KEEP ON KEEPIN' ON - LFF14 - Day Two

Oh man. I cried like a baby for pretty much the final half hour of this amazing documentary, but not for sadness but sheer joyfulness.  It was truly an honour and a pleasure to be in the presence of these two great men - men first and musicians second.   To see a young kid - Justin Kauflin - go blind in sixth grade and still say he wished something bad would happen to him so he could play the blues right.  And then this prodigious jazz piano talent tempered with stage fright.  He's taken under the wing of the legendary jazz trumpeter Clark Terry - a veritable history of jazz in one man.  "CT"  grew up playing with Count Basie and Duke Ellington, mentored Quincy Jones, earned the respect of Dizzie Gillespie and inspired everyone from Miles Davis to Winton Marsalis. And if being a jazz legend wasn't enough, he went beyond his own career to pretty much invent jazz education and tutor others - starting with "Q" and certainly not ending with Justin.

I came to this doc, maybe like many people, expecting a straight ahead summary of all that is great in Clark Terry's music: his dexterity and wit.  What I wasn't expecting was to leave the doc more impressed with CT the man, than CT the musician.  He's in his nineties now, struggling with complications from diabetes, but even on the eve of surgery, the tunes just come pouring out. And let's not forget the love. In a cynical, messed up world, to see his wife of decades, Gwen, keep strong for him - their love and devotion - and the halo of positivity that it brings to all who touch them - is really something else.  

I count myself as a fairly cynical person but I'm welling up right now just writing about this documentary.  Please don't be put off just because you're not a jazz fan - although of course it's greatest satisfaction will come to those people. It's a doc for all of us who need to be inspired and who are dealing with ageing parents and grandparents - or just ourselves. It teaches you about hard work, integrity and most of all joyfulness.  Thank god for it.

KEEP ON KEEPIN' ON has a running time of 84 minutes.

KEEP ON KEEPIN' ON played Newport, Seattle, Tribeca and London 2014.  It was released in the USA on October 3rd.

Sundance London 2012 - CHASING ICE

CHASING ICE may well be the most important movie since AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH.  And I say that as a self confessed greedy capitalist bastard and sceptic about all social activism, causes, and anti-corporate whining.

For me, AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH was a movie that raised awareness but also raised questions about the veracity of climate science. Was the climate really changing and if so, was human activity the cause?  And most importantly would changing human activity  reverse the damage or is it already too late?  What CHASING ICE does is, for the first time, give powerful, irrefutable, visual, easily understandable evidence that climate change is happening, and at a pace that is frightening.

Jeff Orlowski's documentary does this by basically shadowing a nature photographer called James Balog, in his worse time lapse photographic melting glaciers.  That all sounds much simpler than it really is. The doc (as penned by Mark Monroe -THE TILLMAN STORY) shows exactly what a labour of love it has been.  Balog and his team have had to hike up to some of the most inaccessible and hostile places on earth to install cameras to take the photographs - designed bespoke equipment to withstand the gruelling climate - and at no small cost to Balog's health.  It becomes clear that Balog didn't start out as a climate change evangelist. He was just a guy who took amazing photographs of nature, and somehow stumbled onto this story.  But once he found it he pursued it with a passion that seems at times reckless, and produced visuals that deserve to be seen by the widest possible audience.

CHASING ICE answers he question of whether climate change is happening. It is. Naysayers need to just get over it.  That said, CHASING ICE doesn't get to the part about whether governmental action to alter human behaviour would reverse the change.  That's fine: that's not Balog's job.  But it sure does throw down the gauntlet to the rest of us.

The run-time is 76 minutes.