RECOMMENDED Bruce Weber’s 1988 black-and-white tone poem to the youthful beauty and fallen-featured dotage of trumpeter Chet Baker, “Let’s Get Lost,” is one of the more gorgeous artifacts of high-contrast black-and-white filmmaking you’re likely to see this year. The movie’s broken-hearted center is less music, the bebop life and loves of the gifted musician, than the sound of Baker’s cheekbones: an inaudible wail of self-destructive energies. Weber had been sitting on this lustrous lovely for almost fifteen years, and in its restored form remains a valentine to cool: ineffable, inexplicable, destructive, alluring, lovely seductive, simply itself, like romance or love or foundless fetish. Weber’s own words are spot-on: “We decided that we wanted to share our story about Chet with people because we learned a lot about that thin line between love and fascination. Today there are a lot of CDs of Chet’s in the record stores, and once again, while I’m looking through all of them in the bins I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. After all these years, when I have a roadblock in my life, I think of Chet and I put on one of his songs—and the sound of his trumpet and voice show me once again how to get lost in this troubled world.” Jeff Preiss was the director of photography. (Ray Pride)
