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      Louis Armstrong’s Last Laugh

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      Private recordings, heard in the new documentary “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues,” add a further dimension to the artist.The tapes are thrilling, revelatory, wrenching: the warm-gravel voice of Louis Armstrong, perhaps the most famous voice of the 20th century, speaking harsh truths about American racism, about the dehumanizing hatred he and millions of others endured in a world he still, to the end, insisted was wonderful. He tells the stories — of a fan declaring “I don’t like Negroes” to his face; of a gofer on a film set treating him with disrespect no white star would face — with fresh outrage and can-you-believe-this? weariness.He also tells them with his full humor and showmanship, his musicality clear in the rhythm of his swearing.The public can hear these stories, privately recorded by Armstrong as part of his own lifelong project of self-documentation, in the Sacha Jenkins documentary “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues” (streaming on Apple TV+). Often, Armstrong recalls getting the last laugh on those who disrespected him — he harangues that gofer, and the studio, too, telling both where to stick their movie.It’s no revelation that a Black man born less than 40 years after the abolition of slavery endured harrowing racism, or that stardom on par with Bing Crosby’s and Frank Sinatra’s offered him no exemption. Armstrong faced blowback in 1957 for speaking against discrimination, and donated to the Civil Rights movement. Usually, though, he avoided controversy.By the 1960s, Armstrong’s reticence — as well as that wide-grinning, eye-rolling performance style that echoes minstrelsy — inspired backlash, most painfully among younger jazz musicians who revered his recordings of the 1920s, the very headwaters of jazz.That backlash has been exhaustively hashed over ever since, with critics often dividing the Armstrong legacy in two. On the one hand: the young genius-artist-virtuoso, who perfected the arts of swing, scat singing, and improvisational solos, hitting trumpet notes so high they tickled God’s toes. On the other: the global entertainer with hits in six decades and a penchant for sentimental pop and discomfiting tunes like “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South.”Well into this millennium, defenses of Armstrong’s later years have been, well, defensive. But Jenkins’s film, following the lead of Ricky Riccardi’s 2012 biography “What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years,” draws deeply on the Armstrong archives to make an assertive argument, often in Armstrong’s own words, that the man called Pops was deeply committed to the cause of racial justice.“The Armstrong story has been in plain sight for so many years — and been so misunderstood for many years,” Jenkins said in a Zoom interview. “America’s going through something. In many ways, things haven’t changed, and in many ways things have gone backward.”Armstrong at home. Apple TV+At the same time of the film’s release, the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Corona, Queens, is preparing for its 20th anniversary and the opening this spring of its new Louis Armstrong Center. The museum’s executive director, Regina Bain, said that the center will exponentially increase the museum’s educational outreach, a core mission with roots in Armstrong’s own development — he was given his first formal musical training as an adolescent at the Colored Waifs Home for Boys in New Orleans. The center also will host concerts, exhibit the Armstrong archives and showcase its Armstrong Now program, which puts artists in dialogue with Armstrong’s legacy.Bain acknowledged that legacy’s complexity. “When you look at him,” she said by phone, “you should see what most people see: an icon and a musical genius with a gorgeous smile and an effusive personality full of joy. And you should also see the racial terror that he and the people around him went through, and affected his life and body, and that he was still able to move through.”“It’s extremely important to tell your story in a way that doesn’t have any tainting or tampering,” said Jeremy Pelt, one of today’s top trumpeters, composers and bandleaders, in a phone interview. He’s published two books of interviews with Black jazz musicians (“Griot” volumes 1 and 2) for just this reason. “To be able to expose yourself, and deal with what you’ve gone through — it’s essential and freeing, even in the last chorus of your life.”For 23 years, David Ostwald has led the Louis Armstrong Eternity Band, playing weekly gigs at Birdland. Ostwald has long championed Armstrong as a pioneer of civil rights, making the case in a 1991 New York Times guest essay that Armstrong, as early as 1929, actually did address race in his music. His example: “Black & Blue,” the song on which Jenkins’s film title riffs. On it, Armstrong sings, “I’m white inside, but that don’t help my case / ’cause I can’t hide what is in my face.”Asked how he feels to see that argument going mainstream, Ostwald released a whoop. “Finally,” he said.“The Armstrong story has been in plain sight for so many years — and been so misunderstood for many years,” said the documentary’s director, Sacha Jenkins.Apple TV+Ostwald credited Wynton Marsalis with having made Armstrong “OK again” in the jazz world. In the film, Marsalis describes growing up hating “with an unbelievable passion” the “Uncle Tomming” that Armstrong has often been accused of. But listening closely to Armstrong’s trumpet jolted Marsalis, the future artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, who has since championed Armstrong. In the documentary, he says that Armstrong “was trying to use his music to transform and reform and lead the country closer to his ideals.”Armstrong’s musical legacy has likewise been contested. His solos, especially from the 1920s, have long been celebrated — in one of Pelt’s “Griot” interviews, the saxophonist J.D. Allen says that for jazz players, “all roads lead back to Pops.” But Ostwald recalled being regarded as “weird” for playing traditional and old-time jazz in New York in the 1970s and ’80s. “People were saying the music’s going to die, but I always felt that Armstrong was too powerful a force to ever go away, even if some people did misunderstand him.”Today, young musicians feel increasingly free to find inspiration throughout Armstrong’s career. Like most Juilliard jazz graduates, the up-and-coming trombonist, composer and bandleader Kalia Vandever studied Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Hot Sevens recordings of the 1920s. But she also prizes his 1950s duets with Ella Fitzgerald: “I love the way that he transitions from singing into playing,” she said. “It’s seamless and sounds like one voice.” Listen to Vandever’s playing on her “Regrowth” album, and you may feel the connection, though the music sounds nothing like “Heebie Jeebies.”With each fresh look at Armstrong’s life and influence, perhaps the old artist/entertainer distinction is fading. In a video introduction shown before the deeply moving tour at the Louis Armstrong House Museum, Bain offers, with welcome precision, a third way to think about Armstrong: as “one of the founding figures of jazz and America’s first Black popular music icon.” The message: He’s both. And both matter. More

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      ‘Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams’ Review: For the Heel of It

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      Luca Guadagnino’s documentary about the celebrated Italian shoe designer Salvatore Ferragamo reaches for romance and glamour, but falters during transitions.Arriving two weeks before the release of “Bones and All,” Luca Guadagnino’s tatterdemalion drifter romance, the director’s “Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams” surveys a more refined coupling, not of people, but of pumps.The documentary opens on an assembly line, where a suite of artisans methodically carve, sculpt and hammer out a pair of sequined vermilion stilettos. Before we even meet the film’s subject, the Italian designer Salvatore Ferragamo, this mesmerizing procedural overture suggests that Ferragamo viewed shoemaking as an art and a science. One wishes the tribute that follows were as nimble.Plodding through Ferragamo’s life, the documentary layers talking-head interviews with archival footage and photographs. Born in 1898 in the Italian village of Bonito, Ferragamo went on to apprentice in Naples before taking arduous passage to the United States. Following his ambition, or perhaps a premonition, he moved to Santa Barbara, where he found success designing custom footwear for movie stars. Throughout, Michael Stuhlbarg reads passages from Ferragamo’s writing in a velvety murmur. “I love feet,” he recites at one point. “They talk to me.”Guadagnino clearly intends for these themes of seduction, allure and glamour to envelop the audience, like silk fabric swathing an arched foot sole. Instead, the film falters, particularly during transitions, which tend to feel abrupt. If Guadagnino sought to reflect the romance of Ferragamo’s red carpet creations, his storytelling is at once more conventional and more awkward in construction. Forget feet; defter hands might have helped.Salvatore: Shoemaker of DreamsRated PG. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters. More

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      ‘Meet Me in the Bathroom’ Review: New York’s Last Rock Renaissance

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      The post-post punk New York rock scene gets an archival retrospective in this documentary.The post-post-punk rock scene in late ’90s and early aughts New York saw an unusual flurry of activity, with disparate acts exciting international attention of the sort that hadn’t visited the city since the early days of CBGB. Elizabeth Goodman’s 2017 oral history of “rebirth and rock and roll” is the basis for the documentary “Meet Me in the Bathroom,” directed by Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace.Downtown rock was never homogeneous in style, and the bands considered here are all over the map stylistically: there’s the very East Village scatological shagginess of Moldy Peaches, the minimalist grandiosity of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the hermetically psychedelicized TV on the Radio, and of course the poor little rich boys of the Strokes, whose best work melded Motorik-derived groove with Stonesy/Velvety attitude.There are revealing glimpses into the early work of artists who would morph into entities that were slicker and ostensibly cooler. For instance, Paul Banks, later to front the acclaimed Joy Division sound-alike Interpol, is first seen here bearing an acoustic guitar and a boyish earnestness.The film is entirely archival in its visual footage, much of it shot at the time by the photographer and videographer Nanci Sarrouf. The movie’s new interviews are audio only. As a result, the likes of Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, and the recently reconstituted Strokes, all working musicians still, are never seen as they are today.The most interesting narrative thread is that of Murphy, who arrived in New York as an odd man out with no clue about the dance music he would eventually master. It’s kind of jarring to learn that “Losing My Edge,” LCD’s breakout single, in which Murphy elaborates on the title condition, was born out of genuine desperation rather than ironic drollery.Meet Me in the BathroomNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Good Night Oppy’ Review: Life (Kind of) on Mars

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      NASA’s Opportunity and Spirit rovers didn’t shoot cinematic-quality footage of Mars, but this documentary offers the next-best thing.NASA’s Opportunity Rover landed on Mars in January 2004 and chugged along for more than 14 years before giving out. (In February 2019, NASA declared the mission over.) Opportunity’s anticipated time in service — a span that Steve Squyres, the principal investigator for the mission, is heard likening in “Good Night Oppy” to a warranty — was only around 90 days. Oppy, and to a lesser extent its sister rover, Spirit, which “died” several years earlier, was the robot geologist that refused to quit.Neither rover, alas, shot cinematic-quality footage of the red planet, but in this documentary from Ryan White (“Assassins,” on the killing of Kim Jong-nam), visual effects work from Industrial Light & Magic allows viewers to imagine they’re exploring craters and bedrock right alongside the androids. The orange- and copper-blasted images are convincing enough that moviegoers might be fooled, but the technique never plays like an unreasonable sleight of hand.Similarly, the way “Good Night Oppy” anthropomorphizes the robots might sound like pure Hollywood hokum. (The movie, unusually for a documentary, is graced by the imprimatur of Amblin Entertainment.) But White, through interviews and archival footage, makes clear that scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., couldn’t help but regard these bots as living things.Kobie Boykins, a mechanical engineer who was instrumental in building the rovers, recalls getting tingles at Opportunity’s first steps. Vandi Verma, who sometimes piloted the rovers from Earth, says that each one had its own personality. (Driving a Mars rover, we learn, does not offer the instant gratification of turning a steering wheel, because of the time it takes commands to reach Mars.) In keeping with a tradition observed by human astronauts, Opportunity and Spirit were given a blast of pop music to wake up in the morning.“Good Night Oppy” accelerates the decade-plus saga into a suspenseful series of close calls. We hear of how the scientists had to design the rovers in time to make the alignment of the planets; failing would mean being set back by more than two years. Solar flares damaged the rovers’ software en route. And once “Good Night Oppy” finds Opportunity and Spirit safely on opposite sides of Mars, the movie recounts one near-mishap after another, as the droids survive dust storms, lose contact with the humans, encounter steep drop-offs or get caught in sand. Some problems require scientists to play around in sandbox simulations on Earth.The pace is snappy enough that it’s easy to forget just how long many of these maneuvers took. Sometimes the rovers’ travels from one destination to another lasted years, and it’s hard not to gasp as title cards tick off the passage of time. And while descriptions of the aging robots as experiencing arthritis and memory loss are perhaps too cute, by the end of “Good Night Oppy,” Opportunity and Spirit have become no less lovable as characters than R2-D2 or Wall-E. It’s tough not to feel for their loss.Good Night OppyRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me’ Review: An Honest Portrait of Stardom

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      Sincere and soul-baring, the documentary, directed by Alek Keshishian, captures Gomez’s challenges with mental illness, lupus and fame.“My Mind & Me,” a new documentary about Selena Gomez, doesn’t feel like a publicity device. Sincere and soul-baring, the film captures Gomez’s challenges with mental illness, lupus and fame. Watching it is like eavesdropping on a 95-minute therapy session with the artist.It opens with Gomez out of sorts. “I have to stop living like this,” she says, as we jump from 2019 back to 2016. Backstage at one of her concerts, she cries, yearning to shed her child-star image and stand on her own as a solo artist. She fears she’s a disappointment.The documentary doesn’t show her forgetting her past as much as confronting it. A road trip to Grand Prairie, Texas, where she reunites with old neighbors and visits her childhood home, is a turning point for Gomez. In contrast is a scene where she’s answering interviewers whose flippant questions leave her feeling, she says, like “a product.” She craves genuine connection, something fame hasn’t yet afforded her.As a subject, Gomez is in the trustworthy hands of the veteran director Alek Keshishian. In 1991, he worked the same kind of magic on Madonna for “Truth or Dare.” Capturing an artist’s fearlessness, as he does in both films, isn’t just up to him, of course; like Madonna, Gomez is boldly unguarded. But “My Mind & Me” also looks outward, framing struggle as the human condition. An honest portrait study of stardom and mental illness, the film offers a hopeful catharsis: How, when we reveal our hardest truths, we can heal together.Selena Gomez: My Mind and MeRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+. More

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      ‘God Forbid’ Review: An Affair With Political Implications

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      The Hulu documentary covers a high-profile affair involving a pool attendant and the prominent evangelical couple Becki Falwell and Jerry Falwell Jr.“God Forbid: The Sex Scandal That Brought Down a Dynasty,” a Hulu documentary from the director Billy Corben, concerns a sensational, high-profile affair between Giancarlo Granda, a pool attendant at a luxury hotel in Miami Beach, Fla., and Becki Falwell, the wife of the prominent Republican evangelist Jerry Falwell Jr. — whom Granda claims participated in these relations as a silent voyeur. At the time, Falwell Jr. was the president and chancellor of one of the nation’s largest Christian colleges, Liberty University, and one of the best known evangelical supporters of former President Donald J. Trump.The film describes, in graphic and sometimes vulgar detail, a seven-year sexual relationship that had surprising political ramifications involving the attorney Michael Cohen, the actor Tom Arnold, and President Trump, each of whom, as the film illustrates, became tangentially embroiled in the ensuing drama and fallout.“God Forbid” tries to rationalize its often lurid account of these events, emphasizing the Falwells’ hypocrisy and castigating them as “predators” who showed patterns of abuse — the charming husband and beloved wife are “not the good Christians they present themselves to be,” one observer concludes righteously.But while Falwell Jr. may indeed be a charlatan, ridiculing his sexual predilections seems like a pretty dubious way to prove it. (We’re meant to savor the irony that, as Granda says, Falwell is “trying to appear as the strongman” when he is in fact “the cuck in the corner of the room.”) I’m not sure what’s gained from scrutinizing so many of Becki Falwell’s candid texts and voice messages, other than making her seem foolish.The film combines archival materials, original interviews and various text messages and video and audio recordings pertaining to the case. Its smoking gun is a recording of a late-night video call in which Becki is shown drinking wine and stripping naked, reminiscing with Granda about their past dalliances. I found it incredibly depressing. What, exactly, I had to wonder, is being documented here, and what, exactly, am I meant to conclude?God ForbidNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues’ Review: In His Own Words

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      Personal tapes and letters bring fresh insights into the jazz great as a musician and a Black man.In Louis Armstrong’s study in the Queens home he shared with his fourth wife, Lucille, bookshelves were filled with reel-to-reel recordings he made as a sort of audio diary. Those tapes and his letters — read by the rapper Nas — lay the foundation for the director Sacha Jenkins’s documentary “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues.”By foregrounding the gravel, grace and salty frankness of Armstrong’s voice, and mining an archival mother lode of audio and video interviews and clips, Jenkins delivers a bountiful portrait of one of the 20th century’s superstars — on Armstrong’s own terms.As welcome as this is, the documentary’s most affecting attribute may be a reckoning by several Black male artists with what Armstrong means to them. After all, his broad smile, his cameo roles in Hollywood films, his seeming muteness on racial issues had some critics, many of them younger, discounting him for his complicity, his “Uncle Tomming,” as fellow New Orleanian Wynton Marsalis put it early in the film, confessing to how he once felt about Armstrong. With the aid of Marsalis, Miles Davis, the poet Amiri Baraka (via audio clips) and the actor Ossie Davis, Jenkins recontextualizes the man.In a tribute from the “With Ossie & Ruby” television show, Davis shares an epiphany he had when he and Armstrong were on set for ‌the 1966 movie “A Man Called Adam.” During a break, he happened on Armstrong lost in a moment of somber repose, one that quickly gave way to his trademark grin. In that swing, Davis discovered a new kinship: “What I saw in that look shook me. It was my father, my uncle, myself down through the generations.”There is no paucity of expert witnesses who never had doubts about Armstrong’s depth, starting with Lucille Armstrong (whose story about their first house is a keeper). They also include the jazz historian Dan Morgenstern, who wrote the introduction to the centennial edition of Armstrong’s memoir “Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans,” and the composer Leonard Bernstein, who describes the melodies Armstrong plied as “looking for a lost note.” The poetry in that phrase seems to underscore Armstrong’s lineage as a descendant of the African Diaspora.Among the film’s ample pleasures is the only known footage of Armstrong in the recording studio. His head tilted back while scatting, he holds a handkerchief to mop his forehead. The film is a trove of Armstrong’s love of music and his labor. And because so many of those who lend their insights are now departed, it has the feel of a mausoleum worthy of a humble yet celebratory “Saints Go Marching In” second line.Louis Armstrong’s Black & BluesRated R for Satchmo’s salty language. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters and available on Apple TV+. More

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      Lenny Lipton, ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ Lyricist and 3-D Film Pioneer, 82, Dies

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      He used the royalties earned from the hit folk song, based on a poem he wrote in college, to fund decades of research into stereoscopic projection.Lenny Lipton, who as a college freshman wrote the lyrics to the classic folk tune “Puff the Magic Dragon,” and then used the song’s bountiful royalties to fund years of pioneering research in 3-D filmmaking, died on Oct. 5 in Los Angeles. He was 82.His wife, Julia Lipton, said the cause was brain cancer.Few people leave much of a mark on popular culture; Mr. Lipton was among the few who got to leave two, and in such wildly divergent corners as folk music and cinema technology.He was a 19-year-old student at Cornell when he sat down at the typewriter of his friend and fellow physics major Peter Yarrow. He had just read a 1936 poem by Ogden Nash titled “The Tale of Custard the Dragon” and felt inspired to write his own.Some time later, Mr. Yarrow found the poem, still in his typewriter, and felt a similar inspiration. He put the poem to music, and in 1963 he and his folk trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, released it as “Puff the Magic Dragon.” It begins: “Puff the magic dragon lived by the sea / And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee.”Mr. Yarrow tracked down Mr. Lipton, who was working as a journalist in Manhattan, and gave him credit as a co-writer. (As Mr. Lipton told reporters repeatedly, despite persistent rumors, “Puff” had nothing to do with marijuana.)The song was such an immediate and lasting hit — Mr. Lipton called it his “MacArthur ‘genius’ grant” — that it allowed him to leave his job and move to California. In the Bay Area, he fell in with a circle of independent filmmakers and made several short films of his own.He received even more royalty income from his book “Independent Filmmaking” (1972), which became a niche but durable success, giving him enough of a financial cushion to explore yet another abiding interest: stereoscopy, the technical name for 3-D technology.Mr. Lipton had fallen for it as a boy in early 1950s Brooklyn when the first wave of 3-D films arrived in theaters. He saw them all: “House of Wax,” “Bwana Devil,” “The Maze.” And while the craze passed — the technology was crude, the projectors were hard to synchronize, the cheap eyeglasses that had to be worn to see images in 3-D were clunky — his belief that 3-D was the future of film did not, and in California he began tinkering with ideas to make that belief a reality.“‘Puff’ gave me a lot of freedom,” he said in a 2021 interview with Moving Images, a YouTube channel. “I didn’t have to get a job. I spent years in my little lab in Point Richmond developing my stereoscopic inventions.”Mr. Lipton accumulated some 70 patents related to 3-D technology, among them a screen that switches rapidly between left- and right-eye images, and a companion pair of eyeglasses fitted with shutters that open and close in sync with the screen.He developed that technology, which he called CrystalEyes, in the early 1980s. It soon found applications far beyond the movie theater: Versions were used by the military for aerial mapping, by scientists for molecular modeling, and by NASA for driving Mars rovers.CrystalEyes equipment developed by Mr. Lipton. He had some 70 patents related to 3-D technology.CrystalEyes and other advances devised by Mr. Lipton seeded the emergence of a new generation of stereoscopic filmmaking, used in 3-D versions of movies like “Avatar,” “Chicken Little” and “Coraline.” Today, some 30,000 movie screens across the United States use 3-D techniques that evolved from his innovations.Mr. Lipton “changed the paradigm of the audience’s experience in cinema culture entirely,” Sujin Kim, assistant professor of 3-D animation at Arizona State University, said in an email.Leonard Lipschitz was born on May 18, 1940, in Brooklyn. His father, Samuel, owned a soda shop and died when Leonard was 12. His mother, Carrie (Hibel), a teletype operator, later changed their surname to Lipton.His mother inspired his love for film by taking him to some of Brooklyn’s many grand old movie palaces, like the Ambassador and the Paramount, while his father inspired his love for filmmaking by bringing home a toy film projector. Leonard soon assembled his own, using aluminum foil, a toilet-paper roll and a magnifying glass.He entered Cornell intending to study electrical engineering but quickly switched to physics, where he felt more freedom to experiment.After graduating in 1962, he got a job at Time magazine in New York, then became an editor at Popular Photography. After work he would head to a small theater in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan, where he and some friends presented the latest movies to emerge from the city’s underground film scene.He did much the same in California, though without the need for a day job. He wrote a weekly film column for The Berkeley Barb, an alternative newspaper, and made several short documentaries shot on 16 mm film, including “Let a Thousand Parks Bloom,” about the clashes surrounding People’s Park in Berkeley, and “Children of the Golden West,” a rambling, touching portrait of his countercultural friends.In addition to “Independent Filmmaking,” Mr. Lipton wrote several other books, among them “The Super 8 Book” (1975), “Lipton on Filmmaking” (1979) and, in 2021, “Cinema in Flux: The Evolution of Motion Picture Technology from the Magic Lantern to the Digital Era,” an 800-page opus on the history of movie making.Along with his wife, he is survived by his children, Noah, Jonah and Anna. He lived in Los Angeles and died in a hospital there.Mr. Lipton had an idealistic certainty about the coming dominance of 3-D films, but he was also critical of the way Hollywood had limited its use to cartoons and action movies.“I had hoped that stereoscopic cinema would be about actors and acting and involve people in stories about the human condition, but that’s not what happened,” he told Moving Images. “What happened is, it’s a cinema of spectacle.”Still, he held out hope for something different around the corner.“As soon as someone has success, financial success, a stereoscopic documentary or a stereoscopic buddy comedy, then the studios will copy it,” he said. More