and Blue Note cofounder Francis Wolff), new interviews, and poetic, atmospheric shots of snow, sunsets, cityscapes, and other outdoor scenes by Oscar-nominated cinematographer Bradford Young (Selma, Arrival). Throughout, Morgan’s glorious music is heard, front and center or in the background, including such songs as “Gaza Strip,” “Tom Cat,” “New-Ma,” “Lament for Stacy,” “The Procrastinator,” “Absolutions,” “Angela” (for Angela Davis), and “Helen’s Ritual,” tunes that are not only revelatory but also a constant reminder of the talent the world lost in 1972. “I find that the essence of creativity is the newness of things,” Morgan told Wilmer in 1971. “And the only way to keep things new is to have constant changes in environment and surroundings and people, and all that, you know. And that’s the thing that makes it so exciting about being a jazz musician.” It’s also what makes Collin’s film so exciting. I Called Him Morgan opens March 24 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Francesca Beale Theater, with Collin participating in Q&As on March 24 at 6:00 (with jazz critic Gary Giddins) and 8:15 and March 25 at 6:00 with jazz historian Ashley Kahn; it will expand to Metrograph on March 31.
Yasujirō Ozu might not have been keen on the latest technology — he made silent films until 1936, and his first color film was in 1958, near the end of his career — but there’s nothing old-fashioned about his mastery of camera and storytelling, as evidenced by one of his lesser-known comedy-dramas, Passing Fancy. On March 19 at 4:30, Film Forum is screening a 35mm print of the 1933 masterpiece, accompanied by a live benshi performance by Ichiro Kataoka and composer and pianist Makia Matsumura. Takeshi Sakamato stars as Kihachi, a character that would go on to appear in such other Ozu works as A Story of Floating Weeds, An Inn in Tokyo, and Record of a Tenement Gentleman. The film opens at a rōkyoku performance, where the audience is sitting on the floor on a hot day, mopping their brows and fanning themselves; Kihachi has an ever-present cloth on his head, looking clownish, a small boy with an injured eye who turns out to be his son, Tomio (Tokkankozo), sleeping by him. Foreshadowing Bresson-ian precision, Ozu and cinematographers Hideo Shigehara and Shojiro Sugimoto follow a small, lost change purse as several men inspect it, hoping to find money in it, then toss it away when it comes up empty. The scene establishes the pace and tone of the film, identifies Kihachi as the protagonist, and shows that there will be limited translated text and dialogue; in fact, Ozu never reveals what happened to Tomio’s eye. After the performance, Kihachi and his friend and coworker at the local brewery, Jiro (Den Obinata), meet a destitute young woman named Harue (Nobuko Fushimi). An intertitle explains, “Everyone years for love. Love sets our thoughts in flight.” Kihachi, a poor, single father, helps Harue get a place to stay and a job with restaurant owner Otome (Chouko Iida), hoping that Harue will become interested in him, but she instead takes a liking to the younger Jiro, who wants nothing to do with the whole situation, believing that Harue is using them.
“This isn’t how it was supposed to turn out,” Ryota Shinoda (Hiroshi Abe) says in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest masterful family drama and most personal yet, After the Storm. With the twenty-third typhoon of the year on its way, struggling writer Ryota decides to visit his mother, Yoshiko (Kilin Kiki), at the Asahigaoka Housing Complex in Kiyose, Tokyo (where Kore-eda lived for nearly twenty years, until he was twenty-eight). The broke Ryota is hoping to find some hidden treasures left behind by his father, who has recently passed away, to get him out of the financial hole he has dug for himself through a gambling addiction. His ex-wife, Kyoko (Yoko Maki), is threatening to take away his visitation rights with their young son, Shingo (Taiyo Yoshizawa), unless Ryota pays his back child support. To make some quick cash, Ryota has taken a job with a detective agency, where he is not exactly ethical; he claims he took the job as research for his next novel, but he even spies on Kyoko, who has a new boyfriend. As the storm approaches, the characters try to reconnect, and disconnect, forced to face what their lives have become. Written, directed, and edited by Kore-eda, After the Storm is a gentle, eloquent tale, where the smallest of gestures and details are packed with emotional resonance, from Yoshiko attending a class on Beethoven to Ryota purposely scuffing cleats he is buying for Shingo in order to get a discount, from Ryota and Yoshiko trying to eat frozen-solid ices to Ryota finding out something new about his father from a local pawnbroker (Isao Hashizume).
A surprise going-away party turns into a nightmare in Matt Reeves’s highly anticipated Cloverfield. Michael Stahl-David stars as Rob, a young man who has accepted a promotion that will send him to Japan. Although he is in love with his best friend, Beth (Odette Yustman), he is unable to tell her. But everything changes when the ground starts to shake, buildings begin to collapse, and people are on the run, attempting to escape from an enormous monster on the loose in post-9/11 Manhattan. And when Rob discovers that Beth, who had left the party early, might still be alive, he decides to risk his life and head uptown to save her. He is joined on the dangerous journey by his brother, Jason (Mike Vogel); Jason’s girlfriend, Lily (Jessica Lucas); Lily’s friend Marlena (Lizzy Caplan); and Hud (T. J. Miller), who serves as the comic relief. The entire film is seen through the lens of a video camera that Hud was entrusted with at the party, giving the film the feel of The Blair Witch Project, mixed with such Gotham horror stories as King Kong, The Day After Tomorrow, and the ridiculous 1998 Godzilla remake. Cloverfield, which has an ever-widening back story growing online (similar to that of Lost, which is also the creation of J. J. Abrams), doesn’t try to be anything more than it is — a monster movie set in New York City. The creature is kept hidden for most of the film, which doesn’t make any grand statements about science, humanity, or, really, anything except true love — and brutal death. And yes, there is a secret message hidden in the brief sound clip at the end of the credits. Cloverfield, which was followed by the conceptual sequel 10 Cloverfield Lane, is screening on March 17 and 18 in the Nitehawk Cinema “Midnite Screenings” and “Large and in Charge” series; the latter continues weekends in March with Pacific Rim and the 1958 and 1988 versions of The Blob.
