Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Take part in the festivities by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them! So, I had already basically done this for last year's "Movies About Music/Musicians" week, before realizing that movies about REAL-LIFE musicians were verboten. So this week was pretty easy to do. Here you go, the good, the bad, and the ugly of music biopics. In that order.
De-Lovely (Irwin Winkler, 2004) And right off the bat I MAY be cheating a bit, because Cole Porter wasn't so much a musician as a songwriter, but I don't care. This is far and away my favorite music(-adjacent) biopic, an easily entertaining - but NOT easy - film with two lovely central performances by Kevin Kline (in the role he was born to play) and Ashley Judd. Unlike the earlier Night & Day with Cary Grant, De-Lovely doesn't shy away from Porter's taste for men, but that's just one superficial reason why this is a superior picture. Solid filmmaking all around, plus cameos from a rogue's gallery of music stars singing some of Porter's most famous songs. What's your favorite? Mine is probably John Barrowman singing "Night and Day", with Vivian Green's poignant "Love For Sale" (and its stunning one-take scene) in a close second.
Get On Up (Tate Taylor, 2014) It's sad, really, because all the elements were there for this James Brown biopic to really soar. But unfortunately, the film decides to jump around in time whenever it feels like it for no real reason at all. Chadwick Boseman is electrifying as the Godfather of Soul, Nelsan Ellis and Dan Aykroyd offer reliable support, Brandon Mychal Smith makes a killer cameo as Little Richard, and Viola Davis is her typical stellar self as Brown's mother. The costumes, hair, and makeup are great. The music and choreography are fabulous. But the film's structure and editing are so far gone as to make this one very nearly unsalvageable.
Jersey Boys (Clint Eastwood, 2014) ...but then again, Get On Up for all its faults is nowhere near as mind-numbingly awful as Clint Eastwood's adaptation of the hit Broadway musical about the rise and fall of The Four Seasons. The stage show has such tremendous energy as it barrels through its story and the hits that happened along the way, but Eastwood sucks it all dry - and I'm not just talking about the severely drained color palette. The actors are almost entirely at sea (John Lloyd Young, who won a Tony for playing this part, is hopeless despite his golden voice), the musical numbers are flatly staged (not to mention the downright embarrassing sound mix on the film's big number, "Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You"), and the few issues with the stage show's script are somehow even worse in this version. And worse than all that, it's boring as all hell - the filmic equivalent of listening to an AM radio oldies station that keeps fading in and out when you're a kid on an hours-long road trip with your parents and they refuse to change the station.
