Truth you can rock to
A great rock doc and also necessary correction to the historical record, Rumble reveals how musicians with Indigenous roots have shaken, rattled and rolled pop culture.
They include guitar greats Jimi Hendrix, Link Wray, Charley Patton, Jesse Ed Davis and the Band’s Robbie Robertson, as well as singers Rita Coolidge, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Mildred Bailey and the rapper Taboo.
Their musical contributions may be celebrated, but their heritage is often unknown or deliberately suppressed — often by the musicians themselves, for fear of discrimination.
“Be proud you’re an Indian, but be careful who you tell,” Robertson says in the film, quoting advice he received growing up in the Six Nations Reserve near Brantford, Ont. Robertson and the Band helped Bob Dylan transform in the 1960s from the acoustic folkie of “Blowin’ in the Wind” to the driving rocker of “Like a Rolling Stone.”
Catherine Bainbridge directs Rumble, with Alfonso Maiorana co-directing. Bainbridge co-founded Montreal’s Rezolution Pictures International, an Indigenous-owned film and TV production company that previously made Reel Injun, a Peabody-winning doc about Hollywood’s depiction of native characters.
Using archival audio and concert footage, plus new interviews, the film demonstrates how Indigenous musicians have roots as deep as blues artists, who are often incorrectly cited as the original source of the music that branched into rock, pop, soul, hip-hop and other variants.
The film also explores how the U.S. and Canadian governments practiced what Bainbridge calls the “deliberate erasure” of history.
A good example of this is the title song, a thundering power-chord progenitor by late guitar legend Wray and his Ray-Men band. “Rumble” was banned by many authorities upon its 1958 release, for fear that it might have the power to incite violence, despite being a purely instrumental tune.
Indeed, singer Iggy Pop and guitarist Steven Van Zandt, the latter a member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, are among the many musicians in the film who bear witness to the song’s Pied Piper appeal: Iggy says “Rumble” made him want to be a rocker and Van Zandt calls it “the theme song of juvenile delinquency.”
Other guitarists who have named Wray as an influence include Neil Young, Jimmy Page and Pete Townshend. Rumble is truth you can rock to. Play it loud! Peter Howell No, it’s not the Scottish play from a woman’s perspective.
Rather, the film — based on a 19thcentury Russian novel, Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District — is set in rural northern England.
The title comes from the main character’s penchant for ruthlessness. She has her reasons.
Katherine is “sold” into marriage to Alexander, the son of a prosperous landowner, who proves to be a cruel and neglectful husband. His father, Boris, is a bitter and censorious overlord.
When both are called away on separate matters, Katherine takes up with an impudent stable hand.
But Katherine demonstrates, in every carefully crafted word and gesture, that she is no victim. It’s a bravura performance by Florence Pugh that anchors the film.
After dispatching her father-in-law without raising suspicion, things soon begin to unravel for Katherine and lover Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis), who proves not to have her inner steel.
Director William Oldroyd delivers a taut and well-paced period drama elevated by Pugh’s riveting performance. Bruce DeMara Colossal is a sci-fi/horror/psychodrama/comedy/thriller/revenge/ romance film — and that description of Nacho Vigalondo’s genre-buster not only works, it does so in spectacular fashion.
Anne Hathaway is Gloria, a blogger and raging alcoholic. Drunken antics get her kicked out of the New York apartment she shares with her boyfriend Tim (Dan Stevens), whose patience has justifiably reached its limits.
Gloria reluctantly returns to her family home in a small New Jersey town. She encounters her childhood classmate Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), who hasn’t exactly been setting the world on fire, either.
Everything seems to be following a predictable rom-com path, until news breaks that a giant lizard-ish monster is rampaging through Seoul, South Korea — and then a giant robot shows up. It all seems to connect to Gloria.
What’s it all mean? Colossal has a through line of the psychic trauma that many of us carry but never adequately deal with. It’s our raging ids made real, scary and scaly. It will stomp through your brain.
Extras include deleted scenes. PH There are few obvious villains in the films of Cristian Mungiu. Just people who can’t look at themselves in the mirror.
Romeo (Adrian Titieni) is one. A respected middle-aged doctor and father, he’s desperate to get his daughter Eliza (Maria Dragus) into a university in England, to escape life in post-Communist Romania.
Eliza has the grades and scholarship offers; all she needs is a nearperfect score on her exams. But when she’s assaulted outside her school one morning, her concentration falters and her exam marks slide.
Romeo is undeterred. He arranges with corrupt local officials — a cop (Vlad Ivanov) and a politician (Petre Ciubotaru) — to “fix” Eliza’s grades. Maybe he can do them a favour, like helping the politician jump the queue for a liver transplant. Who’s it going to hurt, really?
“Sometimes, the result is all that matters,” Romeo assures his dismayed wife Magda (Lia Bugnar), who used to respect Romeo’s integrity. She also used to love Romeo. Mungiu views life as a series of complex decisions, with fate intruding. Extras include a director’s interview PH An “A” cast takes on a “B” production, pulling off the real heist of this unnecessary but amusing comedy remake.
Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman and Alan Arkin assume the roles of bank-robbing oldsters played by George Burns, Art Carney and Lee Strasberg in the 1979 movie of the same name.
And they demonstrate — along with the delightful Ann-Margret — why all of them are stars. Obliged to work under the relentlessly feelgood direction of Zach Braff and softball scripting by Theodore Melfi, they just get on with making us glad to watch them.
Caine’s Joe, Freeman’s Willie and Arkin’s Albert are three longtime Brooklyn pals who have reached the age where they constantly refer to each other as “young man.”
They’re not happy. Joe is about to lose his house through bank shenanigans, Willie needs a new kidney he can’t afford and Albert has the blues about the saxophone he plays and attempts to teach to tone-deaf students.
What to do? How about robbing a bank? Natch, nothing goes as planned.
Extras include a director’s commentary and deleted scenes. PH