Post by Dracula on Oct 5, 2024 17:49:03 GMT -5
Piece By Piece(10/2/2024)
I will say that as you can probably guess this is very much an “authorized” documentary that’s not going to tell you much that Williams doesn’t want you to hear. Not that I think there are necessarily too many skeletons the film is hiding but it definitely does gloss over some of the darker moments. In particular I found the film to be irritatingly vague about a period in the late 2000s and early 2010s when Williams says he was “lost” which he blames on listening to executives about… things… before making his comeback with “Get Lucky” and “Happy.” Really though this is not a figure I necessarily want a “warts and all” take on, especially not then the story is being brought to the screen with Legos. And what of that use of Legos? It would be easy to dismiss this format as being a gimmick and… well it isn’t not a gimmick. I don’t think there’s any sort of deep metaphor connecting the story of Pharrell Williams to toy building blocks; they’re really just a playful way to make the movie more visually interesting than the average talking heads doc it would have been otherwise. But it works! The movie tells the story of its subject well and gives you a lot of nostalgic music along the way and also gives you a vibrant and enjoyable visual presentation along the way. It’s definitely not a movie that’s going to change the world but I had a lot of fun with it and I hope it gets rewarded for trying something a bit different with its assignment even if it’s not so different that it’s breaking down the doors or anything.
***1/2 out of Five
Generally speaking, the documentaries that get the largest audiences are documentaries that play things pretty straight and not the one that try to break the mold or experiment or challenge the line between documentary and scripted feature. And yet the documentary, if you want to call it that, which will likely get the most eyeballs and certainly the largest budget this year will be one whose very status within the format will likely be debated (including by myself). That movie is Piece By Piece, a biographical account of the life of producer/rapper/singer Pharrell Williams told using the CGI lego animation style made famous by The Lego Movie and its various sequels and spinoffs. This seems like a risky approach; that animation can’t be cheap and I do wonder how much of an audience this is inherently going to have. People know Williams’ name from a couple of songs he performed like “Happy” but I’m not sure the public knows the extent of his influence, he and his Neptunes partner Chad Hugo pretty much invented the sound of pop and pop hip hop in the 2000s, but I’m not sure if he has droves of die-hard fans excited to see his story told but I’m always excited to see people try something a little different with projects like this.
There’s not a single bit of live action photography in Piece By Piece, but it does broadly take the form of a documentary. It’s directed by Morgan Neville, who’s made his career working on straightforward talking head docs like 20 Feet from Stardom, Won't You Be My Neighbor?, and Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain. Ignoring the animation this is structurally no different from any of those movies: there are no voice actors here, every character is voiced by themselves and they provided their commentary in the form of talking head interviews which are often recreated in the movie by having the characters’ Lego avatars talk to the camera. These are then augmented by Lego animated recreations of the proceedings which are, at times, fanciful and abstract and at other times just get a charge from being standard music industry experiences you wouldn’t normally associate with Legos being shown with Legos. If you ever wanted to see what the music video for the Wreckx-N-Effect song “Rump Shaker” (which a young Williams apparently ghost wrote lyrics for) would look like as a Lego set, this is the movie for you.
This is not necessarily the most obvious material for the Lego treatment, firstly because it’s a biographical documentary rather than a comical adventure movie, but secondly because Lego is a very family friendly brand and Williams isn’t always that. Williams has always had an aura of childlike wonder around him and leaned heavily into that around “Happy” but the majority of his musical endeavors have been with artist who are bit harder edged and the majority of his music has borne the “explicit lyrics” tag, so even though this movie isn’t really meant for kids (it’s meant for nostalgic millennials) a certain amount of sanitization was going to have to happen to get the approval of this toy company. So all of the songs here are the clean versions and there’s an amusing moment when it’s revealed that all of the smoke in the air of Snoop Dogg’s recording studio is being created by a guy walking around letting loose something called “PG spray.” The film mostly gets away with this though, in part because Williams himself never really lived that rap star lifestyle. He’s depicted here as someone who did grow up in the proximity of a bad neighborhood but was never really effected by the temptations of the streets and instead lived this Horatio Alger-like life in which he rose above his origins through hard work, persistence, and the ability grab at opportunities when they arises. It’s all pretty wholesome in the grand scheme of things.
***1/2 out of Five
