BEFORE: Michael Stuhlbarg carries over from "Pawn Sacrifice", and I'm getting the feeling this guy is a chameleon of sorts - well, at least he's a character actor and he's worked a LOT in the last couple of years, so that helps make my linking a lot easier, and it allows me to get to some films that I've been very curious about, or at least very interested in crossing off the list. Sometimes it's hard for me to tell the difference. Two more Stuhlbarg appearances this week before I go on break - so this guy has a shot at beating Zach Galifianakis, Jason Sudeikis, Nick Offerman and maybe even Chris Hemsworth for the 2nd most appearances this year, after Fred Astaire. Stuhlbarg's on track to be in 7 films that I've watched in 2017, which is a pretty good showing for an actor I never noticed before, not until he had a role in "Fargo" this last season. Chris Hemsworth may also appear in 7, if I add in "Rush" at the last minute, but that would mean I'd have to drop a film from the October chain. I need to think about this first, though.
THE PLOT: An exploration of the life and music of Miles Davis, depicting his attempts to get his career back on track following a period of inactivity and drug addiction in the 1970's.
AFTER: Once again, it's a film following this trendy recent trend of breaking a notable person's life up into fragments, and letting them splay out across a movie screen in (more or less) random order. This trend shows no sign of slowing any time soon, and come the end of this Movie Year, I'll need to make a full accounting of how many films followed this ridiculous pattern. Why does everyone seem to hate linear narratives so much? And can you really say that a bio-pic has done justice to its subject, by focusing on just a few key (in this case, probably fictional) scenes in his life? I mean, all of us live in our lives in linear fashions, don't we? Why do recent films have such a hard time representing this?
Unfortunately, I don't know enough about the life of Miles Davis to be able to put this fractured movie back into some kind of linear order. I get that he didn't release any music for a period of about five years, during which time he had both a drug addiction and some health problems with his hip. But if the goal here was to introduce Miles Davis to people like me who did NOT follow his career or listen to his music, or know anything about the story of his life, then I have to say that the format was not conducive to educating me, because now I'm more confused about what he did and what happened to him than ever.
Plus, this malarkey with the journalist from Rolling Stone who wanted to interview him, but also kind of wanted to steal the recording demo for his new album - if this part of the story never happened, then it's a complete waste of everyone's time. You can't give us a feel for who Miles Davis really was if you show us things that didn't really happen.
Unfortunately, I don't have much of an ear for Davis' music, or jazz in general, it all sort of ends up sounding the same to me - which I think has a lot to do with the freeform nature of jazz, but that comes at a cost, if you ask me. I honestly can't tell Miles Davis from Charlie Parker or Thelonius Monk, sorry. The only inroad I have into jazz is knowing what instrument some of the musicians are famous for, so if I hear a prominent clarinet, I could guess Benny Goodman, or if I hear a lot of trumpet, that could be Dizzy Gillespie or Louis Armstrong - but beyond that, I'm kind of clueless.
So with that in mind, I'm apparently missing out on whatever insight I was supposed to get by hearing the results of his varying creative process, as seen at different points in his life. Since the music all sounded the same to me, I didn't get how what was going on his life got represented in the music at the different stages. Here, I'm not sure if the problem was inherent in the film or my lack of hearing differences in the music, but either way, whatever message was meant to be conveyed was not received by me.
There was a little bit of a story when he was arrested for loitering outside the nightclub that he was playing at, and this almost came close to making a point about racism in America in the 1960's, but in the end this felt like a throwaway nod to the times, nothing really came of it, which is a shame, because the way this country is going right now, this part could have been relevant.
Also starring Don Cheadle (last seen in "Captain America: Civil War"), Ewan McGregor (last seen in "I Love You Phillip Morris"), Emayatzy Corinealdi, Lakeith Stanfield (last seen in "Snowden"), Brian Bowman, Christina Karis, Austin Lyon (last seen in "Pitch Perfect 2"), Jeffrey Grover (last seen in "Compliance"), Theron Brown, JT Thigpen, Morgan Wolk (last seen in "The Perks of Being a Wallflower"), Nina Smilow, Drew Lachey, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter.
RATING: 4 out of 10 signed album covers
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