Daily Archives: August 10, 2009

It Might Get Loud

Film Reviews

Forget the videogame — it’s a real-life version of Guitar Hero when Jimmy Page, the Edge and Jack White get together for the music documentary It Might Get Loud, an exploration of the electric guitar that spans, roughly, three different musical generations, and encompasses all sorts of different modes of expression. Director Davis Guggenheim’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth, the film works as a sort of three-for-one biography, with just a handful of glancing, macro-analytical insights scattered and tossed in for good measure.

Guggenheim structures his film in discrete narrative strands, but doesn’t waste time with talking heads trying to frame or debate the importance of his subjects’ bands, or respective places in music history. In fact, even bandmates or other intimates don’t win any screen time; the only interviewees are the three men themselves, which helps give It Might Get Loud a well-groomed intimacy.

Page, of Led Zeppelin and the Yardbirds, has probably the deepest reservoir of stories, and therefore the most fascinating back story, having started out as a session guitarist who laid down licks for commercial jingles on the side. For all the shit The Edge, of U2, takes for his zen-guitarist persona, it’s White — of the White Stripes, the Raconteurs and whatever new side project he’s put together this week — who is the most interested and invested in artificial persona. He drafts a miniaturized version of himself for the movie’s biographical segment, and stages scenes where he teaches this younger “him” how to play the blues, and even kick down a piano stool for added effect. He also cops to the arthouse conceit of the White Stripes, and the fact that the costuming was all misdirection and window-dressing, all so that they (or he, really, since bandmate Meg White comes across as doing little more than what Jack tells her) could play earthy blues and folk music without facing a harsh, skeptical vox populi.

As I mentioned previously on the site, the movie is in sum never less than in-the-moment engaging, even if
there’s a lingering feeling that the roundtable
gathering that forms its spine — what Guggenheim called “The Summit,” and less a Charlie Rose-style chat than a meandering exploration of a couple of the gentleman’s big tunes, and adolescent breakthroughs — could perhaps have used a bit more
prodding or structure, to get at the marrow of exactly why and how sometimes even (or even especially) trite musical expressions achieve significant emotional lift-off. I know… it’s like dancing about architecture, this, especially since the movie quietly serves up contradictions (White talks about technology being “a big destroyer of emotion and truth,” even as he mounts a microphone into the carved-out body of a guitar, allowing for greater feedback and distortion) in a fashion that underscores how a lot of music, and indeed maybe art in general, is about learning and knowing the rules, and then consciously breaking or tearing them down.

There are some great song stories along the way, whether it’s Page recounting the drum set-up for “When the Levee Breaks” or the Edge stumbling across an early cassette recording of some “Where the Streets Have No Name” noodling, with Bono calling out time shifts in the background. What most pokes through, though, is the sheer joy attached to creative expression. “There was a thrill in doing, even if we were doing it badly,” says the Edge. Later, White (resembling a ghostly, slightly pudgy Johnny Depp) talks about the aggressive quality of music, and seemingly channels the spirit of a bullied-too-long sensitive soul who’s finally screwed his courage to the sticking place, saying, “It’s our chance to push you down now.” It’s a reminder that music matters so much because it has the capacity to make us feel other than what we perhaps are, and feelings so often can and do trump cold rationality. For the film’s trailer, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, 97 minutes, PG)

Uma Thurman Brings Soupçon of Grace to Motherhood

Posterized!, Trailer Watch

The trailer for Motherhood (Freestyle Releasing, October 16), starring Uma Thurman as a harried New York City mom of two prepping for her daughter’s sixth birthday party, is now online, and it pretty much delivers, in beat-by-beat fashion, everything you’d expect based on the above logline: playground quibbles, rumpled clothing, appropriately distracted line readings. Minnie Driver is the best friend; Anthony Edwards is the husband whose impassioned, sensitive-guy speech of reconnection/reconciliation is given away about three-fifths of the way through the trailer.

It was perhaps inevitable that Thurman would end up in something like this, which might slot nicely alongside One Fine Day as a modern-mom DVD double feature, if only there were the time for such a thing. Thurman’s timing is so completely crackerjack that she’s a natural fit for studio genre product, but I still feel like her best work is a bit off the beaten path, in stuff with more complicated motivations and less cleanly delineated emotional mooring. Those striking eyes help her capture and convey the oblique in a way that a lot of actors and actresses simply cannot. Prime was halfway an attempt at something at once poppy and scruffy, with some real-world edges if not really grit, but it didn’t really work. Still, there

Selling only one thing, and to one audience, the poster is a garish thing seemingly straight out of the 1980s… actually, I take that back. It’s effectively, attractively streamlined. The background color (reading, quite literally, caution) is what makes it feel like a home video box. But the 1980s version would have a lot more clutter — bottles, baby strollers and the like, plus something in her hair.

Thurman elicits sympathy and smiles, and the trailer evidences a pinch of wit in some of its dialogue, but the movie seems saddled with by-the-numbers direction through and through. What makes one most wince, of course, are the squealing bus tires used to cover up the intimation of profanity (a tired trailer foley trick that should be permanently retired, unless used ironically) and, to perhaps an only slightly lesser extent, the obligatory dancing-in-the-kitchen scene, which probably pegs the moment that Thurman’s character recaptures her chi, or groove, or creativity or whatever the movie is calling it. I again wonder, though: since The Big Chill, has anyone over 14 ever danced unselfconsciously about their home with another person?