Tag: Memphis

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Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies Music

It’s Never Over,
Jeff Buckley

Director – Amy Berg – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 106m

***1/2

A look at the life of the hugely talented singer / songwriter whose career in the 1990s was cut short by his untimely death – out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 13th

It’s tempting to place Jeff Buckley among the all too long list of rock and roll music casualties who killed themselves via a mixture of excessive lifestyle and drug abuse, a list which includes Jeff’s absent, singer / songwriter father Tim, who died of a morphine and heroin overdose at age 28.

This documentary charts its subject’s life chronologically and thus doesn’t get to the issue of Jeff’s death until late on. Following his early years as a young hopeful living in New York City, Jeff Buckley relocated to Memphis where one day, aged 30, he swam out into the Wolf River (a tributary of the Mississippi) and was never seen alive again. The autopsy, which was pretty much open and shut, recorded that he had one beer in his system. Nothing else. The river at this location had a powerful undertow, so Buckley’s untimely death can be put down to a tragic combination of ignorance and misjudgement.… Read the rest

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Documentary Features Live Action Movies

King:
A Filmed Record…
Montgomery
To Memphis

Directors – Sidney Lumet, Joseph L. Mankiewicz – 1969 – US – 181m

*****

Not-for profit documentary charts the career of non-violent, civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King and the role he played in that movement – plays at a free screening 6 for 6.30 start at Union Chapel, Islington on Wednesday, March 29th

An attempt to document the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King from 1955 to 1968. If you had any doubt as to the subject matter, it goes straight in with a pro-Black Power activist (not Dr. King) making a speech to an enthusiastic black audience. Then it cuts to Dr. King, talking about power – but not the power of the Molotov Cocktail. “But,” he says, “we DO have a power. As old as the insights of Jesus of Nazareth and as modern as the techniques of… Gandhi.”

Dr. King was a great orator, and removing his words, cutting them down (in an attempt to distil their essence) and posting them in this verbal review loses much of the qualities seen in footage of the great man speaking, his presence, his phrasing, the way he uses pauses and so on. He must have been incredible to watch in the flesh as an orator, and while it’s true that seeing his oration captured on film is, inevitably, not the same as the experience of watching him live, the footage of him speaking is both astonishing and compelling.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies Music

Elvis

Director – Baz Luhrmann – 2022 – US, Australia – Cert. 12a – 159m

***

Elvis Presley’s career from the mid-1950s through to his death in 1977, and his complex business relationship with his manager Colonel Tom Parker – out in cinemas on Friday, June 24th

Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), having a heart attack, reminisces to himself about his career. Many considered him the abuser and exploiter of the singer Elvis Presley, but that wasn’t the way it was. In the early 1950s, when Parker was managing the touring show of country singer Hank Snow (David Wenham), he heard Presley’s first recording on Sun Records though Hank’s son Jimmie Rodgers Snow (Kodi Smit-Mcphee), a singer in his own right who Parker didn’t think was anything like as good as his father.

Parker, an old time carnival showman, is always on the lookout for that one act that’s a little bit different, affects audiences and might well clean up at the box office. When he first sees Elvis (Austin Butler) perform, and notices young girls and older women going wild at the singer’s dance moves, he is convinced there’s money to be made and determines to sign him before someone else does.… Read the rest