Movies without music would be like books without adjectives. So much of the emotional impact of film as we know it depends on auditory cues and clues, even though we aren’t really aware of it much of the time. When we are aware of it, more often than not it lessens the impact of the music on a scene. But done right, movie music — in which I include not just soundtrack songs and title themes but also the little recurring motifs, snippets, and incidental figures that contribute to a film’s soundscape — can get deep in our soul in a way that film stories themselves sometimes do not.
This is especially true of movies about music. For whatever reason, “music movies” fall flat so often that part of me is surprised they still get made. Maybe it’s the difficult technical problem of having a non-musician trying to convincingly mimic a master’s movements. Or maye it’s the absence of the frisson that comes with seeing a performance live. To be clear, I am not thinking here of musicals in the Broadway tradition, but of films like The Doors and Eddie and the Cruisers.
But this week, a few films come to area screens in an attempt to reclaim some of that lost glory. On Friday and Saturday night in Shelburne Falls, Pothole Pictures kicks off its summer season with a screening of Malik Bendjelloul’s 2012 must-see documentary Searching for Sugar Man, a film about the mysterious career of Sixto Rodriguez. A Mexican-American singer-songwriter whose style was part flower power, part urban realism — unlike many of the era, he hailed from Detroit — he made a couple of albums in the ’70s but never quite hit a nerve with the American market. Soon after those disappointing releases, he returned to the home renovation work that kept a roof over his head.
But somehow his music traveled to South Africa, where it found an audience with the young people fighting against the traditions of apartheid. There, he became a folk hero whose music lived on for decades after most of the world — if they had heard of him at all — had long forgotten his name. Bendjelloul’s story picks up in the late ’90s, when Cape Town resident Stephen “Sugar” Segerman (“Sugar Man” is the title of Rodriguez’s best-known song) began a search for the musician he idolized, first connecting with Rodriguez’s daughter and eventually bringing the musician to the land that had kept his name alive for so many years. The shows begin at 7:30 p.m, but both nights will feature live music before the movie, beginning at 7 p.m.
And at Amherst Cinema this Wednesday night, director John Carney’s 2007 film Once screens (just once, appropriately) as part of the theater’s 10th anniversary celebration, which features a film each month that has been picked by the cinema’s regulars. I’ll be honest: when Once first came out, I thought it was something of a wish-fulfillment tale: a street musician and a flower seller come together to make wonderful music, maybe fall for each other, and record an album before moving on, each having helped the other heal in a way that might hurt for a moment but last for a lifetime.
Maybe that’s still true, but almost a decade later, that sort of wish-fulfillment doesn’t seem so needless to me anymore. Bonus: as of press time, the director’s new film Sing Street, about a Dublin teenager forming a band in the ’80s (Carney spent over a year collaborating with a who’s-who of era originals on the soundtrack), was still playing at Amherst as well.
Also this week: the all-female Ghostbusters reboot has been in the press a lot lately (often, sadly, due to idiots who can’t handle a female-centric story) but this week Cinemark theaters in Hadley and Springfield bring back the 1984 original for two shows on Wednesday June 8. The story of a group of ragtag paranormal investigators led by Bill Murray’s Venkman, it is perhaps most notable today for the enduring popularity of its title track: three decades after the fact, few of us can hear the words “who you gonna call?” without immediately thinking of the title. Citizen Kane and Rosebud don’t have a thing on that.•
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
