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A few days ago I saw  A Complete Unknown , the new film biography on Bob Dylan. As a movie with a coherent storyline, fabulous acting - especially by its star,  Timothée Chalamet - you couldn't ask for more. Unusually, for a mainstream Hollywood film, it's mostly accurate. That  means a lot to me because I've always been a curmudgeon when movies and TV shows play too fast and loose with historical facts so much that the viewer gets a totally skewed view of real events. Because I liked the movie a lot and wanted to continue liking it, I began researching its historical accuracy online after I got home.  I'm OK with the  liberties  director James Mangold took because he didn't change the intent of the storyline. According to the website, Shortlist , it doesn't matter that actress Elle Fanning's character, Sylvie Russo, is an entirely different woman than Suze Rotolo who was Dylan's real first girlfriend in New Yor...

To celebrate the relationship between music and movies Starbucks Coffee, Sundance Channel and BMG Music jointly opened a coffeehouse in an old Elk's lodge in Park City, UT, the town that annually hosts Robert Redford's renowned festival featuring new, independent films. Where Music Meets Film: Live from the Sundance Film Festival is a 1999 soundtrack CD with fifteen songs from the gala's after hours, live music shows. While none of these songs were written or performed specifically for films they were released as part of a made for TV documentary. A portion of the profits were donated to the non-profit Sundance Composer's Lab. The disc's liner notes get right to the point. "From silent film to contemporary cinema, music has always been part of the movie experience. It enhances the story and helps set the mood of the film." The CD features a few established stars - John Hiatt, Lyle Lovett, and ...

I don't know where to begin. "Over The Rainbow" is my favorite song from The Wizard Of Oz - my all-time favorite movie. As a child I fell in love with the film, the music, even Judy Garland as Dorothy. Many decades later I feel the same way about this masterwork of fantasy films. Beginning in 1956, and for many years afterward, the 1939 classic was shown on TV every year with gargantuan ratings, and in this era before home video and streaming were available I had to watch it on network TV every year. I believed that Garland's performance of "Over The Rainbow" was so wonderful that I never wanted to hear anyone else sing it. Cover versions just never rang true, and I've often said a law should be passed preventing anyone else from ever singing it. Immunity will only be given to Israel  Kamakawiwo'ole  (better known as Iz) for his Hawaiian folk version performed solo on a ukulele. "Over the Rainbow" was writt...

What The Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?  is a new documentary released only in theaters about the famous jazz-rock hitmakers of the late 60s. For a short time Blood, Sweat & Tears (BS&T) were among America's most popular musical artists. They were even one of the headliners at Woodstock. Unfortunately, their days in the sun were fleeting because people of all political persuasions eventually discovered reasons to hate them. To use today's overly trite terminology, they were canceled. The movie takes place in the Spring of 1970 when the nine musicians committed an unforgiveable sin. At that time it wasn't a good career move to cooperate with the United States government in any way, but at the request of our State Department BS&T toured three of Eastern Europe's communist bloc nations -Yugoslavia, Romania and Poland - as part of a cultural exchange program. Because the band worked wit...

A week before its actual screening on August 16, 2022 I bought tickets online to see Elvis - the first film I saw in a theater in at least two and a half years. At the time of my purchase, I had no idea that date eerily coincided with the 45th anniversary of the day Elvis Presley died way back in 1977. It's a day I remember well. My wife picked me up at the train station after work that day and told me the tragic news while driving home. Needless to say, I was shocked. The death of the King of Rock & Roll at age 42 is the epilogue to director Baz Luhrmann's excellent film about Presley, a man who has now been gone from us longer than he was alive.  The long, over two-and-a-half hour movie discusses all of the events that turned a shy, polite, mama's boy into someone who at one point was probably the most famous man in the world. Despite its length, the movie is fast paced so it holds your interest. It helps if you know something about P...

A surprisingly good documentary, The Terry Kath Experience , received rave reviews at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2017 and is now available on AXS TV , a cable network that specializes in classic rock programming. Kath was the guitar player for the 70s horn band, Chicago, an outfit that was finally inducted into the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame in 2016. Michelle Kath Sinclair was only two years old when her father died accidentally playing with a gun he didn't know was loaded at age thirty-two. Sinclair never knew Kath because she was so young when he died so, in order to fill a big void in her life, she produced this informative and moving documentary. Before we get deeper into the film some of you fine readers may need to know more about Kath because, except for musicians and many diehard fans, he is not among the more well-remembered classic rockers. Although he unjustly never makes the lists of rock's great guitarists that many music magazines and web...

As a movie offering us a good love story La La Land easily satisfies. Actors Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling are excellent and they have a great rapport with each other. They look and act like a real couple, something that is a must for a romantic film to be successful. This best film nominee of 2016 is well paced and looks great. Both things can be attributed to Damien Chazelle who is quickly establishing himself as a fine director. Much of the plot of La La Land is driven by Gosling's character who is an aspiring jazz musician. Chazelle is also the man behind the award winning Whiplash , a 2014 film about a jazz drummer at a music conservatory. Apparently, the director is a big jazz fan. La La Land gets four stars for its acting, plot, direction, cinematography and all of those neat little things Hollywood gives awards for. Unfortunately, the music is not as rewarding. The jazz, pop, show tunes, and instrumentals - all composed by Justin Hurwitz who also worked with Ch...

Love & Mercy is indeed a very good movie and based on what I've read about about both Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys (which is a lot) what we see on the screen is very accurate. It's also extremely well acted and directed, a definite thumbs up as Siskel and Ebert would have said. Praise for the film has been nearly unanimous. I agree with most observers that Paul Dano was better than John Cusack at playing Wilson, Elizabeth Banks as his future wife (Melinda Ledbetter) was drop dead gorgeous, and Paul Giamatti was perfectly evil as Dr. Eugene Landy. The movie has been discussed endlessly in the entertainment press and on music blogs everywhere so for me to write a proper movie review at this juncture would just be redundant. Instead, it's time to look at this film biography from a slightly different angle and address a glaring omission director Bill Pohlad should have included. This post offers no defense of Landy's treatment of Wilson during the time period...

What is your favorite movie scene about music? Mine is from Diner (1982). Daniel Stern's character, Shrevie, angrily chews out his wife, Beth, played by Ellen Barkin for misfiling his records when she messes up his painstakingly organized alphabetical and chronological filing system. The scene is used to show how shabbily men like Shrevie treated women in 1959. Even though I don't believe the Diner sequence was intended to be comedic, it's hysterical to me, largely because my wife and I have taken part in some friendly bantering about my CD filing system. I file movie music that is mostly or completely by a single artist, such as Mark Knopfler's Local Hero , under the artist's name instead of "Soundtracks" and this drives her crazy because she can't always find the disc she wants to play. However, it makes perfect sense to me. My second favorite scene is from Nick Hornby's High Fidelity (2000). When the staff of John Cusak's used re...

Shut Up & Sing is the feature length documentary about The Dixie Chicks that was released to theaters in the fall of 2006 and on DVD in January 2007. The cover on the box of the DVD has the following pronouncement: "Freedom of speech is fine, as long as you don't do it in public." So for those of you who are squeamish of free speech when the perpetrators are liberals here is your warning: Do not open this DVD. If you do, and you don't like what you find inside, don't blame me. In many ways Shut Up & Sing is like so many other documentaries on the lives of working musicians. The film alternates between shots of live in concert performances, clips of the band recording in the studio, in business meetings, backstage before and after their concerts, and at home with their families. Not a single performance of a complete song is to be found anywhere, and to me that has always been a major flaw with most documentaries on musicians, but this film is not ...