Week in Review
I went through my queue and tried to put all the music movies together. If I had to do this project again, I would have kept it organized to directors or categories. It is a little maddening to see the same plot devices used over and over again.
In the last few years, as the music biopic has become an Oscar standard, a license to print soundtrack sales money, and an assured way to get entertainment journalists to write articles about the film (as many of them are music enthusiasts), we have seen at least one big name biopic every year. And we can count on that for years to come. Often, the same company owns both the back catalogue AND the movie studio, financing the film as more or less an infomercial for the soundtrack.
These biopics tend to focus on a brief part of the subject’s career. In Ray and Walk the Line both, the films leave off the last 30 years of the each singer’s life story. Why the fascination with ending the film after the singer kicks his drug addiction? Because it’s Lady Sings the Blues with an upbeat ending, which is an easier sell than that depressing overdose storyline.
Pick of the Week
There were several films to choose from for this week’s pick. From the first moment to the end credits of Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang, I was thoroughly entertained, and the dialogue alone almost made it my pick. The peacock-colored and sometimes psychedelic trash classic Valley of the Dolls is a must for group viewings. I loved watching Clint Eastwood acting alongside his son Kyle in the road movie Honkytonk Man. Watching Elijah Woods’ transformation from expelled Harvard student to West Ham Football Hooligan in Green Street Hooligans almost got the nod. But the pick this week goes to a classic: Otto Preminger’s government drama Advise and Consent.
Henry Fonda stars as a man nominated to be secretary of state. The opposition digs up dirt on him, and it’s all conspiracy and slander after that. It’s an early sixties behind-the-scenes government film, as dirty as it got before the JFK assassination and the various political traumas that followed.