I didn't set out to the video store yesterday intending to get a couple of "celebrity/politics" documentaries. I think I was just looking for "rebels who stood up and won" stories. Which brings me to the Dixie Chicks' Shut Up & Sing.
This is a better film than The U.S. vs John Lennon. Partly this is because of the intimacy of documentarians Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck's approach. Another, related reason is because The Chicks' movie is almost unfolding in real time, so thankfully we're spared any glib synopsis of "just what it all means." The Lennon flick pauses periodically so celebs ranging from Yoko Ono to Walter Cronkite can give us their overview from the safe vantage point of more than 30 years later.
Politics aside for a moment, in some ways this could be a typical video for any band's fanbase, with footage of them with their families or hanging around backstage, doing radio interviews and such.
It's exceedingly enjoyable just on that level. The Dixies come off both as the kind of hot Chicks I've always known they are, and the shrewd women I want to think they are. Politics should never have been allowed to overshadow these women's gifts.
Of course it did, at least briefly, but the filmmakers never succumb to the temptation to dot all the i's and cross all the t's about that. They just present the footage of what happened as it happened.
There is a link between the material showing them with their families and the freedom of speech issue. Again, the movie admirably never hits us over the head with this, it's all done by allusion. A short sequence with Natalie's father, a steel guitarist who has played with and produced for the band, gives you a sense of the context in which she was raised.
Their relationship seems to be filled with a lot of affectionate teasing. It's not at all hard to believe he would have helped raise someone with as big a mouth as hers (and I mean that in the best way).
And seeing each of the women with their children (the Dixie Chicks all seem to have uncommonly darling children) is impossible to forget. When the backlash digresses into death threats, you're always thinking, these women are each somebody's (more than one somebody) mother.
I'd always heard something about motherhood and apple pie not being something "real" Americans, like the kind who picketed their shows, spoke against. Much less threatened.
Check out the trailer and I'll be back in a few minutes with a lighter note.
On that lighter note, each time I see the Chicks they seem to come one step closer to perfect. You may well be asking yourselves, what could they do now?
Eight words: Jokes about blow jobs and not wearing panties. These are my women.
Of course, the irony of the pro-Bush crowd's attack on the Chicks, as they know very well, is that it has allowed them to explore slightly new musics and a vastly new audience. If that crowd hadn't been such idiots...
A brief digression that may seem off-topic, but I'm going somewhere. The Late Shift, Bill Carter's intensely readable book about how NBC let David Letterman get away, ends with Jay Leno looking like a "loser."
Dave, meanwhile, looks like a winner as, after regularly cleaning Jay's clock in the ratings, he goes off to host the Academy Awards. We all know how that worked out. Letterman was widely judged to have screwed up the Oscar gig, and shortly therafter Leno started beating the pants off him in ratings if not creativity (I don't want to get into that).
My point is, these kinds of stories are always ongoing. And because the Dixie Chicks story is still unfolding, it means that the movie necessarily ends before a very nice chapter in it indeed, when they sweep the Grammys with five wins and are further rewarded with a big jump in sales of their album.
Which brings me to my Amazon.com Wish List. I haven't made this kind of naked appeal in some time, but if you scroll up, look over to the right there and click the View my complete profile link...
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