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.

ROADRUNNER: A FILM ABOUT ANTHONY BOURDAIN****

Documentarian Morgan Neville excels at producing well-researched, precisely constructed documentaries about the major pop cultural figures of our times - not least Orson Welles, Mr Rogers and Keith Richards.  In his latest film, he focuses his attention on celebrity chef and travel journalist Anthony Bourdain.  What emerges is a picture of a deeply troubled man - a junkie who beat the habit but turned that compulsive energy into relentless travel and finally an obsessive love affair. At the end, when he had achieved fame and commercial success and travelled the world many times over, he still seemed deeply lonely and depressed, maybe bipolar, and he chose to commit suicide. 

I may be in the unusual position of not having read any of Bourdain's books and not having watched a single episode of his TV shows. I just knew his face as someone on TV and read the stories when he died. This was not a barrier to finding the film fascinating. Because I got to know Anthony threw his friends, fellow recovering addicts, superlative chefs, his ex-wife, his crew. He seemed to be a deeply funny, a wonderful raconteur, and a deeply erudite man who cared deeply about using his platform to show what was happening in the world that usually escapes mainstream attention.  What he doesn't appear to be is a particularly amazing chef! And I suspect, and the movie suggests, that we should truly see him as is a gonzo journalist. 

As a cinephile, I found the final half hour of the movie most interesting, with Bourdain dating Asia Argento in the period where she denounces Harvey Weinstein as a rapist at Cannes, and the industry that sheltered him. Bourdain seems to throw himself into the MeToo movement with a reckless boundary-less energy that suffocates his partner and drives her away.  

Overall, I found this an insightful, sensitive and honest portrait of an addict struggling with mental health issues and entirely relatable for any of us dealing with the same. I felt it could've had maybe 20-30 minutes taken out of the running time, but that perhaps reflects that I am not watching this as a pre-made Bourdain fan.

ROADRUNNER: A FILM ABOUT ANTHONY BOURDAIN is rated R and has a running time of 119 minutes.  The film played Tribeca 2021 and was released in the USA earlier this year. 

TWENTY FEET FROM STARDOM - LFF 2013 - Day Five

TWENTY FEET FROM STARDOM is one of the real gems of this festival: a music documentary that's fill of the joy of collaborating on music and that gives us insight into the unfairly hidden talents of background singers.  Veteran music documentarian Morgan Neville (CROSSFIRE HURRICANE) gathers together some of the most legendary singers you've never heard of: singers who have soul and depth and heft to hits from the Rolling Stones to Springsteen to Michael Jackson to just about very other major  act.  It's just amazing to see the Waters family sitting around their dinner table, talking about singing on the biggest selling album in history as well as the biggest selling movie in history but you'd never know them if you passed them in the street.

Where the documentary gets really interesting is when it discusses the evolution of the music industry, from soul to rock to autotuned American Idol stars.  And it also delves into the psychology and music industry shenanigans that keep some amazingly talented singers in the background.  Some, like Lisa Fischer, seem at peace with their lives:  others like Merry Clayton feel rightly hard done by; some like Darlene Love get a renaissance, and others like Judith Hill, are still struggling to cross those twenty feet.

The message this movie gives is that a lot of background singers just don't have the ego and the hunger and the luck to make it and that in some cases maybe that's a good thing.  But I couldn't help agree more with a retired former background singer who's now a preacher, when she argues that it comes down to self esteem and in too many cases, getting out from under an exploitative producer.  That was certainly the case for Darlene Love, who suffered the indignity of having Phil Spectre give her vocals to The Crystals.

I've always thought of myself as a fan of the Stones but I know that until today I never truly appreciated what went into producing the raw power on Gimme Shelter or so many other iconic tracks.  For that, I'm grateful to TWENTY  FEET FROM STARDOM for that, and, on a far simpler level, for just giving me ninety minutes of great, great music.

TWENTY FEET FROM STARDOM has a running time of 91 minutes and is rated PG-13 in the USA.

TWENTY FEET FROM STARDOM played Sundance, Toronto and London 2013. It opens in the Netherlands on November 28th and in France on December 4th.