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Directed by: Duncan Bridgeman & Jamie Catto Starring: Duncan Bridgeman, Jamie Catto, Dennis Hopper, Brian Eno, Ram Dass, Grant Lee Phillips, Sharon Mitchell, Michael Franti, Tom Robbins, Kurt Vonnegut Let's start with the fact that I'd been getting around to watching this movie for a very, very long time. You may have seen the "Making of..." special on National Geographic, which I think got more publicity than the finished loving product. The accompanying album—my workout CD for years—is a trimph of world music miscegenation that makes Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel look like nationalists blowing through all-American kazoos. The album is a staple of Fusion Radio, so it's probable that some of the readers will have heard of it. Essentially, the documentary is an extension of that. These two guys, both accomplished musicians, went around the world interviewing musicians, trying to see "how the other half lives." One of the first things said in the movie, to paraphrase from Anita Roddick (who should know), is that business is the most powerful force on this earth, more powerful than politics or religion, and our lives have become, as everyone else has pointed out, those of consumerist zombies. Well, while we're busy consuming and buying and working to buy more things to consume, there are literally billions of people living on a few dollars a year, people who get cold at night and can't do anything about it, people who have nothing and are made by the pressures of the modern world to have even less than that, and we, the luckiest and richest people on the planet, don't give a gently caress. There's an interesting and probably unintentional dichotomy that comes with that last paragraph. On the one hand, everything I just said is a platitude and a cliché. On the other hand, it's all perfectly valid ideas that we should be thinking about, given how lucky you are to be reading this right now, in what is probably a fairly comfortable and insulated room. All 6.5 billion of us live on this world together, and yet it's easy for those of us in the first world to think that the first world is the world. After all, China must be a happy place to make such happy toys! Well, while the central theme of the work is the world, and encouraging miscegenation and cultural understanding and thinking to the future, there are a lot of little themes scattered throughout. Briefly, the documentary also tackles organized religion, fear of death, perception of the elderly, preservation of that which is sacred to some people, the extent to which consumerism makes the laws, and sex. One minute Tom Robbins is firing off aspersions on organized culture and its nature as a noncorporeal chastity belt and tool of female oppression, leading into another speech about how disgusted and irritated Jesus would be with the way his message is interpreted by televangelists and religious people in power. The next, Sharon Mitchell is talking about her porn years. All though this, there's music in the background. The music is the most fascinating part of this whole thing. I should know; I've been working out to it since 2002. Each song takes different musicians from around the world (always recorded at or near their homes) and mixes and matches their parts. The United States (shocker), England, India, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, Senegal, Ghana, and South Africa all get representation here. The music strings together and transitions between the various interviews. But after a while the interviews start to feel like intros and interludes in the music (which they are, really), which basically means you're watching a 118 minute music video. It's the Baz Luhrmann effect, and for a film made to challenge the lifetime pursuit of the almighty dollar, it's almost ironic to see it loaded with Luhrmann-like atmosphere and editing. But still, good music and good visuals are such that you could find worse things to fill 80% of a film. Some of the interviews, however, can be incredibly thought-provoking. An Indian funeral and subsequent funeral pyre (sans Sati, fortunately) really sticks in your head long after viewing. Arguments for theism are incredibly pervasive even alongside derision of organized religion, (I can guarantee that an atheist and a theist are going to think two entirely different things about what they're watching.) and Kurt Vonnegut and Ram Dass have some real pearls. Maori carver George Nuku talks as though escaping brand-name culture is the best thing ever to happen to him. Fred Reed, an Aborigine man dressed in traditional attire, makes points so articulate about the need for spirituality while being a part of modern society that you forget you've never seen any of what he's wearing in person in your life. (The film makes the interesting choice of juxtaposing his words with those of David Oldfield, a right-wing Australian who sees Aborigines and their culture as useless and without benefit.) Let's not get me wrong. Considering that this had a production crew of two documentarians and two camera operators, this is nothing short of an astounding achievement. Unfortunately, as I've been hinting, the achievement is not without its weaknesses. To start with the less relevant ones... Some of the best songs in the movie, with the fattest drum loops, can't be found on the 1 Giant Leap album, which is a shame because the space and the demand certainly both exist. Second, the filmmakers say they're working in 2sides2everything, a sequel project that would add some much-needed breadth, adding on Japan, China, the Middle East, and Central and South America. A little research will make it very obvious, though, that this is the film equivalent of vaporware.  Moving on to the more immediately pertinent weaknesses, the entire film is just one song after another, each overlaid with interviews such that each set has nothing to do with the previous or the next. For a documentary, it has an astounding lack of internal flow and structure, with scenes transitioning into each other with nothing more than a single quotation on a blank screen. You could probably set the DVD to shuffle the chapters and get the exact same viewing experience. Moreover, the film rarely feels like its message is really important to it, and the messages it conveys are all over the place. But these are all things that we should be thinking about anyway, and it's good—and in the case of this film, fun—to be reminded that there's a big world just outside this little glowing radium box. RATING: 4 Pros: Thought-provoking interviews. Good music. Stunning visuals. Kurt Vonnegut gets some great material in. Cons: It substance is nothing new. It gets kind of boring in places. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0312296/
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Oct 27, 2007 08:00
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