In which the cinematic and literary history of the American South is recounted and skewered by the inimitable Rich Hall.
Rich on musical bio-pics (from 43'23):
Southern music was a shadowland of honkytonk hell and rockabilly heaven: Drugs, murder, alcohol, miscegenation, and illumination. And Hollywood would repeatedly and always belatedly try to capture this demonology.
.....
The one and only Hank Williams. If Hank Williams is a one-and-only kinda guy, then why is someone else pretending to be him? Of all the shitty things that Hollywood does to sell films, the absolute shittiest, is when they try to crank out some musical bio-pic. A musical bio-pic exploits the details of an artist's life, and pigeonholes 'em, homogenizes them, and in the end, just lies about it. Patsy Cline died in a plane crash near Camden, Tennessee, eighty miles west of Nashville. And yet in the bio-pic of her life, Sweet Dreams, the producers decide to have her plane crash out in the American desert in the southwest.
The screenwriters of a bio-pic are forced to attribute character changes to specific events in that artist's life. That's not how life happens! Ray Charles becomes a heroin addict in the film Ray because his brother died, when in fact, Ray Charles became a heroin addict because he kept shootin' fuckin' heroin into his arm! It's reductive lies. It's reductive emotions. It's reductive talent. People do not listen to the music of Johnny Cash for any other reason than that it allows them to tap into a greater depth of emotion. Watching Joaquin Phoenix pretend to be Johnny Cash is about as goddamm illuminating as if Johnny Cash had stopped a concert midsong, and started doin' scenes from Gladiator.
But wait a minute Rich, wait just a cotton-pickin' minute. That's what you're sayin': Didn't Joaquin Phoenix get an Academy Award nomination for playing Johnny Cash, and...and didn't Jamie Foxx win an Academy Award for bein' Ray Charles? Well, yes they did. What that means is that Jamie Foxx did a slightly better job of raping Ray Charles' corpse than Joaquin Phoenix did of raping Johnny Cash's corpse.
Actors don't portray musicians out of some sense of honor or admiration. They do it because it's Oscar-bait. But Rich...you're sayin', what if it turns that person on to their music? If you do not have the innate ability to seek out someone's music on your own, and you have to wait for Hollywood to do it for you, then you are some sort of hillside grazer of culture. You're a sheep, a cow, what is biologically classified as...a ruminant...Fuck you!
Not available for purchase as far as I can tell. Which is a shame.
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