Joni Mitchell Honored at Star-studded Concert Gala

FILE - Joni Mitchell arrives at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on Sunday, April 3, 2022, in Las Vegas. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)
FILE - Joni Mitchell arrives at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on Sunday, April 3, 2022, in Las Vegas. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)
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Joni Mitchell Honored at Star-studded Concert Gala

FILE - Joni Mitchell arrives at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on Sunday, April 3, 2022, in Las Vegas. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)
FILE - Joni Mitchell arrives at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on Sunday, April 3, 2022, in Las Vegas. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)

Artists spanning the genres came together Wednesday to celebrate the peerless Joni Mitchell, honoring her vast contributions to popular song.

The pioneering singer-songwriter behind poignant hits including "A Case Of You," joins an elite coterie of composers including Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney, Tony Bennett and Carole King in receiving the US Library of Congress' Gershwin Prize, which is named for the brothers behind American standards such as "I Got Rhythm" and "Rhapsody In Blue."

Not one but two of her muses -- James Taylor and Graham Nash -- performed; both were among the lovers and collaborators she counted throughout her storied career, AFP said.

Wearing a newsboy cap, Taylor perched on a stool with an acoustic guitar to perform the song "California" off her seminal 1971 album "Blue," to Mitchell's delight.

The 79-year-old kept the beat with her cane, donning oversized sunglasses along with a metallic gold beret and a long, bedazzled teal dress.

"Her music, it gets into you, and it sort of becomes part of the mix," Taylor told AFP on the red carpet prior to the event in Washington.

"Blue" saw Mitchell mine her own heartache, including breakups with Taylor and Nash, to produce the record that's a regular on critics' all-time-best lists.

Nash later took the stage for a rendition of "A Case Of You" -- another song on "Blue," which many people believe she wrote about him.

"It's a very simple song," he told journalists prior to the event. "I think it's very profound in what it says."

"I loved it from the day that I first heard it and I'll sing my ass off tonight."

He certainly did but of course it was Mitchell herself who stole the show: after accepting her award she stunned the audience with a soulful, smoky performance of "Summertime," an aria George Gershwin composed for the opera "Porgy and Bess."

"This is overwhelming," she said onstage, the crowd giving her a standing ovation. "There's so many people that I care about in here tonight, from different parts of my life."

"New friends, old friends... it's thrilling!"

- Comeback -

The trailblazing Mitchell has experienced something of a renaissance over the past year, making a return to public life after she suffered a brain aneurysm in 2015 that left her temporarily unable to speak.

She has since undergone extensive physical therapy that's allowed her to return to performance, which at one point seemed a long shot.

Last summer she delivered her first full set in more than 20 years, surprising attendees at the Newport Folk Festival alongside folk-rocker Brandi Carlile, who was also a performer integral to Wednesday's setlist.

"Her resilience is palpable," said Carlile before the gala. "There are huge elements of her voice and vibrato that are back."

Mitchell is slated to headline a "Joni Jam" show this June at Washington state's Gorge Amphitheatre, again alongside Carlile.

- 'Opened doors' -

Wednesday's gala was a testament to the foundations Mitchell laid for women creating art in a world controlled by men.

"Joni was the first woman that I really related to as a singer-songwriter -- as a creative woman," said Annie Lennox on the red carpet. "There wasn't anything like her."

"She was this ethereal beauty that had this deep, profound insight into the world."

Lennox gave the room chills with a performance of the ballad "Both Sides Now," starting at the piano before standing to belt out the final stanzas.

She later collaborated with a bevy of women including Angelique Kidjo, Cyndi Lauper and Carlile to perform Mitchell's environmentally conscious classic "Big Yellow Taxi."

"This business is so men-dominated," Kidjo told AFP. "And we have to find our space in there, and she has opened doors for many, many women in this country and in the world."

- 'Freeing' -

Born in a small town in western Canada, Mitchell had her start playing small clubs and eventually moved to Los Angeles, where she became a pivotal figure in the 1960s Laurel Canyon music scene and beyond.

She punctuated her deceptively simple songs with a distinctive, wide-ranging voice and open-tuned guitar, which lent an idiosyncratic sound to the standard rock and folk of the era.

Mitchell also received praise for her integration of jazz, collaborating with greats including Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock, the latter of whom performed "River" on Wednesday.

"She's like, up on a pedestal somewhere up there with Zeus," Hancock told AFP.

"She bares her soul," the superstar pianist -- who dedicated an entire album to Mitchell's covers and won one of the top Grammy's off it -- continued. "Sometimes you try to hide things from others, and she addresses those kinds of issues."

"I think it's freeing for everybody that listens."



Movie Review: From Bumper to Bumper, ‘F1’ Is Formula One Spectacle 

Brad Pitt, from left, Lewis Hamilton, and Damson Idris attend the world premiere of "F1 The Movie" on Monday, June 16, 2025, in Times Square in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
Brad Pitt, from left, Lewis Hamilton, and Damson Idris attend the world premiere of "F1 The Movie" on Monday, June 16, 2025, in Times Square in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
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Movie Review: From Bumper to Bumper, ‘F1’ Is Formula One Spectacle 

Brad Pitt, from left, Lewis Hamilton, and Damson Idris attend the world premiere of "F1 The Movie" on Monday, June 16, 2025, in Times Square in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
Brad Pitt, from left, Lewis Hamilton, and Damson Idris attend the world premiere of "F1 The Movie" on Monday, June 16, 2025, in Times Square in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

The wide-screen spectacle of Formula One gets a gleaming, rip-roaring workout in Joseph Kosinski’s “F1,” a fine-tuned machine of a movie that, in its most riveting racing scenes, approaches a kind of high-speed splendor.

Kosinski, who last endeavored to put moviegoers in the seat of a fighter jet in “Top Gun: Maverick,” has moved to the open cockpits of Formula One with much the same affection, if not outright need, for speed. A lot of the same team is back. Jerry Bruckheimer produces. Ehren Kruger, a co-writer on “Maverick,” takes sole credit here. Hans Zimmer, a co-composer previously, supplies the thumping score.

And, again, our central figure is an older, high-flying cowboy plucked down in an ultramodern, gas-guzzling conveyance to teach a younger generation about old-school ingenuity and, maybe, the enduring appeal of denim.

But whereas Tom Cruise is a particularly forward-moving action star, Brad Pitt, who stars as the driving-addicted Sonny Hayes in “F1,” has always been a more arrestingly poised presence. Think of the way he so calmly and half-interestedly faces off with Bruce Lee in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood.” In the opening scene of “F1,” he’s sleeping in a van with headphones on when someone rouses him. He splashes some water on his face and walks a few steps over to the Daytona oval, where he quickly enters his team’s car, in the midst of a 24-hour race. Pitt goes from zero to 180 mph in a minute.

Sonny, a long-ago phenom who crashed out of Formula One decades earlier and has since been racing any vehicle, even a taxi, he can get behind the wheel of, is approached by an old friend, Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem) about joining his flagging F1 team, APX. Sonny turns him down at first but, of course, he joins and “F1” is off to the races.

The title sequence, exquisitely timed to the syncopated rhythms of Zimmer’s score, is a blistering introduction. The hotshot rookie driver Noah Pearce (Damson Idris) is just running a practice lap, but Kosinski, his camera adeptly moving in and out of the cockpit, uses the moment to plunge us into the high-tech world of Formula One, where every inch of the car is connected to digital sensors monitored by a watchful team. Here, that includes technical director Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon) and Kaspar Molinski (Kim Bodnia), the team’s chief.

Verisimilitude is of obvious importance to the filmmakers, who bathe this very Formula One-authorized film in all the sleek operations and globe-trotting spectacle of the sport. That Apple, which produced the film, would even go for such a high-priced summer movie about Formula One is a testament to the upswing in popularity of a sport once quite niche in America, and of the halo effects of both the Netflix series “Formula 1: Drive to Survive” and the seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton, an executive producer on “F1.”

Whether “F1” pleases diehards, I’ll leave to more ardent followers of the circuit. But what I can say definitively is that Claudio Miranda knows how to shoot it. The cinematographer, who has shot all of Kosinski’s films as well as wonders like Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi,” brings Formula One to vivid, visceral life. When “F1” heads to the big races, Miranda is always simultaneously capturing the zooming cars from the asphalt while backgrounding it with the sweeping spectacle of a course like the UK’s fabled Silverstone Circuit.

OK, you might be thinking, so the racing is good; is there a story? There’s what I’d call enough of one, though you might have to go to the photo finish to verify that. When Sonny shows up, and rapidly turns one practice vehicle into toast, it’s clear that he’s going to be an agent of chaos at APX, a low-ranking team that’s in heavy debt and struggling to find a car that performs.

This gives Pitt a fine opportunity to flash his charisma, playing Sonny as an obsessive who refuses any trophy and has no real interest in money, either. The flashier, media-ready Noah watches Sonny's arrival with skepticism, and the two begin more as rivals than teammates. Idris is up to the mano-a-mano challenge, but he’s limited by a role ultimately revolving around and reducing to a young Black man learning a lesson in work ethic.

A relationship does develop, but “F1” struggles to get its characters out of the starting blocks, keeping them closer to the cliches they start out as. The actor who, more than anyone, keeps the momentum going is Condon, playing an aerodynamics specialist whose connection with Pitt’s Sonny is immediate. Just as she did in between another pair of headstrong men in “The Banshees of Inisherin,” Condon is a rush of naturalism.

If there’s something preventing “F1” from hitting full speed, it’s its insistence on having its characters constantly voice Sonny’s motivations. The same holds true on the race course, where broadcast commentary narrates virtually every moment of the drama. That may be a necessity for a sport where the crucial strategies of hot tires and pit-stop timing aren't quite household concepts. But the best car race movies — from “Grand Prix” to “Senna” to “Ferrari” — know when to rely on nothing but the roar of an engine.

“F1” steers predictably to the finish line, cribbing here and there from sports dramas before it. (Tobias Menzies plays a board member with uncertain corporate goals.) When “F1” does, finally, quiet down, for one blissful moment, the movie, almost literally, soars. It's not quite enough to forget all the high-octane macho dramatics before it, but it's enough to glimpse another road “F1” might have taken.