|
|
Special Events
 |
| Detroit Metal City | November 2008
Karen Bliss
You don’t have to know anything about blues music, Islam, Japanese manga, a 30-year-old African concert or what Europe views as talent to enjoy five music films that screened at September’s Toronto International Film Festival. You may need a bit of luck to find them, though, since all were looking for distribution deals.
Sounds Like Teen Spirit: A Popumentary, directed by Britain’s Jamie Jay Johnson, follows four 2007 Junior Eurovision Song Contest finalists as they compete against kids from 17 countries in this cheesy offshoot of the long-running adult version that spawned ABBA.
Few North Americans know anything about the campy singer/songwriter contest viewed by 23 million people overseas, but the kids are endearing and often unintentionally funny.
“I hope that there’s something universal enough about the kids and about their situations,” Johnson said.
In Jeffrey Levy-Hinte’s long-awaited documentary Soul Power, African and American musicians unite for a three-day music festival in Zaire in 1974, when the Muhammad Ali–George Foreman Rumble In the Jungle heavyweight title fight took place. The match was chronicled in the 1996 Oscar-winning When We Were Kings, for which Levy-Hinte was an editor.
He sifted through hours of footage to show the spirit and camaraderie of these musicians from two continents, including James Brown, Bill Withers, B.B. King, Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela.
The biopic Who Do You Love, directed by Jerry Zaks, takes some liberties with the history of Chicago blues label Chess Records and its founders, Polish-born Jewish immigrants Leonard and Phil Chess. While it portrays Leonard (played by Alessandro Nivola) as a single-minded businessman and music lover with an edge, the film glosses over any prejudice likely to have arisen when a white man stepped into the black man’s world. It focuses on the early stages of the label and signings of such artists as Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Little Walter and Who Do You Love composer Bo Diddley.
Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love, by U.S.-based director-producer Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, follows the internationally acclaimed Senegalese singer throughout the world during the tour for his 2004 Egypt album, which lyrically expressed his devout Sufi Muslim beliefs. It was misinterpreted in his homeland as blasphemous, but won Ndour his first Grammy Award.
Detroit Metal City might sound dumb, but it is hilarious. The Japanese live-action comedy is based on a popular manga series about a geeky wannabe pop singer who ends up fronting a death-metal band that sings about murder and rape. Director Toshio Lee says he didn’t make any adjustments to make it work for a North American audience: “I think that music and comedy are the same, and that they really are able to overcome international obstacles.”
|
|
|
|