Fin: Low Cut Connie at the movies

Plus: Yes, there are many films about Jewish gangsters, RIP James Earl Jones, seeking a better class of conservative movie, and Aaron Rodgers: The Documentary

I am, as everyone reading this knows, a movie writer, and I’m not a music writer. I realized the moment I showed up at the college newspaper as a freshman that I could easily articulate why I like or dislike a movie, but I could do that with songs or albums, aside from “this sounds good” or “this doesn’t sound good.”

This has continued into my professional career. I’ve been writing about movies for almost 25 years, and while I frequently review music documentaries, I have developed an interest in film scores. However, I don’t have any professional reason to follow the music scene, and I only go to a handful of shows a year (more often than not, it’s The Hold Steady or solo Craig Finn). 

All that said, I’ve always really liked what Low Cut Connie is all about. Adam Weiner, a Jewish guy about my age from South Jersey, lives in Philly and uses “Low Cut Connie” as his band's name, alter ego, and an all-purpose umbrella term for his different projects. 

He’s ventured well beyond Philly, and everyone I know in the Twin Cities seems to be a huge fan. I first saw his concert documentary, Art Dealers — a fantastic, uniquely structured documentary featuring intimate interviews and full song performances —  last year during the Philadelphia Film Festival. 

Now it’s finally out, and I interviewed Weiner last week for the Philadelphia Inquirer; you can read that here. Then, last night, I went to a screening, Q&A, and brief performance by Weiner. In the Q&A, Weiner told stories about the time he played piano at a gay bar in New York and often functioned as everyone’s therapist. This seems to add credence to the theory that the bar in Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” is a gay bar. 

The movie is touring various cities and lands on VOD on October 1. 

Yes, there are movies about Jewish gangsters 

Because X (formerly Twitter) is now primarily a delivery mechanism for antisemitism — along with transphobia, open praise of Hitler, paeans to the glory of Rhodesia, surveillance video of muggings, and many, many charts about race and IQ — a video went viral this week about why there are so many movies about Italian gangsters, and not so many about Jewish ones. 

The video includes the phrase “I’m not saying all Jewish people are in some conspiracy, I’m just saying that like…,” before pivoting to his own, likely fifth-hand understanding of Neal Gabler’s “An Empire of Their Own.” (“This is all over Wikipedia!”) 

This is all wrong in a few different ways: One, there are many, many movies about Jewish mobsters. Just off the top of my head: One Upon a Time in America, Bugsy, Casino, Eight Men Out, and several different biopics of Meyer Lansky. There are prominent Jewish characters in both The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, as well as The Sopranos. In a movie called Lucky Number Slevin, Ben Kingsley played a gangster called The Rabbi, who was an actual rabbi. 

And besides, if “The Jews” held unchecked dominion over Hollywood, wouldn’t they make more movies about themselves being gangsters, as opposed to fewer?

Here’s a Wikipedia page, and here’s a piece I wrote for JTA on Casino’s 25th anniversary. And speaking of Hyman Roth…