I sit in with hosts Jim Richards and Deb Hutton on NewsTalk 1010 to play the game “Did Richard Crouse Like This?” This week we talk about the Pharrell Williams Lego music doc “Piece by Piece,” the crime thriller “Woman of the Hour” and the origin story “The Apprentice.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE! (Starts at 27:25)
SYNOPSIS: “Piece by Piece,” a new fanciful documentary about musician, rapper, producer, fashion designer and entrepreneur Pharrell Williams, told through animated Lego, is a brightly colored trip down memory lane for one of the most influential musicians of the 21st century.
CAST: Pharrell Williams, Gwen Stefani, Kendrick Lamar, Timbaland, Justin Timberlake, Busta Rhymes, Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, Chad Hugo, Daft Punk. Directed by Morgan Neville.
REVIEW: Content wise “Piece by Piece” is a rather straightforward music biography. The story of a young music obsessed outsider who, through tenacity, talent and luck finds his way to the inner circle of the music business isn’t new, but the telling of the tale is. Shot like a regular doc, with talking heads, recreations and “archival” footage, it is rendered completely in colorful Lego bricks. “What if life is like Lego,” Pharrell Williams says early on, “except you can put it together however you want?”
The imaginative visuals will make your eyeballs dance. Williams’s early life in Virginia Beach, Virginia is vividly portrayed as a time filled with diverse influences, like Stevie Wonder, Carl Sagan and his grandmother, who encouraged him to join his school’s band club, but it is music that sparked his imagination. Literally. In one eye popping sequence director Neville illustrates the future producer’s synesthesia, the ability to see colors in the mind’s eye when listening to music.
Later the Lego is used to maximum effect when recalling incidents in Williams’s career, like getting the contact high in Snoop Dogg’s studio that resulted in “Drop It Like It’s Hot” and in a splashy sequence that sees Williams return to the neighborhood where he grew up.
By the time the end credits roll, “Piece by Piece” touches on Black Lives Matter, his brand work with everyone from Chanel to McDonalds and the dry spell that saw him briefly lose his way in the business. The talking heads provide good information, but there are holes. We never learn why his original band the Neptunes split, and while there is a great of talk about his genius at coming up with beats, the actual creative process remains mysterious.
Still, as a fun night at the movies, the Lego look and good time tunes like “Hollaback Girl,” “Rockstar,” “Frontin’” and “Happy” are a blast but it is his philosophical vantage point—the movie could easily have been called “The Tao of Pharrell”—that provides the film’s uplift. It’s mostly Pop Psychology 101, and never really digs deep into Williams’s head, but it does serve as a testament to the power of music, positive thinking and being true to oneself as key components to personal and profession success.
Richard makes a Negroni, the perfect cocktail to enjoy while watching the new documentary “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain.” Have Bourdain’s favourite drink and a think about “Roadrunner” with us!
Watch the whole thing HERE!
In the opening moments of “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain,” a new documentary about the late television host and author, now playing in theatres, we hear the titular character’s voice state the obvious. “This does not have a happy ending,” he says.
For fans of Bourdain, the former heroin addict chef-turned-author-turned-television-star-turned-cultural-avatar, “Roadrunner” comes with high expectations.
The edgy but empathic Bourdain, who was 61 when he took his own life while shooting a television show in France, inspires strong feelings. A standard, hagiographic look at his life, rehashing the well-known details of his career, would be met with a collective yawn. Get too prickly and it might be seen as disrespectful to the memory of a man many still miss.
“Roadrunner” somehow straddles the line, providing a balanced overview of the scrappy chef’s personal and professional lives. Using outtakes from Bourdain’s shows “No Reservations,” “The Layover” and “Parts Unknown,” new interviews with friends and family and home footage, director Morgan “20 Feet from Stardom” Neville compiles a Russian nesting doll look of his subject.
What emerges is a deep dive into the life a complex man; a person who circled the globe dozens of times searching for meaning with every air mile point earned. “His whole personality was of a searcher,” says Alison Mosshart, the vocalist of The Kills and The Dead Weather. “He was always looking for something, and it was agony for him.”
Neville captures some of that agony, forcing the viewer to see familiar footage recontextualized by Bourdain’s co-workers and friends. With no shortage of material to choose from—Bourdain’s 250 days a year on the road were meticulously filmed and documented—Neville cherry picks moments that reveal the toll Bourdain’s schedule, celebrity and search for normalcy took.
Often the most revealing footage isn’t of the man speaking, but of the exhausted or melancholy look visible in his eyes as he performs for the camera. “Life was never going to measure up to how he pictured it,” says “Parts Unknown” segment producer Helen M. Cho. “He set himself up for disappointment.”
The circumstances of his death, of course, are investigated. His colleagues become tearful describing his last months as a lifelong addict who turned his addition to Italian actress and director Asia Argento. “Roadrunner” examines Bourdain’s final days but this isn’t a whodunnit or an exercise in pointing fingers. It’s a story about his life, not death.
“Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain” provides an emotionally raw portrait of a gifted, charismatic man who travelled the world but never quite figured out where he needed to be. “You are not going to outrun or out smart pain,” comments artist David Choe, who provides the movie with a suitably Bourdain-esque ending.
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada
Near the beginning of a new documentary called The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, world famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma tells a joke.
A little boy says to his father, “When I grow up I want to be a musician.”
“Sorry son,” the father replies, “you can’t do both.”
It’s a subject Ma knows something about. Performing since the age of five, by seven had played for Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. Since then he has appeared with all the world’s great orchestras, released 90 albums and won eighteen Grammys.
“The idea of being a musician means that you have access to wonder,” he says. “When you become too adult-like and concerned about responsibility you tend to push wonder aside. That moment where you take a step back and look at where we are and look at what the world is about. Those are decisions we have to remake every single day, to engage, to love and care for and to recommit. It’s a form of positive will and expression. If you don’t have that you can’t do anything. To me it is the ultimate antidote to paranoia, to hate, to terror is to care about things. To care about truth and be open.”
The cellist’s openness led him on a twenty-year journey to form The Silk Road Ensemble, a loose collective of international master musicians named after the ancient trade route between China and the Mediterranean. Featuring instruments from the Silk Road region, Ma mixes-and-matches his cello with the exotic sounds of the pipa, a Chinese short-necked plucked lute, a Mongolian horse head fiddle called a morin khuur and a Shakuhachi, a Japanese bamboo flute among others to produce an otherworldly sound that blends different cultures and styles.
“It’s not so much what makes stuff different but more the fact that we work in such a connected world,” says Ma. “Part of it is that and part of it is to recognize the strength of individuality but also inherent in that strength is flexibility. It doesn’t mean that because the bagpipe is louder than the violin we should never put the two together. It’s more like, unlikely bedfellows, ‘O my gosh, there could be something extraordinary that could come from that.’”
The movie, directed by Morgan Neville, who won an Oscar and a Grammy for his 2013 documentary 20 Feet from Stardom, chronicles the evolution of the collective and the individual journeys of the players. Wrapped around those portraits is the story of the group’s most famous member. Ma is revealed to be a thoughtful man with a wandering, restless creative spirit.
“I was scared to death before doing something like this,” he says. “I’m drawn to what I don’t know versus what I do know. I think my life is kind of boring because if you ask me questions about myself you will very often get the same answers. I know the answers. What little I know I can tell you about but that is not particularly interesting. What I don’t know is, for me, the source of all knowledge, everything you know is actually very little. We are constantly trying to understand more and moving forward can actually help us reconsider old things and decisions.”
“The Music Of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma And The Silk Road Ensemble” is a journey through music and culture. The documentary, directed by Morgan Neville, who won an Oscar and a Grammy for his 2013 documentary “20 Feet from Stardom,” is based on the cellist’s twenty-year journey to form The Silk Road Ensemble, a loose collective of international master musicians named after the ancient trade route between China and the Mediterranean.
Featuring instruments from the Silk Road region, Ma mixes-and-matches his cello with the exotic sounds of the pipa, a Chinese short-necked plucked lute, a Mongolian horse head fiddle called a morin khuur, the gaita bagpipes, played by a woman known as the Jimi Hendrix of Galicia and a Shakuhachi, a Japanese bamboo flute among others to produce an otherworldly sound that blends different cultures and styles.
Wrapped around the individual journeys of the players is the story of the group’s most famous member. Ma is revealed to be a thoughtful man with a wandering, restless creative spirit. A child prodigy, it’s interesting to hear him sum up his career with the words, “I never committed to being a musician,” says Ma, “I just fell into it.”
Most interesting, however, is the otherworldly music. It’s a cultural democracy of sounds that shouldn’t mix and yet blend together beautifully to create music that sounds simultaneously alien and familiar. The filmmaking is basic, staying out of the way of the music, but the message of harmony in diversity is clear and anything but mundane.
