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Reviews
Wild Palms (1993)
Jim Belushi Ruins a Sometimes Compelling Story
There are some interesting ideas and subplots in this series, but you are always taken out of the series every time Jim Belushi is onscreen. An atrocious actor by any standard, I particularly remember a scene where he cries that is laughable. He ruins any possibility that this series had. It is ahead of its time but I think most viewers will find it unwatchable I'm the end due to Belushi being the main protagonist. And many of the ideas are too vague to feel like you have a concrete idea of what they are talking about and how they work in this futuristic world. It may have worked better as a comic book.
Beautiful Noise (2014)
So poorly done, hard to know where to start.
First off, the promotional poster rips off Brian Eno's comment that only 5,000 people bought the first Velvet Underground's first record, but they all started bands. The poster for this movie says "They didn't sell a lot of records, but everyone who heard them started a band". Heard who? The three bands at the top of the list actually sold quite a few records. My Bloody Valentine's Isn't Anything sold 60,000 copies in a few years after its release going Silver in the UK. Pretty good for being on a an indie label like Creation Records. Cocteau Twins and JAMC both got picked up by majors because they were selling decent amounts or records. This was obviously director's Eric Green's first movie and he forgot to do research or have a premise. Yeah, you want to research a topic if you make a movie about that topic. If you actually do the research, the whole Shoegaze "genre" which isn't even arguably a genre as there's nothing that these band have in common, all started as a result of MBV's Isn't Anything in 1988. No one ever mentioned any larger trend surrounding the releases of the Cocteau Twins or JAMC before 1988. He just rewrote history to include a million bands. The shoegaze thing happened when these bands tried to copy MBV starting around 1990 but they did it using guesswork and modulating pedals (echo, reverb, chorus, phasing, flanging, etc) that MBV avoided. (MBV used reverse reverb combined with the unique tremolo system on the Jazzmaster as their starting point, but no one even tried to copy that as a jumping off point. If he'd done any research, he would have understood that.) But the movie doesn't tell any story; its literally a collection of random interviews with no form. Its just a mess. The bands in the British Invasion were all British or from the UK; I've no idea what this random collection of bands has in common. People have been using pedals for years to make nebulous sounds. Except for MBV, for the most part, none of these bands did anything that the Beatles hadn't done already, and done better. I like most of these bands, mind you. I just don't see what the premise of the movie is. Its all so random. Watch it and see if you can figure out the premise or story it's telling. I haven't a clue. But he edited a lot of random interviews together so I guess that's something requiring skill (if you're a monkey.) Completely wasted opportunity. Ane he crowdfunded this nonesense. Glad I didn't know about it or give money.
The Pedal Movie (2021)
Another mediocre documentary on an interesting subject
Documentaries are relatively cheap and easy to make compared to a feature film. They still require a huge amount of work and significant money, but its possible to come out of nowhere and make a great documentary without a huge budget or much experience. This is not one of those great documentaries. It's worth seeing because the topic is so interesting and there's no other film on the topic as far as I know, and it'soverdue, but its all over the place, and I really questions a lot of their choices. A much better film about several of the topics in this documentary could have been made. Like a lot of medicore documentaries, they touch on too many topics without really giving you any definitive history or even a consistent them. They kinda just throw it all in there. And because its a documentary and not a fictional drama, you don't notice just what a mess it is. Still worth watching, just could have been so much better if they had narrowed the focus and stayed on track instead of touching on everything under the sun, and the latest trends which may not be so relevant in a few years. I'm thinking many part of the second half will age very poorly. It certainly didn't feel remotely definitive on even one topic covered.