#1
Posted: 7/31/09 at 2:21am
Scaryotypes Unite! Party! (Send PM if interested)
http://www.traileraddict.com/trailer/passing-strange/trailer
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204619004574318473901277710.html
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Passing Strange: I’ve been intrigued by Passing Strange ever since reading an ecstatic review of it in the New Yorker. Sweet blessed Lord does Spike Lee’s film of the show’s last performance not disappoint. Like Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense it captures with visceral power the sweaty intensity and raw intimacy of a live performance before a packed, euphoric crowd while taking full advantage of the tools and tricks of film.
A film that threatens to give the phrase “rock musical†a good name, Strange follows the evolution of narrator/writer/singer Stew as he pursues a tragi-comic search for an elusive ideal he calls “The Realâ€Â. The son of a doting, solidly middle-class mother, Stew’s search for The Real takes him first to a church choir where he bonds over illegal smoke with an ebullient choir director who is a free, unfettered bohemian in his unfettered imagination but a closeted, frustrated queen in real life and then to a punk-rock baptism before Stew’s young doppelganger decides to follow his wandering muse to Amsterdam, where he experiences hippified bliss with free-loving, pot-smoking countercultural types and then to Germany, where he falls in with a gang of Sprockets wannabes committed to deeply terrible art. Like Dorothy in Wizard Of Oz, Stew learns that there is no place like home. His journey ends where it begins, with a mother he could only learn to love and understand in retrospect. In Passing Strange Stew—who comments upon, interacts with and sometimes just observes the actor playing his younger self while leading a dynamite band—accomplishes in art what he could never achieve in real life.
Stew’s search for authenticity is inextricably intertwined with his thorny, complicated relationship with his racial identity. For Stew, blackness is a tool to exploit or ignore whenever it suits him. Early in the play the choir director kids wisely observes that while Stew’s grandmother passed for white to get by in the world they’re both black men passing for black. Stew is forever trapped between worlds, caught between his love of black culture and his passionate embrace of everything European, arty and pretentious.
In Passing Strange irony, post-modern meta-commentary, pop-culture geekery and parody comfortably co-exist with raw emotion and aching sadness. It’s a film and a play with a huge emotional palette and a mastery of tone. At 135 minutes it isn’t exactly tight but only the Berlin sequence outstays its welcome. Stew’s spoof of humorless Teutonic art-freaks feels a little warmed over and the film’s parody of bad, pretentious avant-garde art feels a little too close to the real thing but at its best Passing Strange isn’t just good; it’s goddamned transcendent, a near-religious experience.
Strange is rooted in Stew’s unique spiritual and creative journey but it hits upon stirringly universal themes of authenticity, family and the eternal search for identity and meaning in a crazy and confusing world. That’s what great art does: it makes the personal universal and the universal personal.
Grade: A-
http://www.traileraddict.com/trailer/passing-strange/trailer
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204619004574318473901277710.html
..........................................................................................................................................
Passing Strange: I’ve been intrigued by Passing Strange ever since reading an ecstatic review of it in the New Yorker. Sweet blessed Lord does Spike Lee’s film of the show’s last performance not disappoint. Like Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense it captures with visceral power the sweaty intensity and raw intimacy of a live performance before a packed, euphoric crowd while taking full advantage of the tools and tricks of film.
A film that threatens to give the phrase “rock musical†a good name, Strange follows the evolution of narrator/writer/singer Stew as he pursues a tragi-comic search for an elusive ideal he calls “The Realâ€Â. The son of a doting, solidly middle-class mother, Stew’s search for The Real takes him first to a church choir where he bonds over illegal smoke with an ebullient choir director who is a free, unfettered bohemian in his unfettered imagination but a closeted, frustrated queen in real life and then to a punk-rock baptism before Stew’s young doppelganger decides to follow his wandering muse to Amsterdam, where he experiences hippified bliss with free-loving, pot-smoking countercultural types and then to Germany, where he falls in with a gang of Sprockets wannabes committed to deeply terrible art. Like Dorothy in Wizard Of Oz, Stew learns that there is no place like home. His journey ends where it begins, with a mother he could only learn to love and understand in retrospect. In Passing Strange Stew—who comments upon, interacts with and sometimes just observes the actor playing his younger self while leading a dynamite band—accomplishes in art what he could never achieve in real life.
Stew’s search for authenticity is inextricably intertwined with his thorny, complicated relationship with his racial identity. For Stew, blackness is a tool to exploit or ignore whenever it suits him. Early in the play the choir director kids wisely observes that while Stew’s grandmother passed for white to get by in the world they’re both black men passing for black. Stew is forever trapped between worlds, caught between his love of black culture and his passionate embrace of everything European, arty and pretentious.
In Passing Strange irony, post-modern meta-commentary, pop-culture geekery and parody comfortably co-exist with raw emotion and aching sadness. It’s a film and a play with a huge emotional palette and a mastery of tone. At 135 minutes it isn’t exactly tight but only the Berlin sequence outstays its welcome. Stew’s spoof of humorless Teutonic art-freaks feels a little warmed over and the film’s parody of bad, pretentious avant-garde art feels a little too close to the real thing but at its best Passing Strange isn’t just good; it’s goddamned transcendent, a near-religious experience.
Strange is rooted in Stew’s unique spiritual and creative journey but it hits upon stirringly universal themes of authenticity, family and the eternal search for identity and meaning in a crazy and confusing world. That’s what great art does: it makes the personal universal and the universal personal.
Grade: A-
Updated On: 8/1/09 at 02:21 AM
