The soothing, all encompassing power of music and song is vividly demonstrated in the documentary Young@Heart. The film follows the 24 members of the Young at Heart choir—headquartered in Northampton, Mass.—as they prepare for a 2006 performance. The gimmick of the movie is that the chorus is made up of members whose average age is 80 yet perform songs by Sonic Youth, the Clash, Coldplay and the Ramones. It sounds as dubious a premise as the old lady singing 'Rapper's Delight' in Adam Sandler's The Wedding Singer. But here, the seniors aren't used to score cheap laughs and the result is alternately delightful, inspiring and heartbreaking.________________
Bob Cilman in Young@Heart. Photo by Brandy Eve Allen
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The movie, by British documentarian Stephen Walker, starts on a high note. A camera follows chorus member Eileen, 92, as she slowly but confidently walks downstage to the microphone and queries the audience 'Should I Stay Or Should I Go?' in a brisk English accent. It's immediately apparent, as Eileen and the rest of the chorus members continue performing the Clash standard, that they and the audience are having a great time. We then meet members of the chorus, which was started in 1982 by Bob Cilman, the choir's director, as they prepare an adventurous program for their upcoming concert.
But the chorus members fearlessly dive in, literally rarin' to go. As rehearsals progress, we are given background on several of the members and hear and see how much the choir has enriched their lives. Oddly, we find out nothing about Cilman's background or where his passion for pairing up old folks with rock and punk songs stems from ( an explanation the film could have used ) .
We also witness the poignant return of Bob and Fred, who will duet on Coldplay's 'Fix You.' Both have been away from the chorus due to illness and their introduction comes just as the charm of the film is fading. Fred, especially, is a shot of tart energy the movie needs after the material has been stretched out with music videos by the chorus.
You're not sure if either Bob or Fred ( or several others for that matter ) will make it through to the concert, and the movie becomes a genuine cliffhanger so that by the time we reach the pivotal moment that the performance of 'Fix You' is tremendously moving. The overall effect of the old folks doing the 'now' tunes is somewhat like that of the plaintive, unadorned beauty of the little grade school girl singing the Eagles' 'Desperado' as part of the Langley Schools Music Project ( the offbeat CD of the found recordings made in the mid-seventies of a group of Canadian grade school kids singing then current songs by the Beach Boys, the Carpenters, and David Bowie ) .
At a certain point, no matter the musical genre, songs are there to be stripped down to their basics ready for both singer and audience to intuitively tap into their universality. It's supremely touching, life-affirming, and oddly comforting that both a record by grade-school kids and the performances in Young@Heart by the elderly choir—two age groups that are not supposed 'to get' or like this music—would find a way to not only perform it, but to transform it for themselves and their audiences in the process.
Jazz singer Norah Jones makes her acting debut in Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai's U.S. debut My Blueberry Nights, a road movie that wends its way from New York to Memphis and then on to the West Coast. The story follows Jones as Elizabeth/Beth/Lizzie, a waitress who encounters Jeremy ( Jude Law ) at his bakery in Manhattan just after being jilted. For weeks, Elizabeth stops by the bakery to sample Jeremy's blueberry pie and other desserts in an attempt to mend her broken heart as the train roars overhead ( a Kar Wai staple ) . But one night—just like that!—she takes off and Jeremy, who has fallen under her languorous spell, only has her intermittent postcards to dream upon.
Elizabeth is surrounded by 'characters' as she meanders along—which is good, because she's nothing more than a bland cipher at the periphery of the action. The movie—which is filmed with a lot of slow-motion montages and Kar Wai's signature striking, muted color—is only momentarily galvanized by the presence of the outsized characters Elizabeth encounters. These people include David Strathairn as a lovelorn cop, Rachel Weisz as a hot tamale and Natalie Portman as a feisty gambler. Portman gets a Southern accent, blonde highlights, lots of jangly jewelry and a hot sports car to zoom around in—but thank goodness for this as both she and Weisz give the movie a much-needed pulse.
A much longer version was screened at Cannes but My Blueberry Nights at any length doesn't begin to answer the question why Jones—who seems nice in a bland, girl-next-door way—would ever be tapped to star in a movie. Her scenes with Law, who brings his easy authority to his role, point out Jones' not-so-good line readings; moreover, whatever goodwill her amateurish acting skills have built up is immediately obliterated when she's heard singing 'The Story,' a new song she wrote for the movie. Ironically, it is Jones' singing of this new song, with its unabashed sensuality, that really underlines the flatness of her screen presence and made me realize another irony: I found her movie debut as bland as I used to find her singing. Huh.
From the department of shameless self-promotion:
For almost four years now I've been writing film reviews and doing interviews for Windy City Times from a queer perspective, and for the last year I've also been working on a TV pilot that incorporates those two things—and more. The project is called 'Movie Queens,' and my co-host is performer-playwright and fellow film fanatic David Kodeski, who worked as a producer for almost 10 years on 'At the Movies with Ebert & Roeper.' I'm happy to announce that the Web site for 'Movie Queens' is now online with about 20 minutes of content ( with more to come ) —including a mini-version of our interview with queer icon Bruce Vilanch. Stop on by Movie Queen Manor at www.moviequeens.net and say hello.
And as always, you can check out my archived reviews at www.windycitymediagroup.com or www.knightatthemovies.com . Readers can leave feedback at the latter Web site, where there is also ordering information on my book of collected film reviews, Knight at the Movies 2004-2006.
