Like Crazy (6/10)
Quite the smash at Sundance last year,
Like Crazy gives us the story of two lovers separated by an ocean and a visa. An English girl falls for an American she met in a Los Angeles college, they fall in love, and she remains in the country while her student visa expires. She returns to England, only to then be denied entry back to the warm bosom of the United States and the hairless chest of her young lover.
Roadie (5/10)
‘Two, TWO; check one two, two TWO’. Consider, if you will, the humble roadie. Always on the road, often on stage – running bent over, thinking that they can’t be seen – but loved by no one except the last leftover groupie. They hang about with musicians but aren’t ones (a bit like drummers, really). Jimmy’s just been fired after 20 years on the road with Blue Oyster Cult. Now what’s he gonna do?
The Black Power Mixtape, 1967-1975 (7/10)
For some reason, Sweden in the late sixties/ early seventies was rather preoccupied with America. Maybe it was because Sweden has, by and large, been uncontroversial, typically Scandinavian, detached and happy to be so. Anyway, Swedish journalists were terribly interested in the emergence of black power, a cause started as we all know by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and continued by his enthusiastic disciples. This documentary pieces together all the footage from an eight-year period, filmed dispassionately and without bias, and was of great interest to me – mostly.
Music Connections, No. 4
Now you're getting it. Every Monday, a new set of three music connections for you to puzzle over. Last week's were all answered early, so hit those refresh buttons!
Traceless (Sans Laisser de Traces) (6/10)
The last thing you need three weeks before you’re due to be named as the president of a large French corporation, I would suggest, is to get pangs of regret over the way you got to be in this lofty position. No, I take that back. The regret would be the second-worst thing. The worst by far would be to act on your conscience and try to rectify your old mistake, because when you do things like that people end up getting killed. Then where would you be? In deep doo-doo.
The Iron Lady (0/10)
When Meryl Streep goes up to collect her Oscar for her impersonation of Margaret Thatcher listen very carefully. You just might hear a little sigh from the heavens as the spirit of Janet Brown exhales deeply and muses ‘that could have been me.’ Streep nails Mrs Thatch perfectly, the best ever in fact, and that’s why she’s a good actress. Whether winning acting awards for impersonations is fair or not is something I’ll leave you to ponder. Oh, as for
The Iron Lady? What a steaming pile of crap it is.
Thurgood (7/10)
This, my friends, is how history should be taught. As enthralling as any high-octane thriller, as tense as any mystery and as frank as the most dazzling exposé documentary,
Thurgood is simply Laurence Fishburne on stage for nearly two hours, talking. Just talking. Using the script written by the esteemed George Stevens, Jr, Fishburne lectures us as Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court judge in American history.
