CHOP SUEY CLUB BRUCE MOVIE

Jan-Michael Vincent, English explorer Sir Wilfred Thesiger, Robert Mitchum, Buddy Hackett, Lena Home, Dusty Springfield, Sophie Tucker, Peggy Lee and Twiggy show up as well.

Whether appearing in vintage clips or in footage shot by Weber and his crew, the invited guests are a notably disparate bunch, ranging from the brassy 1950s jazz singer Frances Faye to Rickson Gracie, the Brazilian jujitsu expert, from Diana Vreeland to the Fletcher family, a clan of radical surfers.

CHOP SUEY CLUB BRUCE MOVIE

This sense of kinship, the little-noted subtext of so much of Weber’s work, comes into much sharper focus in his new film, Chop Suey, a sort of imaginary home movie in which he brings together some of the people who have inspired him over the years for a virtual reunion picnic. What you see, as the titillation that inevitably accompanies a glimpse of naked flesh begins to fade, are happy kids, eminently comfortable with themselves and one another (and their drawstring cargo pants), enacting an idyll of blissful fellowship to compare with any 18th-century pastoral-a lovely, imperishable fraternity of heavenly creatures. Pick up the latest Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, the “Back to School” issue, and take a gander at the coeds lounging in the frat house, the glee-club singers, the streakers tossing a pigskin in the quadrangle. Outraged parents and denunciations by the Catholic League. You think Marky Mark looming over Times Square, sure. Or jazz trumpeter Chet Baker, just before his death, naming a speedball (a mix of heroin and cocaine) as his favorite high, in Weber’s Oscar-nominated documentary Let’s Get Lost. Apollonian young lads, more likely, frolicking in the buff-as in his ad campaigns for Calvin Klein and Abercrombie & Fitch. The phrase “family values” may well be the last thing that leaps to mind when one thinks of the work of Bruce Weber. A jazz singer, a jujitsu champ, a fashion doyenne and a wrestler-turned-model walk into a bar-make that a film: Chop Suey, Bruce weber’s extended family Group Portrait.

Chop suey club bruce