Day: April 22, 2020

20 Feet From Stardom: Pain and Refracted Glory

20 Feet From Stardom

The review:

Morgan Neville’s 20 Feet From Stardom brings light to that visible but invisible maker of music: the backup singer. As we follow the careers of singers from the 1960s onward, we see the pleasure and pain that comes of lending your talents to music that becomes famous while only sometimes crediting your work. Given the stories of the backup singers,* this could have been a depressing catalog, but the film is celebratory and hopeful; still, it left me wondering how a woman would have captured the dismissal of such talented women.**

The verdict: Recommended

Cost: Netflix monthly fee ($8.99)
Where watched: at home

Further sentences:

*While Darlene Love’s story starts as gaspingly awful, she seems to have come out of it okay. Whereas Claudia Lennear’s career trajectory caused both myself and the boyfriend (who was only partially watching) to make audible noises of protest.
**”There can be only one Aretha, only one Whitney.” A lot of backup singers swinging for stardom ran into that sentiment. But why can there only be one woman, when there can be so many men?

Questions:

  • Do you think we’re yet past the “there can only be one” sentiment when it comes to women artists?
  • Which was your favorite story?

Favorite IMDB trivia item:

The film has been compared to the similarly themed book The Wrecking Crew: The Inside Story of Rock and Roll’s Best-Kept Secret, which chronicles the stories of uncredited studio musicians.

(Pssst. It’s also a 2008 documentary: The Wrecking Crew!)

Other reviews:

20 Feet From Stardom

Kicking and Screaming is More Like Napping and Mumbling

Kicking and Screaming

The review:

Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming is full of really low-energy, quasi-adult men dithering about things for ninety-six minutes that feel more like three hours; it has not aged well.* Now that it’s not the 90s, well-educated white guys who can’t figure out what to do after college are not quite the selling point they once were.** It was interesting to see actors in their younger years,*** and I really enjoyed looking at the details of the craftsman bungalow**** the post-college students lived in, but this is not a good film.

The verdict: Skip

Cost: Netflix monthly fee ($8.99)
Where watched: at home

Consider watching instead:

Further sentences:

*It reminds me of Swingers in that regard, though this is if you took Swingers, extracted all the humor, the whirling friendships, dialed down the energy to 10%, and eliminated the fun swing dancing scene.
**This has a Metascore of 75, which is pretty high. The last boring movie I watched (One and Two)had a meta score of 47. I can only think that those reviews must have been from 1995, when the movie was released.
***Eric Stoltz is always fun. The big surprise that the main character, Josh Hamilton (Grover) is someone I’m familiar with as Clay’s dad in 13 Reasons Why and also Kayla’s dad in Eighth Grade. I would not have noticed, except I started looking up things on IMDB before I was finished watching it. The true sign of an uninteresting film.
****The floors needed redoing, but man, those built ins! To die for!

Questions:

  • Did you happen to watch this in the 90s? What did you think?
  • Can you think of an equivalent slacker movie with women as protagonists?

Favorite IMDB trivia item:

The film was almost accepted in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, but Noah Baumbach refused to cut 15 minutes as they requested, and the film was ultimately rejected.

Other reviews:

Kicking and Screaming