THE VIEW FROM HERE
Chet Baker - Let's Get Lost
by Michael Bonner - UNCUT.co.uk - March 10, 2008
LOST AND FOUND
Bruce Weber's Let's Get Lost gets a re-release at Film Forum
by Blythe Sheldon - VMAGAZINE.COM - June 19, 2007
Let's Get Lost
Creative Loafing (Atlanta) — Let's Get Lost: Blue Note – Jan 30 2008
Jazz trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker left many disappointed friends and broken-hearted lovers in his wake. In the 1988 documentary Let's Get Lost, smoky-voiced chanteuse Ruth Young gives a pragmatic reason for her decision to hook up with him: "It would be like living with Picasso – the closest I could get to greatness." ...read more
Cult of Personality
LET'S GET LOST
by Jonathan Rosenbaum - July 21, 1989
Baker's daughter by his third marriage recounts with visible relish stealing clothes and jewelry when she was 14 from the jazz singer Ruth Young, ...
The film draws much of its appeal from the colorful gallery of friends, groupies, and diverse hangers-on (including a litter of adorable puppies) accompanying Baker and the film crew on his travels. Jazz trumpeter Jack Sheldon offers a couple of hilarious deadpan monologues about Baker, and Ruth Young – a singer, like Baker, in the Chris Connor/June Christy mode, and judging from the limited evidence a much better one than her former boyfriend–shows an equal amount of liveliness and intelligence; a few of the others have pertinent things to say as well, but most of the commentary is as walleyed and as bubbleheaded as the film itself–full of awe about very little, unless one confuses the idea of Chet Baker with Baker himself." ...read more
“SEDUCTIVE. Weber’s hipster fantasia is as beautiful and as nutty as ever... maybe the jivest great movie ever made.” “RELENTLESSLY COOL!” - Logan Hill, New York magazine. Click to read Bruce Weber interview "HAUNTING... HEARTBREAKING... This is the hot white light of Fellini's "sweet life," "Stands as a gorgeous gravestone for the Beat Generation's legacy of beautiful-loser chic." “ABOUT THE NATURE OF COOL... a romantic valentine to the 50s.” — J. Hoberman, Village Voice “RAPTUROUSLY BEAUTIFUL... One of the coolest movies ever made!” - Phil Nugent, Nerve.com “A VISUAL TREAT! Ceaselessly seductive.” — Steve Dollar, The New York Sun “A darkly moody piece of cinematic poetry.” — Jack Mathews, Daily News “A FULL-ON EVENT! The type of scorching slow burn Baker himself was famous for... (1988) “He was bad, he was trouble and he was beautiful.” A James Dean lookalike pretty boy whose jazz trumpeting and melancholy crooning epitomized 50s cool, Chet Baker had become, when famed photographer Bruce Weber finally caught up with him after three decades of fandom, an alcoholic and a junkie, those petulantly angelic looks peeping out from behind a gaunt, valleyed and crevassed face that could have starred for Sam Peckinpah. How did he get there? We kind of find out, as Weber and crew follow Baker on a year-long trek on the road, from the West Coast, to the East Coast, to Europe — including a stop at the Cannes Film Festival — with interviews with Chet, colleagues and friends, including dueling insights from his third wife (a former British show girl who had dated Terence Stamp) and three children in Oklahoma, and from old flame Ruth Young, a sardonically throaty torch singer. Plus evocative photo montages of William Claxton’s iconic 50s photo sessions; clips from old movies featuring young Chet; rare performance footage, including a TV appearance introed by a would-be hip Steve Allen — studded throughout coverage of Baker's tour, shot by D.P. Jeff Preiss in a stark, brooding film noir black & white, never more so than in the recurring close-up of Baker between two women in the back seat of a convertible hurtling down night streets, his long hair blowing over that now-seamy face. A popular and critical smash at its 1989 Film Forum premiere, but unseen since 1993 in any medium (rare copies of an early 90s VHS fetch impressive sums on Amazon), Let’s Get Lost has now been personally restored by Weber himself, its lush imagery providing a striking visual experience. “Let's Get Lost isn't primarily about Chet Baker the jazz musician; it's about Chet Baker the love object, the fetish. Behind it all is a soundtrack made up of Baker recordings that span more than three decades — the idealized essence of the man. And maybe because Weber, despite his lifelong fixation on this charmer, knew him only as a battered, treacherous wreck, in the two years before his death, Let’s Get Lost is one of the most suggestive (and unresolved) films ever made. It's about love, but love with few illusions.” — Pauline Kael A LITTLE BEAR FILMS RELEASE |
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