I am a huge fan of Jim White the musician, and I didn't make it through more than 23 minutes of this film. Now maybe things changed later; I'll grant that.
Right at the beginning of the film, White procures a concrete statue of Jesus. He and some others remove it from where it lies in state along the entire length of the inside of a car trunk. But when it goes into the trunk of his seemingly equally large car, it protrudes beyond the back of the car, as if it doesn't fit--so we can see White's burden. It seems a telling incident: the heavy-handed symbolism and artsy contrivance stick out from White's cinematic vehicle like...well, You Know Who.
By the time I stopped, nearly all of the people I'd seen talking were No Depression- magazine-darling musicians and other people who might have used the film toward an MFA. Not that there's anything wrong with the highly qualified and sometimes actually Southern talent here. (I especially enjoyed Harry Crews' storytelling.) But the film purports to be a sort of documentary road trip, exploring Southern spiritual culture, and instead was on its way to becoming--I repeat, I quit a third of the way in--a sometimes evocatively pretty, sometimes maddeningly awkward music video.
Why drive around the Louisiana bayous if the people you "find" playing banjos and singing spirituals are, like you, likely to have tour schedules on MySpace?
I emphasize: Jim White is a musical genius, and this film should not dissuade anyone from checking out his work or that of artists like Crews, the Handsome Family, etc. It's just an unfortunate misstep as a movie.
Right at the beginning of the film, White procures a concrete statue of Jesus. He and some others remove it from where it lies in state along the entire length of the inside of a car trunk. But when it goes into the trunk of his seemingly equally large car, it protrudes beyond the back of the car, as if it doesn't fit--so we can see White's burden. It seems a telling incident: the heavy-handed symbolism and artsy contrivance stick out from White's cinematic vehicle like...well, You Know Who.
By the time I stopped, nearly all of the people I'd seen talking were No Depression- magazine-darling musicians and other people who might have used the film toward an MFA. Not that there's anything wrong with the highly qualified and sometimes actually Southern talent here. (I especially enjoyed Harry Crews' storytelling.) But the film purports to be a sort of documentary road trip, exploring Southern spiritual culture, and instead was on its way to becoming--I repeat, I quit a third of the way in--a sometimes evocatively pretty, sometimes maddeningly awkward music video.
Why drive around the Louisiana bayous if the people you "find" playing banjos and singing spirituals are, like you, likely to have tour schedules on MySpace?
I emphasize: Jim White is a musical genius, and this film should not dissuade anyone from checking out his work or that of artists like Crews, the Handsome Family, etc. It's just an unfortunate misstep as a movie.