Rock musicals about rock stars are almost as tiring as independent films about independent filmmakers. They’re too self-involved and too self-satisfying, and they typically have nothing for an objective viewer to grab hold of. But at least with rock musicals, if the audience can dig the music, they can maybe dig the movie, too. This has been the case, for me at least, with such films as Velvet Goldmineand Hedwig and the Angry Inch, neither of which I would have been so into were it not for their excellent glam rock soundtracks. And now the same goes for Rainbow Around the Sun, a neat little low-budget musical fantasy, which interestingly enough also has a touch of glam in its songs, about a very cliché band leader and his very cliché drinking problem and his very cliché story of heartbreak.
Here, more than the songs, though, it’s the musical numbers, many of which work on their own as great music videos, that really kept me interested. That tired tale of the troubled, tortured artist/poet/rock star is merely a thin thread for Rainbow Around the Sun, which was adapted from an autobiographical album of the same name by Matthew Alvin Brown, who also stars in the film as singer-guitarist-drunk Zachary Blasto. The plot is like an afterthought, concocted only to connect the album tracks and their “videos”, and though the songs seem like they’re supposed to comment on the story, it’s really apparent that it came about the other way around, that the story is in fact meant only to put the songs into a context. I’d probably have enjoyed it as much, if not more, though, without the loose narrative and its underdeveloped scenes. The film could still have been what it actually is anyway: a cinematic concept album.
Let’s face it, fellow film bloggers, we don’t have many readers who don’t have film blogs of their own. The world of cinephilia is quite cannibalistic, and we need each other to survive. However, we don’t just feed on ourselves. We also are part of an extended food chain that includes filmmakers, many of whom nowadays are also or were once cinephiles themselves. These filmmakers like to borrow, pay homage and reference movies of the past more than they like to advance the craft forward with distinct and/or innovative style. But admit it, you sometimes like the movie references, at least if you like the movie being referenced. And maybe sometimes your judgment is a little clouded by all those obscure bits that you feel cool for having gotten.
Paul Soter’s Watching the Detectiveslooks like yet another movie that only us cinephiles are made to enjoy, which is unfortunate since many of us are too pretentious to admit that we’d enjoy just any movie about a fellow movie geek working at a video store and commenting on the merits of City of Lost Childrenand the faults of Casino (see Clip 1) to our customers — aren’t most of us just like video store employees who own computers and can (sometimes) write well? Watching the Detectives could be something of a light companion piece to Michel Gondry’s upcoming Be Kind Rewind; both films should in theory have little relevance to people unfamiliar with their references to movie-geek favorites. But are there enough of us movie geeks out there to make these films worth their effort?
