Short Take: Robin Williams: A Night at the Met

Robin Williams was perhaps the greatest stand-up comic ever. His material might seem modest on paper, but he transformed it with his manic energy, his knack for impressions, and most of all, his brilliant free-associative digressions and embellishments. One laughs, but one also watches in awe at his mind working. Robin Williams: A Night at the Met, which edits together a pair of performances at New York's Metropolitan Opera House, is a marvelous showcase for his genius. He glides from extended takes on alcoholism and drug addiction to ones on sex and fatherhood, with tangents on international affairs and domestic politics. On the first viewing, one never knows what it is coming. Williams has one laughing every moment. On subsequent viewings, his delivery keeps everything fresh. The film originally aired on Home Box Office. It has been marketed under various titles, including Robin Williams: An Evening at the Met and Robin Williams Live!. An audio-only version won the 1988 Grammy for Best Comedy Recording. The credited director is Bruce Gowers.

Short Take: Round Midnight

The American jazz prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s—bebop, modal, and hard bop, among other styles—is considered by many to be the finest music the United States has ever produced. No film has ever done it as much justice as director Bertrand Tavernier’s Round Midnight. The picture, set in 1959, is about the final months of a legendary saxophone player named Dale Turner (played by the real-life saxophone master Dexter Gordon). It’s centered on Dale’s friendship with a French jazz fan (François Cluzet), and the fan’s efforts to keep him sober and focused on his music. The story isn’t of much interest beyond Gordon’s sweet, melancholy performance as Dale. The film’s real glories are the plentiful musical numbers, performed live by Gordon and other first-tier jazz musicians, including pianist Herbie Hancock, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, and guitarist John McLaughlin, among many others. The selections include standards by Cole Porter, Johnny Green, and Vernon Duke, as well as original compositions from Hancock and Gordon. Two special treats are the saxophone-and-vocals duet by Gordon and Lonette McKee on the Gershwins' “How Long Has This Been Going On?,” and Sandra Reeves-Phillips’ raucous party-scene rendition of Bessie Smith's “Put It Right Here.” Tavernier holds the camera on the musicians for long stretches, and one can see the drama of their performances in their faces. In the moments when the camera glides away, it’s invariably to emphasize the atmosphere inside the nightclubs. Tavernier understands live performance is an interaction between players and the audience. It’s wonderful to see performed jazz presented with such love, respect, and filmmaking intelligence. The magnificent cinematography is by Bruno De Keyzer. Herbie Hancock composed the film’s non-diegetic music and oversaw the recording of the performances. The script, by David Rayfiel and Tavernier (with uncredited contributions from Dexter Gordon), is a loose, fictionalized adaptation of Dance of the Infidels, Francis Paudras’ memoir of his friendship with pianist Bud Powell.

Short Take: The Paper Chase (TV series)

The 21st century has ostensibly provided a renaissance in television drama. The most celebrated of the current breed of TV series are defined by a greater reliance on adult themes, an effort to develop the material in a more novelistic manner, and the willingness to end a show when it has run its proper course. Ratings success no longer means a series will continue indefinitely. A significant precursor to this trend is The Paper Chase. Based on a novel by John Jay Osborn, Jr., as well as its 1973 feature-film adaptation, the show debuted in 1978. The showrunner was Robert C. Thompson. The main character was James Hart (James Stephens), a law student at an elite East Coast university. (The school is unnamed in the series, but the novel and the feature film were set at Harvard.) The show followed Hart and his schoolmates as they navigated the demands of law school. Especially notable was Hart’s dealings with Charles Kingsfield (John Houseman), a renowned contract-law professor who inspired both fear and awe in Hart and the other students. The series only lasted a season on network television, but it had attracted a devoted following. In 1983, the Showtime cable network began new episodes, with Lynn Roth taking over as showrunner. It was under Roth that the show fully came into its own. Over the next three years, it fully explored the nexus between adolescence and adulthood that defines the traditional-student experience in higher education. As the students were of graduate-school age, their behavior did not tend towards the juvenile. The elite-university setting also meant the students were quite ambitious and competitive, which gave their responses to their various challenges a compelling intensity. The writing was unfailingly intelligent, and the performances of Stephens, Houseman, and the other cast members always lived up to it. Houseman, who had won an Oscar for playing Kingsfield in the feature film, was especially memorable. Watching him, one always understood Kingsfield's ability to intimidate his students, but also the deep respect he inspired in them. Every episode of the series was something to look forward to. That said, one couldn’t help but appreciate how the show came to an end. Each of the first three seasons had corresponded to a year of the law-school curriculum. The short, six-episode final season brought the series to its natural finish: the graduation of Hart and his classmates. One hated to see the show conclude, but one knew this was being true to the material. The series is one of the finest television dramas ever produced, and perhaps the richest depiction of university life anywhere.

Short Take: Blue Velvet

Blue Velvet (1986) is part small-town crime thriller and part coming-of-age story, all shaped by the unique vision of writer-director David Lynch. A college student (Kyle MacLachlan) returns to his North Carolina hometown after his father suffers a stroke. Walking through a field on his way home from the hospital, he discovers a rotting human ear. After turning it over to the police, a detective's teenage daughter (Laura Dern) tells him there may be a connection between the ear and a local bar singer (Isabella Rossellini). With the daughter's help, the young man plots to covertly search the singer's apartment. Once inside, he discovers more than he ever wanted to know--about the singer, his hometown, and the darkest sides of his own personality. Lynch has a remarkable imagination: unbridled conceptually, but strikingly disciplined in terms of execution. One can tell one is in the hands of a great filmmaker right from the first frames, where the brightly idyllic images of small-town life give way to the brutal interactions of insects beneath the perfectly cultivated lawns. It's a brilliantly succinct allegory for the film's main theme: the ugliness found beneath genteel surfaces. Lynch builds the drama around the taboos of voyeurism, fetishism, and sadomasochistic desire, and he makes the story's key scenes, while only mildly violent in surface terms, among the most shocking ever filmed. He also gives free rein to whimsy, and the trippy moments range from oddball humor to reaches into the uncanny. The most brilliant is a hallucinatory set piece in which an effete thug (Dean Stockwell) mimes a performance of Roy Orbison's "In Dreams." But Lynch's wild card is his villain: a local crime boss played with ferocious intensity by Dennis Hopper. The character is the personification of depravity--the human analogue of the brutal insects hiding in the grass, and the symbol of the dark impulses the young hero fears within himself. It's a tribute to both Lynch and Hopper that the crime boss carries this allegorical freight while being nothing less than terrifying. Lynch's other collaborators, including the rest of the cast and the behind-the-scenes artisans, are remarkable as well. The most noteworthy are Frederick Elmes, who provided the gorgeous cinematography, and Alan Splet, who was responsible for the eerily detailed sound design. The film's score, which ranges from jazz to lush strings to romantic synthesizer pop, is by Angelo Badalamenti.