anthemforadoomed's activity

Truly depressing comments here. Other than the dated terminology, the film is beautiful, perfect, and unquestionably correct. Any music historian will tell you that Black American musicians merged the soul and melody of blues with the compositional approach of classical music to create jazz in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There's no Beatles without BB King and there's no Benny Goodman without Scott Joplin or Jelly Roll Morton. Without the unique experience of being Black in America there would be no jazz and no rock n roll.

Started pretty strong discussing primitive and silent era through the enforcement of the Hayes Code, but as it continues to roll through the decades, it begins to feel like a compilation of 'cinema's greatest hits of nudity' and loses much of its academic steam. The film ultimately stuffers from only briefly touching on power dynamics and how truly exploitative Hollywood was in the latter half of the 20th century at certain points during the runtime, but not thoroughly interrogating it until the end where the focus is primarily on Weinstein. This comes in far too late after listening to actresses share their experiences with being asked to disrobe during auditions, or pressured to do more on camera than they wanted or agreed to throughout the second half of the film. In the meantime, there are plenty of moments where men orate about their favorite nude scenes.

There is some interesting juxtaposition between women talking about their aforementioned negative experiences and others discussing positive, liberatory ones, but eventually the cutting back and forth wanders, causing the film to struggle to maintain its tone. It would have benefitted from having more context provided by film historians interspersed between the traumatic testimonials and the praiseful ones or an entire section in the middle of the film to focus on the industry's exploitative practices. This would have allowed for a consistent, thoughtful tonal shift, wrapped up with the existing ending to show how far we have progressed.

As he does in everything, Malcolm McDowell steals the show and is full of great anecdotes and insights. This was an interesting and challenging concept for a documentary and it does accomplish a fair amount, but the change in tenor from academic to reverential was disappointing. The runtime is also unnecessarily long, considering if watching the scenes is your primary goal, there are plenty of other places on the internet to do that. The film could have been quite good if a hedge clipper had been taken to it before exporting it from Final Cut.