Year of Eastwood #34

Bird (1988)

Starring: Forest Whitaker

Directed by Eastwood

Clint likes the jazz. Composer, aficionado, musician. So it’s only natural that he would tackle the genre in a bio pic. Loosely-based biographies of musicians have always done well … Coal Miner’s Daughter, Ray, Walk the Line … all have gone on to Oscar glory. So which jazz legend should Clint’s movie be about? Maybe Dizzy. Maybe Coltrane. But Clint had once seen Charlie Parker perform in 1945 so he decided to focus on Parker. A sax player better know as the Yardbird.

The Bird likes the smack. Which really shouldn’t be much of a surprise since most of these bio pics include some addiction that the star must battle as they rise in popularity. The Bird only reached a certain amount of fame while he was living, but he sure did like the crank. It didn’t do much good for his liver condition - but that’s what the blues is all about. He also has to overcome the death of his young daughter. Which he should have thought about when he was shooting up the junk. Eventually, he gives up the stuff - instead just drinking perfectly-legal alcohol … but by then his liver had had enough. But the dude sure liked the H. (I really don’t know what I’m talking about anymore … I had to look up some slang on the internets.)

Forest Whitaker portrays the Bird with his usual oafish charm which adds to the sense that Parker had all the talent to be a superstar, but was maybe lacking the charisma to be as successful as some of his contemporaries. Like a fine artist, Bird’s music has come to be more appreciated after his death. The film follows Bird’s career as he plays jazz clubs during a time when the style of music was considered scandalous.

The film opens with Bird jamming to a little ditty called Lester Leaps In. Which was the topic of an interpretation for my first studio in Architecture. I must have listened to that clip of music a hundred times, trying to pull some kind of form out of the composition. I’m not sure that I would actually recognize any other jazz music, so it was great to be able to re-visit those memories.
.

I figure sooner or later there will be a bio-pic for just about every celebrity out there. It’s a lot easier to watch a movie to learn about somebody than having to look it up on Wikipedia. Still, I’m not really looking forward to watching the Bobcat Goldthwait story.

Clint directs Bird with a reverence for the music and artist that comes across in the film. Throwing in a few artsy-fartsy touches like the shot of a flying cymbol crashing to the ground. Not really sure why it was a cymbol … guess a saxamophone would have made more of a clunking sound.