Post by Dracula on May 29, 2016 11:00:39 GMT -5
Sing Street(5/15/2016)
Indie Cinderella success stories, and I mean real indies not the kind of “indies” that are produced by Harvey Weinstein and feature a bunch of celebrities, don’t come around every year but when they do they sure are pleasant. The 2007 Irish film Once certainly felt like an indie sensation even if it never really did cross over. The film never played in more than 150 theaters and only made about ten million domestic, but when you consider that it was made for €112,000 that is a pretty impressive return and it can be said to have had a larger cultural impact between its Oscar win for best song and the successful Broadway production it inspired. That film starred an Irish singer/songwriter named Glen Hansard and his collaborator Markéta Irglová and at the time it was easy to simply view it as a product of those two principals rather than its actual writer/director John Carney but Carney has proven to be a bigger force than he initially seemed. He came back in 2014 with another music movie called Begin Again which wasn’t as well received as Once but which definitely had its fans. I missed that one in theaters and when I caught up with it on blu-ray I didn’t love it but it was a good movie and one I probably shouldn’t have slept on. Because of that I’ve opted not to make the same mistake twice and diligently went to see his newest movie Sing Street even though its trappings had me a little suspicious.
Sing Street is set in Dublin in 1985 and focuses on a fifteen year old kid named Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) whose parents (Aiden Gillen and Maria Doyle Kennedy) are constantly fighting and are also in some bad financial straits. Because of these financial problems Conor is transferred from the nice catholic school he’s been attending to a less nice catholic school that’s being run by an authoritarian priest. Alienated and aimless, Conor suddenly sees himself drawn to a slightly older girl named Raphina (Lucy Boynton) who lives at a “home for girls” across the street from his new school. In order to impress her he says that he’s in a rock band and invites her to be in his bands’ music video. She says she’s open to the idea, which is sort of a problem because it means he needs to form a band on short notice. This would seem to be a recipe for disaster but the band he ends up forming with classmates actually turns out to have a kernel of talent but it isn’t entirely clear what direction this will take him in.
I’ll say straight up that this movie was always going to be at a bit of a disadvantage for me because I have something of an allergy for coming of age movies, especially when they appear to be autobiographical. It isn’t that it’s impossible for coming of age movies to work for me but they need to really hit just right and if they don’t I tend to recoil. Normally filmmakers lean on the autobiographical coming of age films for their debut film because people keep telling them to write what they know and the only things that twenty-something first time directors know about are stories about what it’s like to be a confused teenager dealing with trivial problems. And yet, John Carney seems to have gone to this well for his third major film (sixth if you want to include the three indies he made before anyone was keeping track) at the age of 44. I am of course making some assumptions when I throw around “autobiographical.” The film is about a 15 year old Dubliner in 1985 with an interest in music and Jon Carney was a 13 year old Dubliner in 1985 who would certainly grow up to have strong feelings about music, I don’t think it takes too much of a leap to guess that this is very much a nostalgia trip about his own youth, especially given the dedication at the end of “to brothers everywhere.”
So, I guess this had a bit of an uphill battle to impress me and I don’t know that it managed to sway me but I can see why a lot of people are going to like it. Carney definitely seems to have a grasp on the time and place he’s depicting and definitely brings some heart to the table. The film’s trailer takes the odd approach of namedropping bands that are on the soundtrack as if they were the stars of the film which in this case are the mid-eighties pop-rock acts like Duran Duran and The Cure. I’m not sure if these acts have been re-assessed in the poptimist era but they have not in my experienced been the most critically respected acts out there. Carney does seem to make a pretty good argument for them though and suggests that their appeal lay in the way they were a distinct break from the old British rock template set down by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. The high billing of these acts is also curious in that their music actually takes something of a backseat in the actual movie to the original, if slightly derivative, compositions of the film’s fictional band. The original music in the film, which was mostly written by Carney himself and a guy named Gary Clark who was behind a number of 80s bands that I’m not familiar with but which I’m sure are well respected by all the right record store nerds, is actually fairly respectable… maybe a little too respectable. This is, after all, a band that was formed on the fly by fifteen year olds who had minimal musical experience or maturity… how the hell are they making music this decent?
I’m not going to be completely dismissive of the idea that these kids could legitimately make some good music at their age, stranger things have certainly happened, but as a rule it’s pretty unlikely. If you look at a similarly themed Swedish movie from a couple of years ago called We Are the Best took a more realistic approach by celebrating the spirit of its junior musicians while also admitting that their oeuvre isn’t exactly going to be the stuff of bestselling soundtracks. The thing is, having a band like this form and still sort of fall on its face would kind of go against John Carney’s ethos. Over his last three movies Carney has outlined a very clear message, one that wouldn’t be too out of place on an inspirational poster: “don’t procrastinate, follow your dreams and do the great things you were destined to do” and he seems to have gotten less and less subtle about this as he’s gone. With Sing Street it feels to me like he’s taken this to a bit of a crazy extreme by applying this to people who are straight-up children. As I watched the movie I was like “dude, can you maybe let this kid graduate from high school before you demand that he drop everything and achieve his dreams?” Maybe I’m just a little too cynical for this. This is a bit of an odd one for me, the movie is certainly watchable and there are parts of it that certainly work but it has a vibe that I just cannot jive with and I’m left with the overwhelming feeling that its director is secretly returning to the well too many times and with diminishing returns.
**1/2 out of five.
Indie Cinderella success stories, and I mean real indies not the kind of “indies” that are produced by Harvey Weinstein and feature a bunch of celebrities, don’t come around every year but when they do they sure are pleasant. The 2007 Irish film Once certainly felt like an indie sensation even if it never really did cross over. The film never played in more than 150 theaters and only made about ten million domestic, but when you consider that it was made for €112,000 that is a pretty impressive return and it can be said to have had a larger cultural impact between its Oscar win for best song and the successful Broadway production it inspired. That film starred an Irish singer/songwriter named Glen Hansard and his collaborator Markéta Irglová and at the time it was easy to simply view it as a product of those two principals rather than its actual writer/director John Carney but Carney has proven to be a bigger force than he initially seemed. He came back in 2014 with another music movie called Begin Again which wasn’t as well received as Once but which definitely had its fans. I missed that one in theaters and when I caught up with it on blu-ray I didn’t love it but it was a good movie and one I probably shouldn’t have slept on. Because of that I’ve opted not to make the same mistake twice and diligently went to see his newest movie Sing Street even though its trappings had me a little suspicious.
Sing Street is set in Dublin in 1985 and focuses on a fifteen year old kid named Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) whose parents (Aiden Gillen and Maria Doyle Kennedy) are constantly fighting and are also in some bad financial straits. Because of these financial problems Conor is transferred from the nice catholic school he’s been attending to a less nice catholic school that’s being run by an authoritarian priest. Alienated and aimless, Conor suddenly sees himself drawn to a slightly older girl named Raphina (Lucy Boynton) who lives at a “home for girls” across the street from his new school. In order to impress her he says that he’s in a rock band and invites her to be in his bands’ music video. She says she’s open to the idea, which is sort of a problem because it means he needs to form a band on short notice. This would seem to be a recipe for disaster but the band he ends up forming with classmates actually turns out to have a kernel of talent but it isn’t entirely clear what direction this will take him in.
I’ll say straight up that this movie was always going to be at a bit of a disadvantage for me because I have something of an allergy for coming of age movies, especially when they appear to be autobiographical. It isn’t that it’s impossible for coming of age movies to work for me but they need to really hit just right and if they don’t I tend to recoil. Normally filmmakers lean on the autobiographical coming of age films for their debut film because people keep telling them to write what they know and the only things that twenty-something first time directors know about are stories about what it’s like to be a confused teenager dealing with trivial problems. And yet, John Carney seems to have gone to this well for his third major film (sixth if you want to include the three indies he made before anyone was keeping track) at the age of 44. I am of course making some assumptions when I throw around “autobiographical.” The film is about a 15 year old Dubliner in 1985 with an interest in music and Jon Carney was a 13 year old Dubliner in 1985 who would certainly grow up to have strong feelings about music, I don’t think it takes too much of a leap to guess that this is very much a nostalgia trip about his own youth, especially given the dedication at the end of “to brothers everywhere.”
So, I guess this had a bit of an uphill battle to impress me and I don’t know that it managed to sway me but I can see why a lot of people are going to like it. Carney definitely seems to have a grasp on the time and place he’s depicting and definitely brings some heart to the table. The film’s trailer takes the odd approach of namedropping bands that are on the soundtrack as if they were the stars of the film which in this case are the mid-eighties pop-rock acts like Duran Duran and The Cure. I’m not sure if these acts have been re-assessed in the poptimist era but they have not in my experienced been the most critically respected acts out there. Carney does seem to make a pretty good argument for them though and suggests that their appeal lay in the way they were a distinct break from the old British rock template set down by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. The high billing of these acts is also curious in that their music actually takes something of a backseat in the actual movie to the original, if slightly derivative, compositions of the film’s fictional band. The original music in the film, which was mostly written by Carney himself and a guy named Gary Clark who was behind a number of 80s bands that I’m not familiar with but which I’m sure are well respected by all the right record store nerds, is actually fairly respectable… maybe a little too respectable. This is, after all, a band that was formed on the fly by fifteen year olds who had minimal musical experience or maturity… how the hell are they making music this decent?
I’m not going to be completely dismissive of the idea that these kids could legitimately make some good music at their age, stranger things have certainly happened, but as a rule it’s pretty unlikely. If you look at a similarly themed Swedish movie from a couple of years ago called We Are the Best took a more realistic approach by celebrating the spirit of its junior musicians while also admitting that their oeuvre isn’t exactly going to be the stuff of bestselling soundtracks. The thing is, having a band like this form and still sort of fall on its face would kind of go against John Carney’s ethos. Over his last three movies Carney has outlined a very clear message, one that wouldn’t be too out of place on an inspirational poster: “don’t procrastinate, follow your dreams and do the great things you were destined to do” and he seems to have gotten less and less subtle about this as he’s gone. With Sing Street it feels to me like he’s taken this to a bit of a crazy extreme by applying this to people who are straight-up children. As I watched the movie I was like “dude, can you maybe let this kid graduate from high school before you demand that he drop everything and achieve his dreams?” Maybe I’m just a little too cynical for this. This is a bit of an odd one for me, the movie is certainly watchable and there are parts of it that certainly work but it has a vibe that I just cannot jive with and I’m left with the overwhelming feeling that its director is secretly returning to the well too many times and with diminishing returns.
**1/2 out of five.
