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      ‘Mr. Bachmann and His Class’ Review: Learning From the Best

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      Maria Speth’s enthralling documentary spends a year in the classroom of an unconventional teacher in a German industrial town.The students in Dieter Bachmann’s class are sometimes bored. They’re in the sixth grade, so this is to be expected, though there’s a decent chance that these particular adolescents, observed by the filmmaker Maria Speth over the course of the 2016-17 academic year, are less bored than most of their peers, thanks to their energetic and unconventional teacher.What is certain is that, even at more than three and a half hours, the fly-on-the-wall documentary Speth has culled from her time in the classroom is the opposite of tedious.By virtue of its length, the elegance of its editing and the warmth of its curiosity, “Mr. Bachmann” and his class might remind you of a Frederick Wiseman film. The comparison only goes so far. Wiseman tends to be interested in how collective and impersonal structures — neighborhoods, organizations, institutions — illuminate individual personalities and relationships. Speth’s attention moves in the opposite direction.Her film starts with the teacher, whose patience and charisma draws out the children and magnetizes the viewer. Gradually, a group portrait emerges that is also a remarkably detailed and complex picture of a town and a nation. And more than that: an intimate, humanist epic.The town is Stadtallendorf, Germany, about an hour north of Frankfurt. A rural village for most of its history, it was industrialized by the Nazis, who built armaments plants and forced-labor camps. After World War II, “guest workers,” mostly from Turkey, were recruited for metalworks and other factories. (You’ll learn these facts and more on field trips and during class discussions.)Bachmann’s pupils are mostly the children of immigrants — from Bulgaria, Morocco and Azerbaijan, among other countries. Their proficiency in German varies, as do their academic prospects. Part of Bachmann’s job is to decide which secondary-school track is right for each student, a task he undertakes with clarity, compassion and some reluctance.A former sculptor and sociology student now in his 60s, usually dressed in a knit cap and a hooded sweatshirt, Bachmann is aware of the tension between his countercultural impulses and his bureaucratic duties. He administers tests and hands out grades, but also keeps musical instruments and art supplies on hand for jam sessions and creative projects. Even though his anarchist streak is partly what makes him a benevolent authority figure, you wouldn’t say he’s soft or lenient with his students. Instead, he’s honest with them, treating them not as friends or peers but as people whose entitlement to dignity and respect is absolute.They test and tease him and can be inconsiderate or cruel with one another. They’re kids, after all. A handful come into special focus, nearly upstaging their teacher and contributing to the emotional richness of the film. We don’t learn much about their lives outside of school (or about Bachmann’s), but each one is a universe of feeling and possibility, vivid and vulnerable.And lucky to have crossed paths with Bachmann. The film ends with his retirement after 17 years of teaching, a bittersweet moment that Speth observes with tact and understatement. This isn’t a heroic-teacher drama about idealism in the face of adversity. It’s an acknowledgment of the hard work of learning, and the magic of simple decency.Mr. Bachmann and His ClassNot rated. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 3 hours 37 minutes. Watch on Mubi. More

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      ‘The Automat’ Review: Put a Nickel in the Slot for Nostalgia

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      A documentary about Horn & Hardart’s automated cafeterias is sweet and shaggy, but an engrossing tale of cultural harmony.Whatever nostalgia is — homesickness, fantasy, delusion — it’s flooding “The Automat.” There’s something about people’s memories of these automated cafeterias that flourished in the United States for much of the 20th century — you put a nickel into a slot, open a door in an enormous wall of cabinets and pull out, say, a slice of pie or a ham sandwich — that sends them back to the era in which they frequented one. The documentary Lisa Hurwitz has directed about Automats is shaggy and full of cutesy stuff, mostly involving Mel Brooks. But the sight of all these lit-up faces — see Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Carl Reiner, Colin Powell — made me hunger to be back where they wish they were: at 5, at 17, at 20-something, plunked down at a table with a bowl of baked beans.The movie unfurls the history of Horn & Hardart, the Manhattan-and-Philadelphia-based chain of restaurants the Automat was synonymous with. It’s an engrossing tale of commercial expansion, industrial innovation and cultural harmony even in times, like the Civil Rights era, when that kind of unison seems tough to fathom. Hurwitz finds biological descendants of Hardart and professional heirs of Horn. She locates John Romas, an Austrian immigrant who was the company’s vice president of engineering. There are conversations with the authors of a Horn & Hardart book, a moving visit to one of the designers of a powerfully witty 1970s ad campaign and a sit-down with W. Wilson Goode, Philadelphia’s first Black mayor, who served during a notoriously cataclysmic period. And the worst that anybody has to say about anything is that the Automat is gone.Hurwitz and her editors, Michael Levine and Russell Greene, have the interviews, archival footage and bright, soaring, relentless music to plunge us, accordingly, into states of delight and visceral lament. I, at least, am astounded that a movie this chipper, one so easily distracted by its boldface names (Hurwitz includes footage of Brooks essentially telling her how to make the movie), also feels like the key to some lock on the American soul. Just about every source says that what they loved about the Automat was that everyone was welcome. So as the millionth exterior shot and umpteenth photo of those towering cabinets hit me, I got sad, too: why oh why did it all have to end? The answer is typical: the interstate, suburbanization, mismanagement, classism, snobbery, inflation. All of which this movie does more than allude to.And yet — and this, for me, is a heavy yet — it feels as if the movie is skirting something. I get it: Hurwitz wins time with at least four American VIPs, three of whom are no longer with us, and the fourth, Brooks, remains so bewitched by the Automat that he writes a theme song and performs it with real Jimmy Durante bark. Romas, we learn, has also died. And each luminary’s enchantment appears to have inhibited an urge to commit more rigorous probing. (This is a feel-good movie!)I just wonder whether it could have felt better to know more precisely how Horn & Hardart managed a racially integrated clientele when its competition couldn’t have cared less for that sort of thing. When Ginsburg and others enthuse that everybody was welcome, they mean matrons and stenographers, executives, artists and “bums,” to quote Brooks; a panorama of metropolitanism commingling over coffee and Salisbury steak. But the montage of images that accompanies Ginsburg’s assessment includes one photo of an Asian family and another of a blurry Asian man sharing a table with a white diner. The movie has photos of other nonwhite diners; they just don’t appear in this “everybody was welcome” section.The doors did appear to be open to all. Goode offers that Horn & Hardart was “a nice place where African Americans could go and feel dignified.” Powell more or less backs him up, only to have Hurwitz interrupt not with a follow-up question but to move and make an unseemly adjustment of his necktie. (He doesn’t seem amused.) On one of our regular phone calls right before she died in 2020, when she was about 90, my grandmother Martha Ann James, a lifelong Philadelphian (and dignified African American) who is very much not in this movie, rhapsodized for 20 minutes about Horn & Hardart: the coffee, the classy downtown building, the meatloaf, the affordable prices, the magnitude of welcome. (This from a woman who maintained quite a catalog of unwelcome.)So — this is not to dispute the film’s gloss on the belonging one could experience at the Automat. It’s merely to say that it is indeed a gloss. Powell remembers that part of the magic of the dining experience was the magic of the automation itself. As a boy, he knew that someone was behind that wall of food lockers — cooks, maintenance men, servers of a sort. But Hurwitz is content to let the mystery be.If anything, “The Automat” seeks to burnish the mystique — it won’t be hijacked by social politics even if the company’s stance in such matters appeared to be the right one. The movie opts for a starry, top-down vantage. We hear about the chiefs and their business decisions and, save for the late appearance of the actor and former busboy Apache Ramos, very little from or about the people behind the lockers, or even regular people who remember eating there. What we learn about the bosses is illustrative, of course. So is Hurwitz’s approach.Her determination to embody nostalgia succeeds all too well. As the film unspools Horn & Hardart’s demise, something telling happens. A person close to the company identifies a shift away from a kind of civic benevolence in its management style after its president, Edwin Daly, died in 1960. A minute later, the movie turns to Howard D. Schultz, the Starbucks founder and executive, who recalls that his first Automat experience is what made him want to be a merchant. The Horn & Hardart ethos infuses Starbucks’s, he says, beaming. You can see what he means. He then holds up a framed photograph of Automat cabinets that hangs in his office, a handsome people-free image of imprisoned pies. He, too, mentions that the place was run by magic. It’s a shame we don’t hear more about the less fancy magicians. The closest we get are rapturous accounts of the women who changed dollars into nickels without ever looking at the coins. With minutes left, Brooks goes gaga at the thought of the Automat’s coconut custard. “God made that,” he says. In this movie, He might as well have.The AutomatNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 19 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Automat,’ Where Dining Out Was D.I.Y.

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      The director Lisa Hurwitz discusses the history of the Horn & Hardart chain of restaurants, which offered comfort food in coin-operated glass boxes.What do Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Colin Powell, Elliott Gould, Carl Reiner and the former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz have in common? They all fondly recall eating at an Automat — that beloved institution of D.I.Y. dining that lasted from 1902 to 1991 in New York and Philadelphia. Lisa Hurwitz’s detailed documentary, “The Automat” (in theaters), toasts Horn & Hardart’s storied chain of restaurants, where comfort-food dishes perched in coin-operated glass boxes lining the walls. Sort of like a mailroom, but with delicious pie and soup instead of bills.The bustling Automats merged marble-and-brass style and a come-one-come-all philosophy. Horn & Hardart’s last Automat (on 42nd Street and Third Avenue) closed in 1991, after a decline hastened by fast food joints, real estate trends and changing habits. The film, Hurwitz’s debut feature, teems with historical detail and varied interviews (including all of the above fans plus Mel Brooks, in a movie-length swoon).I spoke with Hurwitz about her self-distributed film, which was nearly 10 years in the making. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.Why does the Automat hold a special place in many people’s hearts? Do you have any personal connection?Zilch. I grew up in Los Angeles, my mom is from the Midwest, my dad is from L.A. When our families emigrated to America, we did not settle in New York. So I became interested from stumbling upon it in the library. Eventually I made a short film in a nonfiction media class, a profile about Steve Stollman, the Automat collector. I didn’t really start hearing people’s personal stories until I started making the [feature] film and talking to people in New York and Pennsylvania.For people who are younger and remember going to the Automat one or two times, it was this incredible experience, going as a kid. For a lot of kids, that was the first time they got to choose what they wanted. Their parents would give them coins, and they could do what they wish. But for older people, I think the nostalgia is connected to the loved ones they went there with, people who are no longer with them. They think about their grandparents, their parents. It was like a second home.Lisa Hurwitz, the director of “The Automat.”Lucien Knuteson/Film ForumThe superfan Mel Brooks sings a tribute to the Automat, with a 26-piece orchestra. How did that come about?When I was directing this film festival in Olympia, Washington, we had a 3-D 35-millimeter presentation of “Jaws 3-D.” We had one of the screenwriters, Carl Gottlieb, who is part of that Mel Brooks circle. Carl and I became Facebook friends after his visit in Olympia, so he saw my Kickstarter campaign pop up in his newsfeed. He sent me a message saying, “I’m having dinner with Mel Brooks tonight. Do you mind if I mention your project?” He used his Mel Brooks card for me! I was really appreciative.Mel took a liking to me and the project, and he asked what else he could do to help. I asked him if he would sing a song. I would have it written for him, so all he had to do was go to the recording studio and perform it. He said, yeah, sure, and maybe even you and me, we can write something together, think up some ideas. A few weeks later he called me back and said, you know, Lisa, I’ve been doing some writing, and I got something. “Listen to this!” He starts singing to me on the phone, and it’s the beginnings of the song. Then a few weeks later, he’s got more. So he wrote the whole song. It’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me! Mel thinks I’m nutty in the nicest way possible, but he believes in the project. And I wanted the music to match the era. I wanted it to feel like an old Hollywood movie.Does the Automat represent an American ideal in some ways, with its democratic approach?It really does. And it’s a window onto America over 100 years. It was such an important place for immigrants. As people came into New York, the Automat became part of their American story. It played a role in the Americanization process, because it was an incredible environment: it had incredible food, it was cheap, you didn’t need to speak English, you could stay there a while. You could get freebie fare like ketchup soup, lemonade, water. And a place to stay warm. I think the Automat represents people coming together in the literal and metaphorical senses.What surprised you most in learning about the Automat?The big moment was when I found out about Howard Schultz. The creator of what has become the new Automat — ugh, I know people will hate me for saying that. But the way you see a Starbucks on every other block, that’s the way it was with Automats in New York! So to hear from Howard about how he’s never stopped thinking about the Automat when he’s thinking about how to grow Starbucks, I’m just drooling at this point. He could be serving shoes on a plate for all I care, but the point is that one of the most successful food entrepreneurs in the world is saying that. And it was easy to go about getting connected to him because at the time I lived in Seattle, which is kind of like a small Jewish town.If I had to choose one thing that the Automat was about, it’s about people sitting together and taking their time. It’s not only Starbucks — there’s a gazillion cafes out there. I just think it’s really healthy for society, for people, for us to be stuck with each other and to share a table with one another.What would you get if you could go to an Automat now?Macaroni and cheese, creamed spinach, mashed potatoes. I would try all the pies. And I would for sure need to try that coconut custard pie that Mel and Carl were both talking about! More

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      Kanye West Always Wanted You to Watch

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      The three-part Netflix documentary “Jeen-yuhs” shows the superstar in his earliest days, then time warps to the present, with disorienting results.No one could quite understand why the young producer was being followed by a cameraman. Almost everywhere Kanye West went beginning in the early 2000s — before “Through the Wire,” before “The College Dropout,” before anything, really — he was trailed by Clarence Simmons, known as Coodie, a comedian and public-access TV host from Chicago who had decided to document West’s attempts to become a successful musician.In “Jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy,” the three-part Netflix documentary that draws heavily on that footage, the camera serves two functions: It captures West at a vulnerable moment in his nascent career, when the future was anything but guaranteed. And it is also a kind of marker of success on its own. The camera’s presence forces the people West encounters to treat him just a tad more seriously, or at least to wonder if they should. In almost every encounter captured, there is a slight hiccup at the beginning, in which the other person wonders, what exactly are we doing here?West, one of the defining figures of the last 20 years, has been a consistent innovator in music and style. But he has also long had a preternatural grasp of the mechanisms of celebrity, how success is only truly impactful if it is imprinted onto others. West believed in himself, but wouldn’t stop until he’d convinced those around him, too.“Jeen-yuhs” is something like the demo tape of that phenomenon. It is both fascinating and obvious, eerie in the way that it foretells who West eventually would become by showing who he always has been.West, as we understand him now, is in early bloom during the first two of the docuseries’s three parts. Driving down lower Broadway in Manhattan, he tells a journalist sitting in the back seat how he feels when others tell him he’s thriving: “I might be living your American dream but I’m nowhere near where my dream is, dog. I got aspirations.” At one point, he says, “I’m trying to get to the point where I can drop the last name off my name.” (Indeed, he is now known solely as Ye.)Granting Simmons access was a combination of marketing savvy and also deep ego — “A little narcissistic or whatever,” West says. Nowadays, most pop superstars (and nowhere-near stars) are documented constantly for social media, but West understood the value of that labor early.The result is a prehistory of one of the most transfixing and agonizing celebrities of the 21st century. The footage could explain to aliens what creativity on Earth looks like. We see West recovering from his 2002 car crash, going through several dental procedures, and then getting back to work and emerging with “Through the Wire,” his debut single, which would finally catapult him toward the stratosphere. The camera captures a vivid, undimmable mind at constant, stubborn work.He asks to save the wires that held his jaw together, still bloody, for his mother, Donda. She appears throughout the film, often as a corrective force; even as West becomes more famous, he is never something other than his mother’s son. She doesn’t flinch from the lens, perhaps because the camera’s eye and that of a loving, knowing parent aren’t all that different.West also encourages the new people he meets to live out their relationship to him on camera. When he plays Pharrell Williams “Through the Wire,” Williams becomes a willing actor, walking out of the room and down the hall, overcome with thrill. After a recording session with Jay-Z in which West talks his way onto a song, Simmons prompts Jay-Z for a quote, asking him to literalize his co-sign of West for the camera.Not everyone plays along with West’s schemes. It’s odd to watch Scarface, one of rap music’s great philosophers, effectively pass on “Jesus Walks,” maybe the most meaningful and popular spiritual hip-hop song of all time. He also chides West for leaving his orthodontic retainers out on the countertop, a light spank from elder to child. (The retainers appear on several occasions, a symbolic embodiment of West’s still unformed persona.)There is, perhaps surprisingly, ample footage like this — this was an era in which West was almost always the less successful person in any interaction. Note the hangdog way in which he skulks out of the Roc-A-Fella Records office after going door to door and playing music for various executives, who seem to regard him as a lovable nuisance. Given how West moves through the world now, it’s disorienting to see him, time and again, as a supplicant.This is footage that most hagiographers would omit, but Simmons and his directing partner Chike Ozah — professionally, they’re known as Coodie & Chike — understand their subject differently. Simmons was inspired, he says in the film, by the Chicago basketball documentary “Hoop Dreams,” a film that cuts its melancholy with bolts of hope.And much about West in the early 2000s, before Roc-A-Fella Records relented and signed him as a recording artist (rather than just a producer), is lightly tragic. When West is at an industry event with far more famous people, in search of a little validation, Simmons films him from a distance, emphasizing his relative smallness. But even this footage doesn’t feel directed so much as captured, tiny moments that in the rear view appear huge.Cameras are not neutral — they change their subject. But while everyone lies for the camera, some people live in the camera. Throughout the film, West often appears most mindful of how history might regard him, driven by a sense that in a room full of people, the most important connection he could make was with Simmons’s lens. (See the scene in which he and Mos Def rap “Two Words,” and West appears to be staring through the camera’s aperture somewhere into the future.)Simmons offers largely space-filling voice-over throughout the film, not an unreliable narrator so much as an uncertain one. There is either far too much or not nearly enough of him, more likely the former: The segments where he links West’s story to his own feel particularly ill-placed, a distraction that doesn’t offer context on the main subject. And some narrative choices are contrived: Too much time is given over to West’s desire to be featured in an MTV News segment spotlighting new artists. (It so happens that MTV was where Simmons and Ozah met.)The success that Simmons had hoped to capture ended up being his termination notice — once West’s career was finally operating under its own steam, he left Simmons (and his footage) behind. That alone would have made for a compelling film. But the third segment, which is far more scattershot, consists largely of scraps that Simmons accrues over the next couple of decades, an era in which West becomes something unfamiliar to him: a world-building superstar.This episode is less narratively satisfying and coherent than the first two, but Simmons’s indiscriminate eye and his pre-existing comfort with West end up as assets. Where in the early 2000s, Simmons had an aspirant as his subject, now he has someone who exists between superhero and autocrat, a figure who isn’t performing simply for one camera but for a world of cameras and observers.There is a grim scene in which West is speaking with potential real estate partners, a gaggle of older white men, and tells them, “I took bipolar medication last night to have a normal conversation and turn alien to English.” He likens his treatment by the public to being drawn and quartered.Simmons lingers for a while — this is who his subject has become, and it is as important to see as any of the clips from when he was simply an up-and-comer. But real as it is, this isn’t the West that Simmons knows, or can stomach. There’s something itchy in the camerawork, and eventually Simmons does something that doesn’t seem to come naturally: He turns the camera off. More

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      ‘Downfall: The Case Against Boeing’ Review: Behind Two Fatal Crashes

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      This documentary on Netflix leaves the impression that the 737 Max’s entire existence is rotten.Regardless of any changes that Boeing made to the 737 Max, regardless of the clearance the revised plane received from the Federal Aviation Administration in late 2020, “Downfall: The Case Against Boeing” leaves the impression that its entire existence is a mistake: that it was cobbled together for the wrong reasons, to boost short-term stock gains and to avoid the time and costs of engineering a new, non-737 plane.The problems of the Max, and how its flawed design was implicated in the crashes of flights on Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines, killing hundreds, have been well-aired, and this documentary, directed by Rory Kennedy (“Last Days in Vietnam”), does not break news or break ground cinematically. (We don’t need to see filler footage of a reporter making calls.) But it is likely to leave viewers shaken, and it is always comprehensible, even in sequences that illustrate what the pilots saw in the cockpit. As the movie explains, in the first crash they were put in the position of having seconds to beat back a system that Boeing had never told pilots was on the aircraft.“Downfall” features interviewees who have gotten lost or abstracted in all the coverage, including the wife of the Lion Air captain, family members of the passenger victims and former Boeing employees. “How many times have you heard companies say, ‘We’re committed to excellence, we’re committed to safety, we’re committed to our customers’?” asks Andy Pasztor, who reported on the story for The Wall Street Journal, in summation. His verdict: “We should be skeptical.”Downfall: The Case Against BoeingRated PG-13. Upsetting material involving the crashes. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Irma Thomas, a Soul Queen Far Beyond New Orleans

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      As she turns 81, the singer whose intimacy matches her grandeur is the subject of a PBS documentary, “Irma: My Life in Music.”The singer Irma Thomas has long been known as the Soul Queen of New Orleans, a title that feels both richly deserved and far too provincial. Her songs never topped the Billboard pop chart, but they did climb it. And even today, they’re covered by bar bands and in blues jams across the country.Still, if the title suggests a mix of regality and relatability, it makes decent sense. Irma Thomas is, first and foremost, a straight shooter. You feel it in conversation, where she’s neither unduly humble nor conceited. And you can hear it in her singing, which achieves the grandeur often expected from R&B singers in the early 1960s, but has always retained a special kind of intimacy; she often sounds a bit like a more plain-spoken Etta James.“Straight From the Heart,” from her breakthrough 1964 album, “Wish Someone Would Care,” is a demand for sincerity that might be a manifesto, and a standout in a catalog studded with gems. As is made clear in “Irma: My Life in Music,” a documentary debuting on PBS stations across the country this month, Thomas has treated baring her soul as serious work for the past six decades. And she has her rules, rooted in faith and practice: Gospel doesn’t belong in an R&B set. One ought to take requests, she said in a recent interview, to be sure an audience “won’t leave disappointed.”It’s the same attitude that made Thomas an indispensable musical partner for the famed producer and songwriter Allen Toussaint: “He knew he could depend on me,” she said.Thomas, who turns 81 on Friday, began singing professionally in her teens, while already raising four children, and by the mid-1960s her career was taking off. A stint in Los Angeles in the late ’60s and ’70s resulted in frustration — as did watching the Rolling Stones score a smash hit off “Time Is on My Side” after they’d heard her version. But she returned home in the mid-70s to a hero’s welcome, and has been a fixture at nearly every New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival since it began more than half a century ago.More recently, she’s found a new generation of fans through Netflix’s “Black Mirror,” where her haunting doo-wop hit, “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand),” frequently cameos. In a phone conversation this month from her home in New Orleans East, Thomas was amicable and down-to-earth as ever — “You ask the questions, and I’ll answer ’em,” she said as we began — as she talked about growing up and thriving in New Orleans, and revealed which of her many songs she treasures the most. These are edited excerpts from the interview.Thomas said she got her start singing in church, and noted, “I’m in the choir at church even now.”Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesWhen did you begin to realize that you really had a passion and a talent?Well, singing was something I did all the time. I mean, I can’t remember when I wasn’t singing. From a wee child, even living in Greensburg, La., I sang “The Tennessee Waltz” for my elementary schoolteacher’s play, “Cinderella.” I thought everybody did it. I didn’t think it was anything unusual.We did a lot of singing, keeping each other company or entertaining each other on the front porch during the week, when we weren’t working in the field. That was in the country. Then when I came to the city, we used to play and sing in the complex where we were. There were several kids who were playing music in school, and on weekends they would be playing music and we were singing whatever the most recent record that was out at the time. To me, I didn’t have such a big deal of a voice. Everybody around me was, you know, musically inclined to sing or play whatever instrument they were playing.You didn’t feel like you got a special response when you sang?Well, they applauded — they didn’t boo me! [Laughs]Your love for singing actually cost you work early in life, correct?I enjoyed singing for pleasure, so I was singing to keep myself company when it got me fired the first time, working the 11-to-7 shift. The second time I got fired for singing on the job, I was supposed to be waiting tables. So rather than waiting tables — or, in between waiting tables — I would get up and sing with the band that was playing at the club.How did your relationship with Allen Toussaint take shape? Was it clear immediately that you two had a special connection?It grew over time. There was just no hardships involved whenever I was working with him. He would have me sing a lot of his demos for people that he was writing songs for. I was a quick learner. When he wanted something done, he knew he could depend on me to sing it the way he wanted it sung. I never knew who he was presenting these songs to, I was just doing the demos for him.But you also made some special records together.Oh yeah, of course. He was one who wrote songs specifically for the artists: He knew my vocal ability and he would write a song that he knew would fit. And there was never a song he wrote that I turned down.One thing we haven’t talked about yet is your relationship to gospel music.I grew up in the church, so naturally I would be singing gospel music. Every Sunday when I’m not working, I still sing in church. I’m in the choir at church even now. Most of us grew up in the church, and a lot of us got our influences in the church. So it would be a natural progression to sing and to be a part of the gospel scene, whenever you could.After Katrina, Quint Davis decided that he would like for me to do a tribute to Mahalia Jackson, which I started doing. And I’m still doing the gospel set at JazzFest every year. I do a gospel set, then I do an R&B set. That’s just the natural thing to do. [Laughs]“He knew my vocal ability and he would write a song that he knew would fit,” Thomas said of working with the famed producer Allen Toussaint. “And there was never a song he wrote that I turned down.”Camille Lenain for The New York TimesHow big was Mahalia Jackson’s influence on you?I grew up listening to Mahalia Jackson’s music as a child. My parents had some of her records, back when it was 78s, and then in New Orleans we had radio stations that had gospel programming during the day. But we heard all kinds of music locally on the radio back then, because the radio stations were owned by local producers and owners. So they played a lot of local music as well as a lot of national music.So people who are my age, who grew up here in New Orleans, we had the best of both worlds because we were hearing it all. And then we didn’t have to fight to have a local record played. Nowadays, you’re lucky to hear your record once a year, because it’s not owned by local people. It’s, you know, ClearChannel or something like that, and they couldn’t care less. When you hear one hour, that’s what you’re going to hear all day long. So you don’t get a chance to call in and request what you would like to hear.Hurricane Ida had a big impact on New Orleans. It was nothing like Katrina, but the city appears to still be struggling in the wake of it.Yeah, because now supplies are hard to come by, because of the problems with shipping replenishing them. And so many people lost the roofs on their houses, so you have to wait in line, I guess. But New Orleans is a city that, you know, we’re resilient. We don’t run away. We stay here, and we snap back and move on.I’m sure almost everyone who interviews you must ask about “Time Is on My Side.” But could you talk about why you gave up playing it for a while in the middle of your career?Well you know, after a while, when you sing something that you know you’ve recorded, and you did the first national version of it, and when you’re singing, somebody tells you: “Oh, you’re doing a Rolling Stones song,” I got tired of explaining that I did it before the Rolling Stones. After a while that gets to be old. And so I stopped doing it, because I got tired of explaining that. They didn’t do their homework, they made assumptions. And so at some point you get tired of repeating yourself. Even now, I don’t do it as much as I do others. I sing it, but a lot of times it’s requested before I think about doing it, because I have so many other songs I can do.I have a large enough repertoire that by choice I can either do all of my own material or I can do a few cover songs that I like. And by taking requests, it makes it simpler, because then you are doing what your audience wants to hear. And I’ll put it this way: Most folks leave satisfied that they’ve heard their favorite song.In fact, “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is” — I recorded that back in 1964. I was at a show on the East Coast somewhere, and somebody in the audience asked me to play “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is.” I said, “Wow, I haven’t heard that request in a long time.” I sang it for them, and then when I got through, I asked them: “What album did you get that from?” They said, “We didn’t get it off an album. We heard it on ‘Black Mirror.’” You never know where you’re going to get a request from, or where they heard the song. And so I prepare — I put as much of my own material in my iPad, lyrically, so in case someone asks for it, I’ll do my best to do it for them.Is there one song that you consider nearest to your heart?The only one that I could say I’m closest to would be the one that got me my first big hit, which was “Wish Someone Would Care.” It became No. 17 in the nation, and if it hadn’t been for the British Invasion, it might have gone a little higher in the charts. There were some personal things going on in my life and I wrote the song because of those things. So that would be the closest to me. More

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      ‘For Lucio’ Review: The Voice of Italy for Four Decades

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      A new documentary pays tribute to Lucio Dalla, a popular and passionate Italian singer whose songs captured the country’s political turmoil.Pudgy and hirsute, favoring floppy hats and round glasses, Lucio Dalla didn’t look much like a pop star. A jazz clarinetist who reinvented himself as a singer-songwriter, Dalla nonetheless became one of Italy’s most beloved troubadours in the later decades of the 20th century. His songs were rhapsodic and discursive, polemical and observant — often within the span of a single verse — and his voice could shift from conversational intimacy to full-throated passion just as quickly.“For Lucio,” Pietro Marcello’s new documentary, offers a portrait of Dalla that is both informative and enigmatic. More an essay film than a standard musical biography, it emphasizes personality over chronology, and dwells more on the work than the life. Instead of assembling the usual squadron of talking heads, Marcello concentrates on just two interview subjects, both of whom knew Dalla well.His manager, Umberto Righi — everyone calls him Tobia — appears alone in the first part of the movie, putting flowers on Dalla’s grave and recalling the early years of their association. Later Tobia is joined by Stefano Bonaga, who knew Dalla when they were children in Bologna. This being Italy, the two men sit and reminisce over a leisurely pasta lunch, pausing to sip wine and light cigarettes. Their conversation sometimes veers into abstraction, and the ways they describe their old friend (who died in 2012, at 68) don’t always paint a vivid picture. We hear that he was unpredictable, brilliant and generous, but there is a curious shortage of anecdotes that might bring those traits to life.More satisfying is the archival material Marcello assembles. We get to see Dalla in concert, on television variety shows, in proto-music-videos and in conversation with journalists. These moments go a long way toward explaining his appeal. They show a plain-spoken intellectual who could be impish, ardent or gnomic, and whose songs captured both the exuberant spirit of Italian popular culture and the country’s political agony and social turmoil in the ’60s and ’70s.Though Dalla released hit records through the ’80s and ’90s, it’s the earlier period that most interests Marcello, in particular the years in the early ’70s when Dalla collaborated with the left-wing Bolognese poet and writer Roberto Roversi. The filmmaker, who has made both documentaries and fictional features (recently, and notably, “Martin Eden”), is fascinated by histories of class struggle, ideological conflict and intellectual agitation. He juxtaposes images of war, poverty and labor unrest with Dalla’s songs to underline their messages and explain their context. A grim climax is provided by the bombing of Bologna’s central train station in 1980, an act of right-wing terrorism that was the deadliest single incident of political violence in an era known in Italy as the Years of Lead.Even when a song’s subject isn’t explicitly political — as in “Nuvolari,” a rambling ballad about a celebrated racecar driver — there is a feeling of urgency and struggle in Dalla and Roversi’s lyrics and in the voice that delivers them. One of the most striking passages in “For Lucio” is a performance, in front of an audience of factory workers, of “Itaca,” a song that evokes Homer’s “Odyssey” from the standpoint of ordinary sailors. That kind of romantic populism links Dalla to the Latin American Nueva Canción movement, while his music incorporates influences from Brazilian bossa nova and tropicália as well as European and North American popular styles.For all his cosmopolitanism, he remains a distinctively Italian figure, and “For Lucio” is a movie preoccupied above all with Italy’s cultural memory and identity. This can make it a bit of a challenge even for Italophiles or students of history, musical and otherwise. This isn’t “Lucio for Beginners” by any means. Nor is it a greatest-hits anthology or a “behind the music” tell-all. It’s a tribute and an invitation to further research.For LucioNot rated. In Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 19 minutes. Watch on Mubi. More

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      ‘Icahn: The Restless Billionaire’ Review: Right on the Money

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      The war stories of the famed financier Carl C. Icahn power this deft documentary portrait.To the uninitiated, the term activist investor can sound as if a shareholder is out on Wall Street with a picket sign and a cause. Carl C. Icahn, an activist investor par excellence, is a veteran of what the practice actually entails: buying a stake in a company and pushing for changes in management or strategy. Above all, as the genial documentary portrait “Icahn: The Restless Billionaire” explains, he’s dauntingly good at making money.The octogenarian Icahn anchors this deft pocket biography, with his appealing directness and dead-level stare, as he presides at the office and around the house. The Queens-raised son of a cantor and a teacher, Icahn has for decades targeted firms like Tappan, Texaco and Apple, while seeking out undervalued stocks.The director, Bruce David Klein, smartly builds out Icahn’s war stories in terms of problem solving and negotiation, not mere bets. Icahn’s triumphs, as well as his past tangles with the Transport Workers Union and the hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, create ready-made drama, while visits with his family (and a wizardly synthesizer score) keep up a sunny vibe.But even for Icahn, a respected headline-maker who has taken the Giving Pledge, the profile can be a little soft. It blurs comparisons to corporate raiders in its rote account of the 1980s. The talking-head commentary is dominated by finance journalists (including Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times) and millionaires, without always clarifying Icahn’s financial maneuvers (or his political ones, such as his service under Donald Trump as a special adviser).The perspective — while producing something eminently watchable — may strike some viewers as old-fashioned and incomplete.Icahn: The Restless BillionaireNot rated. Running time 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch on HBO Max. More