I join CTV Atlantic anchor Todd Battis to talk about Spike Lee’s “Highest 2 Lowest,” the action comedy “Nobody 2,” the music doc “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley”and the crime drama “Americana.”
Watch the whole thing HERE! (Starts at 29:49)
I sit in on the CFRA Ottawa morning show with guest host Bill Carroll to talk about the new movies coming to theatres including Spike Lee’s “Highest 2 Lowest,” the action comedy “Nobody 2,” the music doc “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley”and the crime drama “Americana.”
Listen to thew whole thing HERE!
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.
