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FILMS WORTH WATCHING by Robert Alstead
Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man (now showing) is part concert movie, part tribute movie and part biography of the septuagenarian poet-songwriter from
Montreal. In January 2005, musicians from a variety of musical backgrounds played tribute to Cohen in the Came So Far for Beauty concert at the Sydney Opera House.
Director Lian Lunson’s artful documentary pieces together some memorably intense performances of Cohen’s works from the concert by the likes of Rufus Wainwright, Nick Cave (performing a swaggering version of the title song) and Beth Orton. Interspersed between each performance are interviews with Cohen himself as he reflects on the course his life has taken and the lessons learned.
The performers also talk, with disarming humility, about the huge influence of Cohen on their own careers. U2’s Bono and The Edge are almost at a loss for words to express Cohen’s importance. Cohen performs his only track here – the wry Tower of Song – with U2 at the end of the documentary. Bono talks of Cohen’s sensuality (“his world was brightly coloured”) as being what grabbed him. Both talk of his rare ability to convey metaphysical and spiritual life with ease and humour.
Cohen holding forth with that mellifluous bass voice goes back to the early days – why he started writing poetry (to impress girls with his mind), his calmness on the death of his father (it was “in the realm of things that can’t be disputed or judged”). He takes us through his years as a Montreal poet to the rock star years when he was hanging out with the beatniks in New York and jokes that his mother would not have approved of his song bragging about his fling with Janis Joplin in Chelsea Hotel No. 2. Rufus Wainwright gives a rousing rendition of the song and also a memorable cover of Everybody Knows, although like other performers seems a little too dependent on the lyric sheet at times.
Cohen says of his much publicized retreat into monastic life in his later years that it was more his Japanese master that drew him in rather than the religion, although throughout the film a buddhist equanimity suffuses his reflections on his accomplishments and his “failures.”
While the appeal of the performers, who vary from folkie to Britpop (Jarvis Cocker), is sure to vary depending on personal taste, the highlight song for me was the androgenous, powerfully voiced Antony, who I’d never heard before, singing If It Be Your Will. It sends shivers down the spine.
The film occasionally seems uncertain of its course, but in spite of this drawback, the strength of the performances and being in the company of this most sensitive of wordsmiths make it worth seeing.
If you ever wondered why General Motors is going down the tubes then see Who Killed the Electric Car? (opening July 21). This is another well-crafted documentary from south of the border, in the vein of Enron: The Smartest Guys In the Room, that looks at how corporate self-interest skewered the electric car baby no sooner had it got out of the garage.
Interviewees, including a goateed Mel Gibson and Tom Hanks, are a passionate crowd when it comes to their electric vehicles – perhaps no surprise given the bum rap their machines have had in recent years. In particular, ex-owners of the EV-1 – the sleek, electric car that GM execs wished the company had never released to the world – prove a highly determined crowd. When GM’s top brass decided to remove the car from the market, EV-1 owners, led by a former GM employee, staked out the last repossessed electric vehicles and even offered, in vain, to buy them from GM before it whisked the cars off to be crushed and shredded without trace. As one ex-EV-1 owner puts it, “I’ve never seen a company be so cannibalistic about its own product before.”
Framed playfully as a who-dun-it, and a little too self-conscious that it will be denounced for espousing conspiracy theories, the film posits convincingly that the time was right for the electric car, but the usual suspects of big oil, with around $100 trillion of crude still in the ground, car manufacturers, heavily invested in the traditional combustion engined automobile, and good old lack of political will and consumer inertia, sent the car to an early grave in 2002.
Oh, and don’t hold out for fuel-cell powered cars. Mass produced hydrogen fuel cells are years off. “Disneyland” is how one fuel-cell car developer puts it. The film ends on an optimistic note – electric powered vehicles are set to make a comeback.
Robert Alstead writes for iofilm.ca. He is making a documentary about cycling, You Never Bike Alone (www.youneverbikealone.com/.) |
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