PIECE BY PIECE**** - BFI London Film Festival 2024 - Closing Night Gala

Multi-talented musician, rapper, producer, fashionista and all around creative genius Pharrell tells his life story in a documentary wherein it was shot conventionally and then over-drawn in Lego animation. I guess this is a thing now.  After all, we are getting Robbie Wiliams played by a chimp this week. Why? I dunno. Why not? The result is colourful, creative, imaginative and delightful. Who doesn't work to see Snoop Dogg as a minifig?  And by the way, making this film also made Lego become even more inclusive by radically increasing their range of skin colours and textured hair in the minifig range.

The problem with the technique is that it is distancing - and I think this may be why Pharrell chose it. He gets to completely control the narrative to the point of not revealing his or any of the interviewees' facial reactions to the questions being asked. As a result, I feel like acclaimed documentary director Morgan Neville (20 FEET FROM STARDOM) was stymied from the start.  The doc is therefore as fascinating and well constructed as we might expect from Neville. But Pharrell's falling out with Neptunes band mate is elided over, as just one example, and we get nothing about the Blurred Lines controversy, as another. The resulting film feels like hagiography. And I am a Pharrell fan. But I feel there was some grittier stuff we needed to get into.

PIECE BY PIECE is rated PG and has a running time of 93 minutes. It played Toronto and London 2024 and was released in October.

iPad Round-Up 2 - THE INTERRUPTERS

Steve James' (HOOP DREAMS) documentary, THE INTERRUPTERS, is an absolutely fascinating, compelling and politically incisive film about tackling gang-related crime in contemporary Chicago. He shadows volunteers working for a project called CeaseFire - a programme that takes former gang-members and has them "interrupt" violent situations before they happen, trying to talk  kids down from dangerous situations.  Sounds simple enough. But within this simple format comes a nuanced, emotionally affecting exposition of life in deprived inner cities - a film that is as incisive and unblinking as David Simons' superb THE WIRE, but without that show's defeatist message. If there is a "star" in this documentary, then it has to be Ameena Matthews, a former gang-member in the same mode as THE WIRE's real-life Snoop. She has turned her life around, become a committed muslim, but still has that same scary authority that she must have had as a gang leader. She speaks so much sense, so straightforwardly, that you wish her influence were greater, that there were more people like her working the streets. Few Hollywood starts speak with such charisma and authority, and it's her presence that transforms this film from being earnest and didactical into being a genuinely fascinating watch.  

THE INTERRUPTERS played Sundance 2011 and went on limited release in the US and UK in summer 2011.