Posts Tagged ‘Alanis Morissette’

IT’S NEVER OVER, JEFF BUCKLEY: 3 ½ STARS. “tribute to a generational talent.”

SYNOPSIS: The documentary “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley,” now playing in select theatres, is a moving look at the unique life and ethereal music of the late Jeff Buckley.

CAST: Jeff Buckley, Mary Guibert, Rebecca Moore, Alanis Morissette, Aimee Mann. Directed by Amy Berg.

REVIEW: Jeff Buckley’s haunting, emotional and introspective music made fans of David Bowie, who called “Grace” one of the ten records he’d take to a desert island, and Bob Dylan, who called the singer “one of the great songwriters of this decade.”

With just one studio album released during his lifetime, his legacy is continued in Amy Berg’s loving tribute, “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley.”

Probably best known these days for his version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” the singer/songwriter who said his biggest influences were, “love, joy, anger, depression and Led Zeppelin,” left behind a small, yet potent collection of music.

We learn Buckley didn’t have a relationship with his father, musician Tim Buckley who died of a heroin overdose in 1975 when Jeff was just 8 years old. Although they only met once, the elder Buckley appears to have had an influence on his son. Not musically—Jeff’s influences were many and varied, everything from Zeppelin and Judy Garland to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Nina Simone—but on his impending sense of mortality.

“I have to tell you something about me,” he tells a girlfriend. “I’m not going to last that long.”

His words were prophetic. In 1997, while working on his second album in Memphis, he drowned, age 30, in Wolf River Harbor.

But Berg doesn’t define him by his early passing or the eerie parallels to his father’s life.

Instead, using archival footage, still photographs, loads of music and new interviews with the people who knew him best, she paints a portrait of a complicated artist who could write heartrending ballads and yet got his kicks crawling up a scaffold at a Page and Plant concert to place himself on top of the speakers to internalize the heavy sounds coming off the stage.

Berg essays his emergence as an artist, from the gigs in New York City’s East Village that caught the ear of record company A&R folks, to his rise to stardom and his complicated relationship to fame and the pressures placed upon him by the suits at his label.

It’s standard stuff for music bios, but this isn’t “Behind the Music.” It’s a humanizing tribute of a person who also happened to be a generational talent.

JAGGED: 3 ½ STARS. “portrays the whirlwind journey from unknown to superstar”

After the 1995 release of Canadian singer Alanis Morissette’s “Jagged Little Pill” it seemed like songs like “You Oughta Know,” “Hand in My Pocket” and “Ironic” were pouring out of every radio, turntable and CD player in the world. The album was a juggernaut, vaulting to the top of the charts and making Morissette a superstar in the process.

“Jagged,” a new documentary from director Alison Klayman, details Morissette’s early Canadian success, her rise to fame, the making of the album and the exploitation she suffered as a teen star.

At its bedrock “Jagged” features an amiable interview from Morissette, barefoot, curled up in a chair recounting the events of her life. It should be noted that the singer has since denounced the film as “salacious” and “reductive” and “not the story I agreed to tell.” Nonetheless, in the interview she appears to be open, forthright and helps capture the excitement of her sudden ascent to fame.

The early years section covers her as a young pop star, often treated as a commodity by the record industry. Puberty brought with it an eating disorder, sexual harassment and a dip in popularity. A move to Los Angeles offered an opportunity for reinvention, and, working with  co-writer Glen Ballard, she crafted the rock-oriented “Jagged Little Pill” which would on to sell more than 33 million copies globally.

Here the film makes good use of concert footage and home movies to portray the whirlwind of the journey from unknown to superstar, from clubs to stadiums. It provides context in terms of time and place and the fortunes of women in rock at the time.

The one question everyone seems to want answered—Who, exactly is “You Oughta Know” about?—however, goes largely unanswered.

What “Jagged” does best is give Morissette her due as someone who weathered the storm of worldwide success, and emerged on the other side, bloodied but unbowed.

While occasionally feeling like a music video, “Jagged” does capture the surreal energy that comes along with roaring to “overnight” fame.