Made in Jamaica (2006) User Reviews

If you like reggae music, you'll really like this film.

[JSL26 · 8/10 · 29 October 2007]

If you like reggae music, you'll really like this film. I saw it at sold-out screening at a French Film festival in Washington (the director and producers are French). The audience, including many Jamaicans, was very complimentary afterwards.

All but one of the music scenes were filmed live and the music is great. It concentrated on performers who still live in Jamaica. The director somehow got great access to many performances in Trenchtown and the other inner-city neighborhoods in Kingston that are off the beaten tourist path.

There was a mix of classic reggae (Third World; Bunny Wailer, who is Bob Marley's half brother; the sweet-voiced Gregory Isaacs; and the dynamic Toots and the Maytals), along with a group of contemporary male and female "dancehall" performers--who while respectful of their reggae elders--have their own raucous and often crude styles. But most of them are very compelling performers.

While it's true that the "documentary" aspects could have been a bit more organized (a narrator might have helped), the film cumulatively provides a seemingly true slice of life of just how important music is in the lives of Jamaicans and also how rough life is in the mean streets of Kingston.

I understand that this film still lacks an American distributor. Someone should see the potential and grab it!

The music is great but the wrapping is simplistic

[Dr_Coulardeau · 8/10 · 19 August 2007]

This film (for those who have had the chance of seeing the film) is too much of a documentary and not enough of a musical exploration of the music itself which is the only aspect the CD shows. We do not need explanations that repeat what is in the songs. We can hear and if the songs are not necessarily in standard English, subtitles or printed translations can provide the understanding we need. They wrap up the music in settings that are so artificial that they are absurd. Songs recorded in a studio with frozen control-screens. Songs recorded in a kitchen or a bedroom. It adds nothing to the music, it adds nothing to our understanding and it brings no pleasurable extra dimension. But let's speak of the music and that is valid for both the film and the CD. Two tendencies appear very clearly. On one side the music that goes back to African traditions and the songs are committed to singing the heritage of slavery, the liberation of the blacks, the liberation of humanity beyond. It is also the assertion of a spirituality that they declare fundamentally Christian, though they seem to ignore at this moment the deeper non-Christian influence of the Rastafarian ideology that comes from Ethiopia – via Marcus Garvey – or even beyond the Vodun tradition (the old Voodoo of Hollywood) coming from West Africa. But this desire to be free as both individuals and a community is deeply human and universal and we can entirely enjoy and follow it. The second trend of these songs is coming from some men and most women. It is sexual in essence and it is the rare live stage scenes we are given in the film. It is visually aggressive in its anti-non-straight sexual relations and the postures and attitudes are explicitly sexually reducing the women dancers to some kind of brush used by the men to clean up the front of their pants. There is some change or rather evolution to introduce in that music for it to become sexually open and to advocate sexual freedom as much as racial freedom. But the music is superb. It is a music that has grown from the bringing together of two traditions, the European an the African traditions. The saxophone, the trumpet and the guitars are coming from Europe and the rhythms and rhythmic constructions are coming from Africa. Let me be very clear. Percussions are universal. The modern sets of drums used in amplified music and jazz are a specific American invention, including the blacks who have been in music since the very first day. But the rhythms used in Jamaican music, or all music coming from some African heritage, are typically African. You have a simple rhythm following the beats of the measure and that is the rhythm the singing follows, like normal dancers. But there is another rhythm behind and under, a lot faster, three or four times faster, that is frenetic and that some dancers can follow reaching the level of the trance typical of Vodun dancing. Listen to a solo of the drums in a jazz piece or concert and you will find this trance-rhythm made explicit. So the songs make the relation to Ethiopian ideology very clear, but does not make the relation to Vodun explicit, preferring a Christian reference which is at least reductive, though this tradition is obvious in the music even if it is not over-emphasized here. Listen to it and find that trance-like rhythm. And that is the typical and original musical African heritage that Jamaican music is using all the time.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne

A big music clip

[Amadoux · 5/10 · 5 June 2007]

The director himself said he was supported by Wim Wenders. But where's the inspiration that made Buena Vista S. C. ? The film is a long (too long) compilation of various Jamaican music artists (some are even lost in their own paradoxes - peace, violence ? - which the director isn't able to highlight). We'd been waiting for a special input, a guide to this music ; instead we're getting a well built editing of music clips, with the classical usual interviews between them to remind us that we're in front of a product which is pretending to be a documentary. Not at all. Splitting a few interviews between music bits takes more talent to make us hang on 100'. The set of Jamaica is almost absent, very little of the music context is shown; the concept of poverty explained by newly come wealthy stars isn't enough to explain and justify reggae & dancehall. This old recipe of making documentaries is tasteless in Laperroussaz cuisine.

Great CD, pretty good movie

[geo757575 · 16 September 2011]

As the Professor from the Sorbonne basically states, all the music is very passionate, very well executed, very soulful. The CDs are two long disks of great Jamaican music. The movie adds some visuals, but takes something away from the pure passionate gift of these great performances. Still, its a pretty amazing movie with wall-to-wall great music which exposes all the vast contradictions of the Jamaicans, and really all human groups. Great CD, good movie, great review from the Professor. If you like reggae, gangsta rap, old soul music or music performance movies, you might like this. The movie does have a point of view, and that point of view is not black and white, and twice as interesting because of that. Some of the non-performance settings for the music performance footage are a bit silly, but mostly it all flies by on the wings of great music, and footage of interesting, brilliant folks doing interesting things.