BEFORE: Kate Hudson carries over from "Wish I Was Here", and I think I missed the opportunity to watch this one on cable. It ran briefly, if I remember correctly, but soon disappeared. But it made my mental radar as a film to check out, so I've made a point of trying to get to those films, too. I was going to watch this one last year right after "Drugstore Cowboy", but that just didn't work out.
If this film is about a rock and roll manager, it's a great reminder that in just over a month, I'm going to table narrative films for a while and devote a month and a half to rock music documentaries. I just bought one DVD on eBay to bridge one gap in the line-up, I've got over a dozen docs and concert films piled up on DVD, and the rest is going to come from Netflix, iTunes and Amazon. There's so much overlap, with the same music stars and experts being interviewed or seen in each film, that I think there's only one break in the chain over the 45 days. The hardest part will come later in the year, when I add up how many appearances each person has made in this year's films, and I tend to count archive footage as well as appearing live on camera for a film. Like if McCartney or Jagger appear in a few seconds of concert footage in a documentary about someone else, well that's going to count. So as much work as I do putting films in a proper order, that work gets doubled at the end of the year when it's time to total everything up.
THE PLOT: A down-on-his-luck music manager discovers a teenage girl with an extraordinary voice while on a music tour in Afghanistan and takes her to Kabul to compete on the popular television show "Afghan Star".
AFTER: I was having a conversation with a friend the other day about Paul Rudd - I forget the context, but together we figured out how good he is at playing schlubs, or loser-ish type characters. This came up again in my mind while watching Zach Braff in "Wish I Was Here", because he tends to gravitate toward those same roles. Steve Carell was in that same space for a long while, but for the original perennial loser character actor, you've got to go back to Bill Murray. From "Stripes" to "Caddyshack" to "Ghostbusters", there's been nobody better poised to occupy that lane than Mr. Murray. And that was just the 1980's - more recently he took that tactic in "Rushmore", "Broken Flowers", "Lost in Translation" and "St. Vincent". And I feel like even then I'm leaving a lot of good examples out, like "What About Bob?", "Larger Than Life", "Quick Change" and "Groundhog Day"?
There's such a common thread running through his work - whether his character is rich or poor, successful or struggling, he carries that air of the lovable loser. And even when his character is rich and successful, like in "The Life Aquatic", there's a feeling that he might have a skewed view of his own self-importance, like he's not as famous as he thinks he is. And that also applies to the character he plays here, a music manager who's not as successful as he used to be, but still acts like he matters, and he's coasting on his reputation. We learn all we need to know about him in the first few minutes of the film, both from pictures with famous musicians from the 1970's (they photoshopped Bill Murray into a shot from one of Ringo's "All-Starr Band" tours) and then we see him listening to a horrible singer auditioning for him, and while he doesn't sign her to a contract, he doesn't turn her down either, plus he takes her check for expenses and implies that her fame is just a few steps away.
But his office assistant knows better, she probably fell for this scam years ago, and has been relegating to doing clerical work for him once the bookings never came. But a chance meeting in a bar connects him with a booker for a USO tour, so with the promise of government money, he books his singing assistant into a tour of Afghanistan. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, yeah, just about everything. The set-up here feels fairly standard, but watching this character, Richie Lanz, try to make something out of nothing in a war zone is oddly fascinating. With no money, no passport and only the negotiating skills he's developed over his rock career, can he survive two weeks in Afghanistan and somehow come out ahead, or at least alive?
After his star gets cold feet, he's forced to team up with an American mercenary (Bombay Brian), a local cab driver and a couple of arms dealers to bring a load of bullets to a remote village. This leads to one of the best moments in the film, Murray performing Deep Purple's "Smoke on the Water" in a Pashtun village during a festive dinner, using only a local guitar-like instrument. During this night out in the desert, he also hears the beautiful voice of a singer, and he gets that same old feeling he had in the old days, like he had when he "discovered" Madonna or Eddie Money. He knows that he has to sign this teen girl to a recording contract, only there are so many roadblocks in the way, not the least of which is overcoming the local regulations against women performing in public, not to mention appearing on TV and singing in English, of all things.
I'm sure I can come up with a lot of NITPICK POINTS here about trying to work this girl into the line-up of "Afghan Star" (that country's version of "American Idol") so late in the competition - like, if the show had been airing for so many weeks already, it doesn't seem fair to allow someone to bypass the regular audition process and go straight to the semi-finals. (This would be a bit like the equivalent of the Golden Buzzer on "America's Got Talent".) I would imagine that would be against the rules of "Afghan Star", but then again, I wouldn't know. Anyway, there's nothing to say that Richie didn't make a special deal with the producer of the show.
Eventually everyone is charmed by Murray's character, and it doesn't hurt that he has the best prostitute in the Green Zone on his side. And unlike "Heartbreak Ridge", nobody here tries to rhyme "Ayatollah" with "Rock and rollah", so that's a plus. And the story is at least somewhat true, since it's loosely based on a documentary called "Afghan Star", about what happened after the Taliban ban on music was overturned in that country. I enjoyed this one, it was surprisingly funny and light-hearted for a fish-out-of-water film set in a war zone.
Also starring Bill Murray (last heard in "The Jungle Book"), Bruce Willis (last seen in "Split"), Zooey Deschanel (last seen in "Winter Passing"), Leem Lubany, Danny McBride (last heard in "The Angry Birds Movie"), Scott Caan (last seen in "Boiler Room"), Taylor Kinney (last seen in "The Other Woman"), Kelly Lynch (last seen in "Drugstore Cowboy"), Fahim Fazli (last seen in "Eagle Eye"), Arian Moayed, Jonas Khan, Beejan Land, Sameer Ali Khan, Husam Chadat, Sarah Baker (last seen in "Tammy"), Avery Phillips.
RATING: 6 out of 10 rolls of string
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