The life and career of Sophie Tucker, seen here with longtime pianist Ted Shapiro, is celebrated in new documentary
THE OUTRAGEOUS SOPHIE TUCKER (William Gazecki, 2015)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, July 24
212-924-3363
www.cinemavillage.com
www.sophietucker.com
It’s about time the story of Sophie Tucker gets told. Unfortunately, William Gazecki’s The Outrageous Sophie Tucker is not quite the telling we’ve been waiting for. “She is the most underrated jazz singer that ever lived,” Tony Bennett says in the documentary about the bigger-than-life Tucker. “She was a great jazz singer.” Born Sonya Kalish on Christmas Day in 1886, Tucker was determined to become a star, and she ended up leaving her mark in vaudeville, on radio and television, and in films as an actress, singer, and comedian. But mostly, the woman known affectionately as “the Last of the Red Hot Mamas,” was a major mensch, cavorting with presidents and fans, keeping track of almost everyone she ever met, doing her own promotion, and living life exactly as she wanted to. The Jewish, bisexual Tucker hobnobbed with world leaders, Al Capone, Ed Sullivan, and J. Edgar Hoover (who once asked her for one of her dresses), among many others, and saw her name in lights on theater marquees across the country. However, although the film features some wonderful archival audio and visual footage and photographs of Tucker — singing such songs as “My Yiddishe Momme,” “Some of These Days,” and “Nobody Loves a Fat Girl” and appearing in the films Broadway Melody of 1938 and Gay Love — it never really gets to the heart of who she was; instead, it’s more about producers Susan and Lloyd Ecker, who, after cashing out of a successful internet company, became obsessed with Tucker, meticulously cataloging her more than four hundred scrapbooks and beginning a biographical trilogy with I Am Sophie Tucker: A Fictional Memoir.
The Oscar-nominated Gazecki (WACO: The Rules of Engagement, Reckless Indifference) includes interviews with Bennett, Carol Channing, Michael Feinstein, Shecky Greene, Bruce Vilanch, and Barbara Walters (whose father hired Tucker to regularly play his Latin Quarter nightclub), and there are brief remembrances over the closing credits from Chubby Checker, Joe Franklin, Paul Anka, Connie Stevens, and lesser-known names, but everything else is seen through the eyes of the Eckers, making it feel more like a vanity project / overly personal labor of love than a comprehensive look at the great Tucker. And there’s just not enough film footage of Tucker in action; to make up for some of that lack, Gazecki uses animation to bring some of the photos to life, which is even sillier than it sounds. It’s still a blast learning about Tucker, watching her joke around with Jimmy Durante and her longtime pianist Ted Shapiro, following her unhappy relationship with her son, but this documentary barely brushes the surface of what appears to be a much bigger, far more exciting and fascinating story. The Outrageous Sophie Tucker opens July 24 at Cinema Village and will also have a three-day engagement at the JCC in Manhattan July 27-29 as part of the Cinematters series, with all four screenings followed by a Q&A with the film’s producers.
Writer-director Noah Buschel’s Glass Chin is a gentle, understated boxing movie, an indie sleeper that eschews brutal uppercuts, damaging overhand rights, and heavy knockout blows in favor of steady jabs and clever bobbing and weaving that slowly build in effectiveness. Unlike most fight flicks, there’s not a whole lot of shouting and braggadocio, blood and guts, and melodramatic relationships, no montages set to classic rock songs or slow-motion fight scenes. Instead, Glass Chin is a quiet, deeply contemplative character study of a conflicted man who finds himself at a crossroads. Corey Stoll is sensational as Bud “the Saint” Gordon, a former boxing champ trying to make a life for himself outside the ring. Living in New Jersey with his devoted girlfriend, Ellen (Marin Ireland), he is offered two opportunities, one helping Lou Powell (John Douglas Thompson) train Kid Sunshine (Malcolm Xavier) for an upcoming championship bout at Madison Square Garden, the other working for JJ Cook (Billy Crudup), a crooked restaurateur and loan shark who sends Bud out with Roberto (Yul Vazquez) to collect money from deadbeats, luring the ex-boxer by promising to back Bud’s dream of owning a restaurant in Manhattan. Bud bounces between training at the gym and accompanying Roberto on visits to such clients as Stanley (David Johansen) and Colby (Michael Chermus), who owe JJ big bucks and are going to have to pay for it if they don’t pony up the money. Bud knows he’s getting in too deep, and soon he finds himself in a tough situation that sends his world into a dangerous tailspin.
The never-ending battle between Israel and the Palestinians is reduced to a single incident attempting to be a microcosm of the conflict in the relatively silly and uneven documentary The Wanted 18. In 1988, shortly after the first Intifada began, an Israeli kibbutz sold eighteen cows to the Palestinian town of Beit Sahour. As the small, tight-knit community rallied around the cows, seeing them as a crucial part to their goal of freedom and independence, the Israelis grew suspicious of the Palestinians’ growing self-sufficiency and declared the cows “a threat to the national security of the state of Israel.” Codirectors Amer Shomali, whose family came from Beit Sahour, and Canadian Paul Cowan (Going the Distance, Westray) tell the story of the fight over the cows through contemporary interviews, drawings, reenactments, archival footage, and stop-motion animation in which four of the cows share their thoughts on the matter: Rivka (voiced by Holly Uloth “O’Brien”), Ruth (Heidi Foss), Lola (casting director Rosann Nerenberg), and Goldie (Alison Darcy). The heavily one-sided tale delves into such issues as taxation, bigotry, boycotts, curfews, and civil disobedience, as people from Beit Sahour give first-person accounts of what happened, along with Ehud Zrahiya, who at the time was advisor to the Israeli military governor on Arab affairs. “We were concerned that Beit Sahour may become a model for other places,” Zrahiya admits. “We were certainly concerned that this might infect other places and would spread to other localities throughout the West Bank.”
Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida is one of the most gorgeously photographed, beautifully told films of the young century. The international festival favorite and shortlisted Foreign Language Oscar contender is set in Poland in 1962, as eighteen-year-old novitiate Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) is preparing to become a nun and dedicate her life to Christ. But the Mother Superior (Halina Skoczyńska) tells Anna, an orphan who was raised in the convent, that she actually has a living relative, an aunt whom she should visit before taking her vows. So Anna sets off by herself to see her aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza), a drinking, smoking, sexually promiscuous, and deeply bitter woman who explains to Ida that her real name is Ida Lebenstein and that she is in fact Jewish — and then reveals what happened to her family. Soon Ida, Wanda, and hitchhiking jazz saxophonist Dawid Ogrodnik are on their way to discovering some unsettling truths about the past.