Documentary Review

I watched Rattle and Hum, a documentary about U2's American tour in 1987.

This documentary centers around the members of the band, Bono (vocals), The Edge (guitar), Larry Mullen Jr. (drums), and Adam Clayton (bass). It also includes the legendary B.B. King, one of the greatest blues guitarists alive today. It is an obserbvational documentary because the filmmaker has no prescence and is simply filming the band. There is also very little persuasion involved.
Because it is documenting a tour, the film is dominated by concert footage. It begins with a cover of the Beatles song Helter Skelter and continues to include many songs which the band played at stops during the tour as well as a few recorded in studios along the way.
The songs are, of course, punctuated by interviews, some b-roll, and backstage footage of the band interacting. The script very consciously has some faults, most notably when the band is asked a question near the beginning and no one answers. Instead they just look at each other and quietly laugh. This is a device that does not seem very necessary, but it is forgivable as the interviews are not the most important part of the documentary, taking the back seat to other a-roll such as concert footage and also one scene where the band rehearses with a church choir.
The dramatic aspects of the film are very minimal , but they are captured in footage of the band rehearsing a song with B.B. King as well as a few more interspersed scenes in which show the band interacting offstage. As one would expect Bono is a very powerful prescence, being the lead singer, but B.B. King is the one who really dominates these scenes by telling jokes and describing his experience being in music for over four decades.
The documentary is very interesting cinematographically. The lighting of the concerts is captured very beautifully on film with angles that use backlight to outline band members as they play or sing. The lighting is mainly low-key especially during concert scenes. This projects the excitment from the actual concert onto the screen. The film is shot almost entirely in black and white, presumably for artistic reasons, but it means that when it transitions into color briefly the audience is taken by surprise. The first color shot is an empty stage with a bright red background projected on a screen behind the set. This creates a very desert-like feel that is appropriate for this film and certain songs such as "In God's Country" and "Red Hill Mining Town.
There is no narrator, and the sound is almost all diegetic. This means that the documentary is free-standing and is without any explanation, this lets the music and the atmosphere of the concerts speak for itself.


  B.B. King performing "When Love Comes to Town"

Two Unrelated Topics

I really like what I've read of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the stream of consciousness style is really interesting and it keeps me paying attention to what Oskar is talking about. I don't know if Safran-Foer is accurately representing the mind of an autistic kid seeing as neither he nor I have been diagnosed with the disorder, but it certainly seems pretty realistic and gives me a really new viewpoint on the topic. Sometimes I get the feeling that Safran-Foer is being a little pretentious in his attempt to be profound and that he's exploring his own thoughts and not necessarily the character's thoughts, but that's not often and his ideas in the book are pretty cool anyway.

Recently there has been a lot relating to Egypt in the news. This is because they are beginning the process of drafting a Constitution, the first in the coutry's history. This is very exciting because it means that ideas which began back in 2011 during the Arab Spring are being acted on. There is less sensationalism surrounding these recent events, but I think they will turn out to be more important because this is really what will finalize democracy in Egypt.

Sexism in the Movies

Recently I read an article in the New York Times Magazine (being the elitist that I am) about the extreme age differences in onscreen couples. This was especially prevalent in the forties and fifties, most notably Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in the movie To Have and Have Not, Bogart was forty-four and Bacall was nineteen, and a year after filming the movie, the two married. Of course, To Have and Have Not is a wonderful movie and I recommend it to anyone who is okay with watching movies in black and white, but it is a love story, and the age difference only serves to reinforce sexism in the movies regardless of whether the two were in love in real life. In The Graduate, a movie that might seem free of this kind of thing, Anne Bancroft (Mrs. Robinson) and Dustin Hoffman (Benjamin Braddock) were only six years apart. This is a good example of how a woman's age can heavily and unjustly affect people's perception of beauty while for men, age is a very minor factor, and even if they do really look old in the eyes of others words like "distinguished" are used to cover up the fact that they are at an age when a woman's beauty would most likely be dismissed regardless of whether it is present. This is monstrously unfair, but I also see no clear end to this objectifying practice as it is an major facet of the ingrained sexism that still survives in America today.

All respect to Meryl Streep for managing to repeatedly defeat this stereotype well into her sixties.