Greetings! Have you ever wondered if a movie's worth blowing the money on to see at the theater or what to add next to your NetFlix queue? Then you've come to the right place! Enjoy!
In honor of it being the 21st night of September, it's time to catch up on Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial vs That's the Weight of the World), director Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson's documentary about the seminal 1970s R&B/soul/funk band that influenced many artists including Prince, Michael Jackson, and even Stevie Wonder.
Focusing on founder Maurice White, who was abandoned by his mother at age 5, an event that would color his personal and professional relationships forever, the doc traces his interest in music which led him to move from his birthplace of Memphis to Chicago where he became a session drummer for Chess Records and then joining noted jazz figure Ramsay Lewis's trio. Wanting to express himself more, he left the prestigious jazz gig and formed what would eventually become Earth, Wind & Fire.
It was initially a bumpy start as White and company struggled to find a focus that would cross over. One show opening for Parliament-Funkadelic resulted in such a musical beatdown by the headliners that one EWF member jumped over to P-Funk, the band members who were still around after White reshuffled the lineup were haunted by the grooves, and mastermind George Clinton would taunt them for a decade about it. But they took the lessons they learned and evolved to the point where their massive breakout hit, "Shining Star", was the inspiration for Stevie Wonder's "I Wish" (which later became the music for Will Smith's "Wild Wild West"), a tidbit that shocks an off-camera Questlove during the Wonder interview.
White also realized they needed a SHOW to go with the music and he hired the Tony Award-winning choreographer of The Wiz to stage the show and magician Doug Henning to create illusions like a levitating his half-brother/bassist Verdine White while he played. Fortunes were spent on elaborate costumes in an Afro-Futurist style, but eventually the costs of putting on such as an extravaganza took a toll on the operation, much to the chagrin of the band members who weren't being paid very much considering. White's complicated personal life and business distractions drove further wedges between family and colleagues.
While Questlove does an OK job of laying out the life and legacy and influences EWF had, the overall pacing feels a bit slow and the coverage superficial at times. Since White died of Parkinson's disease in 2016, only archival footage and audio is available and his brief was clearly not to tear down the reputation and renown of seminal artist and his band. While flawed, Earth, Wind & Fire is a good primer of one of the Seventies biggest acts.
If you like your men behaving very badly and correctly believe Network is a documentary and American Psycho is a comedy, then the new HBO/Max Original film Mountainhead is here to reinforce your fears of gazillionaire tech bros and the generative AI deepfake world we're plummeting into.
Hugo "Souper" Van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman, Rushmore) has invited his three besties - collectively known as the "Brewsters" for never-explained reasons - to his new 21,000 sq ft, 7-bedroom mountain mansion outside of Park City, UT called Mountainhead (roll credits!) for a no stress, no deals, brofest weekend. Coming are Venis "Ven" Paris (Cory Michael Smith, May December), the owner of a web company called Traam (think Hooli if you're a Silicon Valley fan) and the Richest Man in the World; Jeff Abredazi (Ramy Youssef, Ramy), owner of AI company Bilter; and Randall Garrett (Steve Carell, Anchorman), a venture capitalist who helped the other startups in addition to running a company that sounds patterned after Peter Thiel's Palantir.
Hugo's nickname "Souper" is because at only a half-billion dollars net worth (approximately 1/460th of Ven's tally) coming from a meditation app makes him the "poorest" and thus closest to needing alms from a soup kitchen and the not-so-subtle hazing of the shortest member of the quartet begins as they diss Mountainhead with slights like, "Is that supposed to be like The Fountainhead? Who was your decorator, Ayn BLAND?" They snowmobile and hike to a mountain peak where they write their net worth on their chests, don hats symbolizing their rank - Ven (crown), Randall (captain's hat), Jeff (sailor hat), Hugo (soup ladle on a chain) - then shout their wishes into the void.
The casual intentions of weekend are interrupted by constant news alerts on their phones about the unrest sweeping the world as generative AI tools released by Traam are being used to create fake videos of atrocities which are then sparking very real and lethal reprisals as tribal groups seeking payback respond to the fake videos. As death tolls rise, Ven doesn't seem particularly bothered by the fallout, saying that it's just a rough patch and that good content will drown out the bad. (As Tony Stark said, "Not a great plan.")
However, a solution exists as Jeff's AI tools could be used to detect and expose the deepfake videos being used to propagandize and radicalize people to violence. Ven wants to buy Bilter to integrate its fact-checking AI tools so he doesn't have to roll back the new features (nor take responsibility for what it's wrought), but Jeff doesn't want his creation subsumed into Traam. Unknown to the others, Randall wants the merger to happen because he's been given a terminal cancer diagnosis and believes that Ven is on the cusp of launching a transhumanist epoch where he will be able to be uploaded and live forever in The Matrix, so to speak.
As the world's governments begin to falter, the three who aren't Jeff decide this would be a perfect time to overthrown the Old World Order and install themselves as the oligarchs of a global technocracy powered up their tech companies endless reach into governments, militaries, power grids, etc. Realizing that taking over the world at once may be too much, they decide to start small with Randall launches a rolling brownout in Belgium and Zoom conferences with Argentina to discuss being taken over by them beginning.
While this goes on Jeff is worried about his girlfriend Hester (Hadley Robinson, Little Women) who has gone on to Mexico for what he calls "a sex party" but she retorts isn't that but "a party where people have sex." While he's troubled by the chaos, he still won't sell to Ven and when Randall fears his life as the Lawnmower Man is at risk, he proposes to the others that they kill Jeff because he's messing up their plans. Because morality doesn't exist in this dojo, they all agree, but because being a megawealthy tech broligarch doesn't necessarily come with competent murder skills, it devolves into farce.
If this all feels ripped from the headlines it's because writer-director Jesse Armstrong (creator of Succession) only began writing the script in January 2025, filming for five weeks in March, and getting it finished and on HBO Max by May 31, 2025. However, it's to his great credit that he doesn't indulge in what 99% of Hollyweird would've done in their current rage state over the peasants voting incorrectly and make it into an obvious bash of Elon Musk and the Bad Orange Man.
While there are some similarities to real people if you know who's who in the techocratic elite space, Armstrong chooses to craft a more general tale of wealthy male fear (a la David Mamet's Glengarry Glenn Ross) and ego, the risks of unchecked AI, the self-anointed regard techno bros have over the rabble, while leavening it with farcical attempts at violence and how even when your best friends try to murder you, you can move past it if there's a buck to be made. His dialog doesn't stop to Basil Exposition anything for the non-nerds so you either keep up with the rapid-fire or get left behind. He trusts the audience to follow enough to understand the base emotions fueling the characters.
The performances are all strong from deft comic performers, especially Carell who's Randall could be seen as a brother to his role in The Big Short which was criminally denied an Oscar nomination. I'm not familiar with Youssef or Smith (though he was Chevy Chase in Saturday Night), but they're good as well. Schwartzman, of course, can play these weasels in his sleep.
Perhaps a more deliberately developed (read: not filmed shortly after writing) script could've honed Mountainhead's intentions to a finer, deeper-cutting edge though the rapidly evolving capabilities of generative AI may've left whatever more time in scripting in the dust. Just last month Google unveiled their new Gemini AI video tool powered by Veo3 and it's capable of producing video with audio, sound effects, camera movement, etc. like this:
Sure, it has some jankiness like the text on the signs at the rally being gibberish, BUT what happens in 2028 when a video showing "[Disfavored Politician] BUSTED Drowning Puppies While Shouting 'I LOVE NICKELBACK!'" pops up on teh Intartoobz a month before the Election and it's amplified by corrupt legacy media outlets who eagerly covered up the last President's senility & family corruption. How will we be able to trust what we're shown anymore and who is going to get even richer and more powerful while having fun running the corps which will generate and disseminate these fabrications? While Mountainhead doesn't have those answers, it is willing to posit the question, albeit in the guise of a bro comic farce.
The Max (formerly Hobo Max) Original movie Reality is an odd movie - a recreation of the serving of a FBI search warrant in 2017 on the unlikely-named Reality Winner, a former Air Force translator working for a national security contractor in Georgia. Sounds exciting, no? No, it's not. Based on the transcript of a recording by one of the agents, the big selling point is all the dialogue is directly taken from what was actually said. While this may imply added verisimilitude, in actuality it illustrates how "natural dialog" is wildly different from how people actually speak, which is banally.
Sydney Sweeney (Euphoria, The White Lotus) stars as Winner, who arrives at her Augusta home to find a pair of FBI agents (Marchánt Davis and Josh Hamilton) waiting for her. After a lot of awkward, weird conversation about securing her dog and cat and whether she has any weapons (a pink AR-15 and a Glock), she's held outside as FBI agents toss her house looking for something. She seems oddly unconcerned, not demanding what the heck is this all about, but chatting emptily about her CrossFit training and hopes to deploy to Afghanistan to utilize her Pasto translation skills.
Eventually they go inside to a bleak unfurnished spare room with nothing but a dog crate in it, no furniture to sit on, where the purpose for the search finally comes into view: They know she accessed, printed and leaked a secret document to the press (its subject and who it was sent to is redacted, but we learn it's about Russian election interference in 2016 and was sent to The Intercept) and they gradually wear her down to admit that she did it, not to "be a Snowden" - referring to the notorious NSA who exposed the shenanigans US intelligence agencies were up to - but that she was angry about the Bad Orange Man being President, though she doesn't explicitly say that.
Ultimately, she is hauled away in handcuffs and the movie ends with cards explaining that she caught a five year sentence for violating the Espionage Act while all the "secrets" she was sent to slam for were eventually exposed to the public, the implication being that she was a martyr for truth while the Bad Orange Man was bad and orange and Putin's Puppet and ORANGE MAN BAD!
The problem with this veiled thesis which is intended to give Trump Derangement Syndrone-afflicted audiences thrills down their legs is that a couple of weeks prior to its debut the Durham Report confirmed unequivocally that there was absolutely zero collusion between the Bad Orange Man and the Ruskies, the entire predicate for years of investigations and denunciations of the Bad Orange Man as a treasonous Russian asset was a lie funded by Hillary Clinton then weaponized by the highest levels of our government and law enforcement agencies to hamstring and ultimately overthrow a duly-elected President because the Deep State believes only Democrats are entitled to rule. (I only learned of this movie when seeing some liberal on Twitter soiling himself over how unfair it was for this noble #Resistance fighter to be jailed for a single document when the Bad Orange Man had stolen hundreds to sell to Russia and the Saudis, which are more lies these people tell themselves to cope with Hillary being a terrible candidate.)
But setting aside the specious thesis of the film, Reality is weighed down by its core conceit of all the dialog being exactly what was said by Winner and the agents (Free Band Name!) because beyond being able to claim that nothing was invented for dramatic purpose, all it accomplishes is that real people talk in circles about nothing interesting. I guess it's of passing note that real FBI agents don't talk like they're portrayed on TV shows, but who cares? The mic drop moment of The Social Network was when Mark Zuckerberg snarls during a deposition, "If your clients had invented Facebook, they would've invented Facebook." Was that taken from an actual transcript or was it an invention of Aaron Sorkin, who won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, probably for that line alone? I don't know, probably the latter, but sometimes drama requires creative license.
The other purpose of Reality is to provide Sweeney a showcase to alter her current sexy cherry bomb image garnered from her role as the always crying and naked Cassie on Euphoria or the super naked lead in Amazon Prime's The Voyeurs which has made her a Reddit fave. This is done by putting her in a shapeless large shirt and giving her a "no makeup" look, but she does fine with what isn't much of a role, limited to what is on the tape, conveying her reaction to finally getting hip to the fact the FBI already know the answers to their questions.
Co-writer and director Tina Satter, who originally wrote a stage version of this transcript, does what she can to make the very banal happenings not put the audience to sleep. When redacted content in the transcript occurs, she visualizes it by the image glitching and the speaker vanishing. She also intercuts photos from the real Reality's social media and FBI photos to illustrate references which also blurs the line between fact and recreation, but other than reminding use that actresses are more attractive than normal people, they add little.
With little insights to provide for an crime which barely merits a footnote's asterisk in history and told in a fashion which makes it even less compelling when you know what really happened, Reality struggles to avoid reality, so it's not a winner, but a DNF.
I never got around to watching King Richard - the biopic about Richard Williams, father of tennis legends Venus and Serena Williams - when it had its premiere run on Hobo Max concurrent with its theatrical release. The subject didn't grab me and I just never got around to it. My girlfriend did watch it and her review was, "It's a TV movie and Will Smith is Will Smith." Not really a ringing endorsement.
I may have never looped back to checking it out - I'm not a big sports movie guy - if not for it picking up six Academy Awards nominations including Best Picture, Actor, Supporting Actress, Original Screenplay, Editing, and Song. So I watched it and she was 2/3rds right: It's an overlong TV movie biopic, but Smith does bring some acting to the proceedings. It also reinforces my desire to see the Academy burned to the ground because while a passable movie, it's hardly Best Picture material and it really shows just how watered down and toothless movies have become.
There's not much plot to recap. Starting in 1991 when Venus (Saniyya Sidney) was 11 and Serena (Demi Singleton) was 10, we see Richard (Smith) taking them to the public tennis courts in their hometown of Compton where gangbangers hang around menacing them. Richard and his wife, Brandy (Aunjanue Ellis), have been coaching their girls around their paying jobs as a security guard and nurse, respectively. Their home is modest and crowded with the four of them plus three daughters from a previous marriage.
Richard believes his girls will be the best ever and has been making videotapes and brochures in a vain attempt to get sponsors and coaches, getting nowhere because who's ever heard of a top tennis player being a little black girl from Compton. No one ever says as much, but it's a factor along with Richard's overbearing manner which continually becomes a risk of blowing everything up as he challenges how things are done. Eventually he secures coaching for Venus from John McEnroe and Pete Sampras' coach, Paul Cohen (Tony Goldwyn), getting her on the juniors circuit, then getting Rick Macci (Jon Bernthal), then hot thing Jennifer Capriati's coach, to take on both girls and move the entire family to Florida to train.
King Richard has the common problem with biopics in that we know how this ends. We are never in doubt that the girls will succeed because we know they have stood astride the tennis world like giants where the only real competition was each other. So the only real interest in their story is either what they did to get there (A: practice, practice, PRACTICE) or how did Richard engineer their path to glory and how many times did he nearly blow it all up? Again, since we know that it all worked out, it's up to the movie to convince us that they wouldn't have made it without his and Brandy's diligent support or that he couldn't have wrecked his epic plan and it just doesn't make it happen.
Smith is favored to win Best Actor (as he did at the SAG Awards recently) and I can't compare him against the field because I've only seen one other performance (Bernadette Cummerbund in The Power of the Dog which didn't impress me), but when two of the others (Denzel Washington and Javier Bardem) have already won, Andrew Garfield has a long career ahead, and Bandersnatch is white and hasn't been a major movie star for a quarter century and it's been 15 years since Big Willie was last nominated, you can bet the rent.
All that said, it's a good performance. Even playing near his age (around 50), Smith can't completely dim his charm, but Richard was a fame-seeking hype man for a hot product (his daughters), so it's not going to be agoraphobic. You can see the weight of what his hopes and dreams for his daughters mean behind the bluster even when they script minimizes his faults so much that when his wife mentions previous children and failed businesses during an argument, it's a big surprise and then never mentioned again. (Seriously, this is nominated?)
Squaring off in the typical Strong Mother Keeping The Family Together When Dad Gets Vainglorious role is the nominated Ellis who embodies the strong woman behind the flighty at times man. She's good, but the character is stock. Also good are the girls playing the sisters and when the time jump happened, their looks changed so much that I checked to see if new actresses were swapped in. (There weren't.) Perhaps the biggest surprise performance was Bernthal who comes of like a peppy Robert Walden (ask your parents) as opposed to his usual fistfaced brooding roles.
Also restraining the cinematic aspects are the perfunctory direction by Reinaldo Marcus Green which doesn't do anything to make the endless tennis sequences visually interesting, leading to a samey monotony which does little to amp up the drama; the pedestrian editing has little to work with and again, this was nominated.
King Richard isn't a bad or merely mediocre movie; it's just nothing particular special as either a biopic or sports flick and really doesn't belong in this race. I didn't know much about the Williams sisters since I'm not really a sports guy other than they seem to be ubiquitous winners, and after seeing this I still don't really know much about them. Then again, it's not called Queens Venus & Serena, is it?
Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable. (It's back on HBO Max)
While it was a shocking decision by Warner Bros. to release their entire 2021 theatrical slate simultaneously for one month on HBO Max due to questions as to whether theaters would be open due to Hot Fad Plague 2020-21 and whether terrified people would want to leave their hermetically-sealed bunker to risk certain death at the movies (Narrator: "There has never been great risk. Sheeple are brainwashed idiots.") caused outrage amongst filmmakers who weren't consulted about their films being dumped to streaming - though Christopher Nolan should really sit this one out since he hasn't made a good movie in a decade and Tenet was his worst ever - the positive aspect has been that a whole lot of money has been saved by NOT going to the movies for disappointing movies. From Wonder Woman 1984 to The Little Things to Godzilla vs. Kong, there hasn't been a movie we've watched that at the end we've said, "That would've been worth paying money to see."
So this week's disappointment was Those Who Wish Me Dead, the second directorial effort by formerly solid screenwriter Taylor Sheridan (writer of Sicario, Hell or High Water, and Wind River which was his directorial debut) which also marks the return of Angelina Jolie to action movies for the first time in a decade. Unfortunately, it's all for naught no thanks to a ridiculously threadbare and coincidence-dependent screenplay.
The plot, such as it is, opens with a pair of clearly shady guys, brothers Jack (Aiden Gillen, Littlefinger from Throne Games, still unable to pull off an American accent) and Patrick (Nicolas Hoult, Beast in X-Men: First Class, and nailing the accent), presenting themselves as gas company workers to a woman in Fort Lauderdale whose husband is in the shower. They then leave, one notes the other has blood on his shirt, and as they drive off the house explodes.
We then go to Jacksonville where Owen (Jake Weber) is preparing his son Connor (Finn Little) for school. Conveniently he's watching the news on his laptop and see the explosion reported and we learn the husband was a district attorney. Owen is a forensic accountant, so he figures someone is coming for him to, so he decides to hit the road with his son.
When the assassins show up, they are conveniently able to determine he saw the news, withdrew $10,000 from his bank account, and thanks to convenient photo on the wall showing Owen with uniformed sheriff's deputy Ethan (Jon Bernthal) at a Montana survival school, a good idea where he's headed. With this knowledge, they are able to take a private jet to Montana and set up an ambush on apparently the only route to this school. Owen is killed, but Connor is able to escape. This displeases their boss, Arthur (Tyler Perry in a one-scene appearance), who tells them to get the boy at all costs. So they toss some road flares into the forest, sparking a massive blaze.
Intercut with all this is our introductions to Ethan and Hannah's (Jolie) lives. He has a six-month pregnant wife (Medina Senghore) who runs the survival school with him and Hannah is his ex-girlfriend, tormented by the demons of a tragedy the previous year in which shifting winds caused the loss of some of her team and three kids who'd somehow wandered into a roaring forest fire area to conveniently die and torment her. Now she mans a fire watch tower when not getting drunk and parachuting from the back of a speeding pickup truck. (Don't ask.)
So the orphan boy finds the broken woman while assassins and a raging forest fire moves in. Sounds like a thrilling story, right? Well, it's not. While there are some tense moments, it all feels flat and convenient like how a lightning strike just so happens to fry the radio and satellite phone in the tower, cutting them off from the outside world. (Don't they have lightning and surge protections built into these things for this possibility?)
Jolie's Hannah is so thinly written and it's been so long since we've seen her play anything remotely like this kind of character, it's disorienting, like watching Michelle Rodriguez in a Jane Austen adaptation. Frankly, any actress could've played this role, it's that anonymously vague. And will someone PLEASE feed her - she was already getting too thin in Wanted and Salt back in the Aughts, but she's so scrawny now that even the kid references it.) It's also weird to see an Angelina Jolie movie where the most badass woman is the pregnant lady as Senghore really gets some stellar beats while Jolie mostly gets beaten and repeatedly hit by lightning.
I lay the blame on Sheridan and his two co-writers for their flat adaptation of the source novel of the same name. This is the second weak adaptation from him in the past two weeks, cold on the heels of his plot-holey script for Without Remorse. Considering his first three original scripts were solid and acclaimed - Hell or High Water was nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar - what is his problem with adaptations where the story and characters are provided being so sub-par.
Ignoring the bad title which has no bearing on anything in the plot that I can tell, almost everything relies on coincidence or dumb behavior. If the killers don't blow up the DA's house, it doesn't make the news and they don't lose the element of surprise. Movie over. If Owen doesn't see the news report, they find and kill him. Movie over. If he doesn't leave his laptop unsecured (the problem with Unhinged) with a preposterously convenient web history revealing he suspected they were coming they wouldn't know to find the one photo with a cop and the name of the place he'd be going. Movie over. If they didn't kill an innocent passerby then leave her car and body where the cops could find it instead of pushing it over a cliff; if the lightning hadn't burned out the tower's communications; if, if, if.
It's hard to view as threat two guys whose elite assassin rep seems to rely on dumb luck. There's also a detail where Arthur's SUV has official government plates, but it never factors again, so why have them? And if you're wondering whether it's a good idea for a pregnant woman to be riding a horse, even allowing for the noise factor precluding a motorized conveyance, you're not alone.
Everyone involved with Those Who Wish Me Dead have done much better work in the past, so it's baffling this project amounts to a middling disappointment. The forest fire VFX are mostly fairly convincing, but it's not a disaster movie or a disaster of a movie; it's just lost in the woods.
All too often you see movies where at the end you're left wondering if anyone involved with the project actually read the script and recognized how illogical and unsatisfying it would be. Such is the case with John Lee Hancock's (The Blind Side) latest film - which is getting the simultaneous theatrical/HBO Max release treatment Wonder Woman 1984 and the entire 2021 Warner Bros slate is getting - which wastes the talents and time of its all-Oscar-winning lead cast.
Denzel Washington stars as Joe Deacon, a rural California county sheriff's deputy who is sent to Los Angeles to retrieve evidence for a local case. He is highly reluctant to go because he used to be a detective for the L.A. Country Sheriff's and left five years before under circumstances the film doles out slowly throughout.
While there he meets his spiritual successor, a young hotshot detective, Jimmy Baxter (Rami Malek), who is lead investigator for a series of unsolved murders involving young women which are reminiscent of a case that wrecked Deacon's life, health, marriage, and career. After some obligatory turf-warring, they join forces to try and crack the case with Deacon's old dog teaching Baxter's pup some new tricks.
Their hunt rapidly focuses on Albert Sparma (Jared Leto - whose name alone may as well be Murdery McMurderer), an exceedingly greasy and hinky character who is so obviously the killer that he can't possibly be the killer. While he taunts the detectives, he once made a false confession to a murder years previously, so what's his deal?
Set in oddly-specific-for-no-reason October 1990 (probably to remove ubiquitous cell phones from the mix and make communications harder) The Little Things presents itself as low-key mystery thriller, but if not for the overpowered cast, the plot would barely qualify as a Law & Order episode plot. Hancock - who apparently wrote the script in the 1990s and couldn't make it until now, which is never a great sign for a story - drips out Deacon's backstory and literally haunts him with the women whose murders he couldn't solve, but the farther along the plot progresses, he begins to conceal more than he reveals in order to maintain a mystery that's only sustained through narrative chicanery.
Things really go off the rails in the third act when characters suddenly get very stupid and seemingly change personalities in order for the events to transpire. This leads to a denouement that is both inconclusive and unsatisfying, raising more questions than it answers. Considering Hancock's track record of entertaining, if lightweight, movies like The Rookie, The Blind Side, and The Founder (dude has a thing for definite articles, doesn't he?), that The Little Things ends up so drab and forgettable and troubling is an unwelcome departure from form.
Performance-wise, Denzel is Denzel, but subdued. Carrying more weight than usual, he embodies the broken, haunted man Deacon has become. Occasionally there are the typical flashes of Denzel charisma (which his son, John David Washington of BlackKklansman and Tenet most certainly hasn't inherited), but not distractingly. Malek never really registers. Either his character is written too flat or he doesn't know how to make him three-dimensional. The MVP is Leto, who gives a flamboyant, but not cartoonish, performance as Sparma which makes the viewer question whether he's the killer or not, but is ultimately let down by the inconclusive script.
Despite its pedigree, the fact The Little Things was slated for late-January release and not Oscar season, even allowing for the havoc wreaked by Hot Fad Plague 2020-21, shows the studio knew it wasn't much of an awards prospect. I wasn't even aware this movie existed until a few days before its release. Frankly, if not for the stars, it would be an ignored TV movie or something that showed up on Netflix with no fanfare. Even with the stars and the option to not have to leave the house to watch it on HBO Max, it's the not-so-little-thing called the weak script that make it not worth the time.
What do you think of when you hear the name or music of the Bee Gees? Falsettos, white polyester, disco, and Saturday Night Fever, right? For right or wrong, their association with the top-selling movie soundtrack album in history is going to be what goes on their tombstones, but even if you're middle-aged you may be unaware of the long, repeated Lazarus act career of the Brothers Gibb (get it, BGs?) prior to the apex of disco fever.
Filling in and expanding the legacy of the Bee Gees is the mission of The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart, the new documentary exclusive on HBO Max. Using archive interview footage of fraternal twins Robin and Maurice Gibb (who died in 2012 and 2003, respectively) and sole surviving eldest brother Barry along with family and musicians including Justin Timberlake (whose participating in the SNL "Barry Gibb Talk Show" sketches with Jimmy Fallon are NOT referenced), Oasis' Noel Gallagher, and several members of their live band over the eras, the doc recounts the brothers earliest days as Brits who'd moved to Australia then returned to England after feeling constrained by Oz's small market.
Their father/manager sent tapes to The Beatles' impresario Brian Epstein who then passed them to his protege Robert Stigwood who recognized their talent and signed them in early 1967. Within a few months they had their first two smash hits with "New York Mining Disaster 1941" and "To Love Somebody." But with the sudden success - Robin had SIX Rolls Royces before he was 21! - the brothers began to drift apart, finally breaking up in 1969.
But in what would become a phoenix-like pattern, they reunited a couple years later and shortly were atop the charts again with tunes including "How Can You Mend A Broken Heart" but were eventually back in a slump and on the verge of being dropped. Taking the suggestion of Eric Clapton, who had just kicked years of addiction, they moved to Miami and moved into the house Clapton had stayed while recording his comeback album entitled with the address, 461 Ocean Boulevard.
Working with Atlantic Records producer Arif Mardin, whose suggestion for Barry to try some high-pitched overdubs on "Nights On Broadway" revealed what would become their trademark falsettos and powered that and "Jive Talkin'" as hits. Their two Miami-recorded albums, Main Course and Children of the World, which included "You Should Be Dancing" made them Kings of Disco. Naturally, this led to their being included in the soundtrack of the movie Stigwood was producing starring a fresh young TV star named John Travolta and the rest was infamy.
When the backlash to the ubiquity of disco hit in 1979, the Bee Gees bore the brunt of it since they were the biggest names in the game. Disco was dead and anyone associated with it had to be expunged from polite society. The irony is that while Saturday Night Fever is considered to have blown disco into the mainstream, it was actual the thing that prolonged a dying genre's lifespan a couple more years; it had already become played out when the movie hit.
But as they'd done before, the brothers shifted from being performers to songwriters for hire and proceeded to rack up hits for Barbara Streisand ("Guilty"), Dionne Warwick ("Heartbreaker") and Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton ("Islands In The Stream"). They gradually were able to record hits, mostly outside the USA, later in the 1980s and were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1997, which only seems odd if you only knew them from their disco days.
At its best, The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart is a very informative overview of a group which had a career that spanned decades, but almost all of it was obliterated from the public consciousness for their association with Saturday Night Fever which is but two years of their lives. (No one just things of The Wall when thinking of Pink Floyd, do they?)
But where the doc falls short is in the total omission of their involvement in the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band movie - which co-starred fellow rocker-turned-simpy-pop-idol Peter Frampton - and the egregious journey into revisionist history which has been attempted against the notorious Disco Demolition Night riot in Chicago on July 12, 1979 which is considered the death knell of disco.
The facts of that event are that Chicago shock jock and not-disco-fan Steve Dahl staged the event where anyone who brought a disco record to Comiskey Park could get a ticket to the double-header between the Detroit Tigers and Chicago White Sox for 98 cents. The bin of records was blown up during the intermission between the games and when the fans stormed the field and tore the place up, that was it for baseball game and the Sox forfeited the second game.
However, in recent years as social justice warrior wokeness has spread to suck every bit of joy from life, Disco Demolition Night has been falsely portrayed as a racist backlash by white straight male bigots to the music made and enjoyed by gays and people of color. The documentary features a black man who worked as an usher at the game who reports seeing Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye albums being turned in and since those aren't disco records, there could be no explanation other than white supremacy and racism in his or the film's eyes. (The idea that a bunch of rowdy rockers looking for a cheap night at the ballgame grabbed whatever disco-looking LP they could find to get the deal while lacking any racist intent isn't possible; no, it's RAAAAAAAAAAAAACISM!!!!)
Disco Demolition Night got extra play in my memory because being a
Detroiter meant it happened on my local sportball team's time. There was
also as similar anti-disco movement happening the Motor City with AOR
station WRIF operating a group called D.R.E.A.D. (Detroit Rockers
Engaged In The Abolition of Disco) where membership cards could be
flashed at merchants for discounts. It was a marketing stunt, not a hate
movement and it's especially hard to claim Detroit was a hotbed of
seething white racism considering it's biggest non-automotive export was
the music of Motown.
Contemporaneous with the backlash against disco was the backlash against boring rock music in the form of punk/New Wave, but you don't see anyone claiming pasty white kids were being racist against tanned California rockers like The Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, do you? In 1991, grunge blew up as the backlash to hair metal and slick Eighties pop. Then the turn of the Millennium brought a round of boy bands and Mousekabimbos to backlash against the miserable whining of grunge. That sparked the garage band days of the White Stripes et al and so on and on and on. When any generation gets bored of what corporate music pimps are cramming down their throats, they want something else, but for some reason the wokesters have decided that disco needs an oppression myth and Disco Demolition Night is their vehicle.
/rant
With the above caveats, The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart is still a worthy primer on a talented and ultimately tragic family act - the youngest brother, Andy, who had his own massive pop star career, died only five days after his 30th birthday from years of substance abuse in 1988 - that had several mini-careers in their lives. Even if you don't want to forgive them for their disco crimes against music or aren't fond of their schmaltzy pop stylings, it's still an enlightening musical journey worth taking.
