MR SOUL! - BFI London Film Festival 2018 Preview

MR SOUL! is why I love documentary film. It's a movie that takes me into a subject that I had no knowledge of, gives me a rounded and intimate look at it, and leaves me with a passionate appreciation of its achievement.  It broadens my mind and uplifts my heart.  The only sadness is that the documentary's subject - the late 60s and early 70s african-american cultural TV show Soul, hosted by subversive icon Ellis Haizlip - didn't survive longer, and to my lifetime.  But maybe I should just be thankful it existed in the first place. 

The story starts in the mid-60s where mainstream TV is dominated by straight white narratives and African Americans are depicted on TV as people to be pitied or vilified - victims of poverty or perpetrators of crime.  Into this space comes an openly gay black man - already something radical - called Ellis Haizlip. He starts a national PBS TV show out of New York. The show features proud, "woke" black people - demonstrating their talent in the sphere of music, poetry, dance, philosophy, literary critique.... That level of unashamed black pride is itself subversive and radical. But more explicitly, the show doesn't shy away from politics - interviewing James Baldwin and Miriam Makeba. Perhaps most significantly - but also eerily - we see Ellis interview Louis Farrakhan with an audience packed with members of the Nation of Islam.  Ellis tackles the homophobia inherent in their beliefs bravely. 

The sad part of this story is that I can't think of something similar even in our time - a mainstream tv show where black culture is highlighted and celebrated and interrogated without being mediated by white media.  And it makes it all the more sad when Nixon tried to exert influence on the station to cancel the show that Ellis refused to go out onto the streets and protest. Instead, this seemingly amazing show ended and a beautiful moment was lost. Still, for the sadness of its end, I found this film profoundly inspiring, and hope that something similar can be fired up by the current generation of creators.

MR SOUL! has a running time of 110 minutes. The movie played Tribeca 2018. There are still tickets available for both screenings at the BFI London Film Festival 2018.

MILES AHEAD

MILES AHEAD is a movie I admired more than enjoyed, which is odd because I love jazz, spent much of my early 20s in a Miles Davis, and have great respect for the talent of Don Cheadle - the lead actor, director and engine behind this whole production.  He conceives of the biopic of the iconic jazz trumpeter as a story within a story.  The framing device sees Miles in his later years, on the verge of coming out of his self-imposed, drug-fuelled exile, and inventing a funky electronic afro-jazz.  Our window into the story is a journalist played by Ewan Macgregor - a kind of enabler and partner in crime who will do anything for access to the Davis story, including scoring him drugs and brandishing a firearm as they careen around time in some kind of caper whose purpose is never quite clear, all the time scored to Davis' music.  Every now and then Davis sees an album cover featuring a photo of his wife, and this prompts a flashback to his earlier days as a pioneer of Cool Jazz. Miles mark one has short hair and a preppy jacket that were later replaced by a more race-conscious look. We realise that he loves his wife, but this doesn't prevent him from being abusive.  The regret at his marriage's failure stays with him into the later framing device years.  

The movie is really good at conveying the excitement, pace and freedom of Davis' playing, and visually underlines it with chase and fight scenes, cut to his tunes.  But the movie is at its most emotionally affecting when it slows down and shows us the real struggles he faced. The most poignant scene occurs when a flirtatious white woman asks him to escort her out of the club at which he's playing.  The beat cop takes against this inter-racial couple, even though they aren't one, and provokes Davis into a scuffle which results in his arrest.  All of this remains deeply relevant to our times.

I regret that there aren't more quiet moments of power like this and that the movie is too caught up in the Macgregor/Cheadle chase scenes in the framing story.  I admire the intent of conveying improvisation in music through improvisation in life but it feels as though this movie is caught between too stalls - between a more conventional approach and a free jazz style. The result is a film that is curiously uninvolving.

MILES AHEAD is rated R and has a running time of 100 minutes. The movie played Sundance, Berlin and SXSW 2016 and opened earlier this year in the USA and Canada. It's currently on release in the UK and Ireland and opens in July in Norway, Portugal, Denmark, Peru and Spain, in September in Poland and in December in Japan.