Category: Movie Reviews

Football season is over, which means it’s movie season.

Mrs Swade and I will be seating ourselves in the cozy confines of the State Theatre from time to time, chewing on some chocolate swirls and enjoying a beverage or two (Hartz cola for me, a glass of merlot for she) whilst taking in some of the latest action on the silver screen.

——

Searching for Sugar Man is a documentary from Sweden about a Mexican folks singer based in Detroit who unknowingly enjoyed significant fame in South Africa. Confused yet?

The singer is an artist known as Rodriguez, who released two albums in the late 1960s. Those who worked with him rated Rodriguez as a genuine talent, one of the best they’d ever worked with, in fact. Despite this, the record company’s own executive guesses that he might have sold around six albums in America. Being a Mexican folk singer wasn’t a recipe for success in Motown at the time.

Rodriguez slips back into normal life after his second album fails and is never heard from again.

Fast forward a few decades and it turns out that Rodriguez’s recordings saw considerable success – in South Africa. It started small in the 1970s but his two albums gathered pace, providing a soundtrack to the apartheid era for South Africa’s youth. His songs are considered so controversial in a very conservative South Africa, that the government had someone physically scratch out one of his songs on the vinyl stored at a Capetown radio station so that they were unable to play it.

While Rodriguez is famous in South Africa, his fans know nothing about him. This is the pre-internet era, when the only stories fans heard about an artist were those that made it into newspapers or magazines. The lack of information about Rodriguez made him all the more intriguing, with rumours circulating about his life/death once his recording career was over.

The story you’ll see in Searching for Sugar Man became real when a young South African journalist set himself a goal of finding out the truth about Rodriguez’s death.

——

This is an analog story – a recording artist from the pre-digital era who knows nothing of his own success, whose fans can’t follow his every move as fans tend to do today. The mystery was solved in the digital era, however, with Rodriguez’s daughter eventually making contact with searchers via an early internet bulletin board.

As with the film I reviewed last week (Argo), Searching for Sugar Man is a factual story. If you know what happened to Rodriguez, you might find that the first half of the film drags a little. The second half, however, more than makes up for it as you learn the full impact of his success and how it plays out.

Searching for Sugar Man is a heartwarming film about discovery, redemption and to a certain extent, justice. If you’ve ever been an enthusiast – for anything – then I think you’ll really appreciate the lengths people went to to find out Rodriguez’s story and you’ll really enjoy the reward afterwards.

At the heart of this movie is Rodriguez’s extraordinary music, which provides the soundtrack for the entire film. You can understand the difficulty associated with promoting a Mexican folksinger in 1960’s Detroit, but you’ll be left feeling that maybe the world missed out on seeing an emerging talent blossom into something quite special.

If you’re a fan of music, or even just a fan of life, go an see Searching for Sugar Man.

Mrs Swade and I gave it four stars (out of five).

——

Football season is over, which means it’s movie season.

Mrs Swade and I will be seating ourselves in the cozy confines of the State Theatre from time to time, chewing on some chocolate swirls and enjoying a beverage or two (Hartz cola for me, a glass of merlot for she) whilst taking in some of the latest action on the silver screen.

——

Argo tells the story of the escape of US citizens from Tehran at the height of the US hostage crisis from late in 1979 to January 1981. When the US embassy was stormed by Iranian students, six embassy workers managed to escape on to the street undetected and take up residence, in secret, in the home of the Canadian ambassador.

This film tells the story of the CIA plan to get the six people out of the country at a time when Iran was transitioning after the first days of the revolution. Tensions are high and the plan is just implausible enough to work.

CIA agent Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) comes up with a plan to get the group to pose as a Canadian film crew scouting Iran for locations to be used in a science fiction film. The fictional film they’ll be making is called Argo, based on a rejected script from the late 1970s. The CIA ends up sponsoring its own Hollywood production company to build up credibility for the film – the escapees will need a decent, checkable cover story, after all. They engaged real life Hollywood movers and shakers, even staging a public reading of the script to get it covered in the newspapers.

What follows is an action/suspense work of considerable weight with a surprising dose of great one-liners that are well placed and lack the cheesiness you might expect from a Hollywood film. I was certainly surprised by the amount of laughter at our screening, which was full of 40+ year olds. I was even more surprised to find myself laughing along with them.

Argo is based on a true story – de-classified by President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s – and one of the problems with telling true stories is that people will often know the ending before they even sit down in their seat. Still, Argo is drawn out nicely and whilst you know they get away in the end, it’s HOW they get away that keeps you interested – right up until take-off.

The characters manage to surprise you and the casting, which is full of known names, is such that you don’t get carried away with their real-life identities (I’m guilty of thinking “De Niro’s doing a great job in this movie” from time to time). It feels quite natural throughout to engage with the characters in their setting.

Ben Affleck not only does a great job as Tony Mendez, he also takes kudos for a good job in directing Argo (the real film, not the fictional one). Alan Arkin is absolutely superb – and hilarious at times – as the Hollywood director engaged by the CIA to build a production company to give the plot authenticity. John Goodman plays the Academy Award winning John Chambers, who also helps to build the fictional film’s backstory. The other big name is Bryan Cranston, who most will be familiar with from small screen (Breaking Bad, Malcolm in the Middle). He plays Affleck’s CIA boss.

Make sure you stay and watch the first half of the film credits. They show the actors from the film along with the original fake Canadian passports used by the six Americans to get out of the country. The likenesses are remarkable.

The other notable likenesses are the sets and the re-creation of historical photographs from the era, also shown at the end of the film.

Argo isn’t the best film I’ve seen this year but it would definitely be in the top 3. It’s a great story, more remarkable because it’s true, and it’s very well made.

Mrs Swade and I gave it 4 Stars (out of five)

——

The original fake poster from 1980: