If there is one artists who had a huge impact on a specific music genre than James Brown fits the bill. A quick look at the “Rap Sample FAQ” shows a long lists of artists who have sampled his music. James Brown had a long and very successful career with some ups and downs. Just like biopics about other artists (think Walk the Line and Ray) Get On Up tries to tell his life story.
The way in which the movie tells that story isn’t chronological. Moments from his life are shown almost randomly without there being a clear connection between them. Moments during his youth are mixed with impressive performances and his issues with both friends, musicians and authorities are all shown. If you don’t know anything about James Brown there is a big chance that you will not find much to hold on to. A chronological way of telling this story would have probably worked better. Something which also really annoyed me was that James Brown regularly breaks the fourth wall (like House of Cards also does) and talks directly to the viewer, which simply does not work here.
Despite that problem the movie still manages to be interesting by the magical performance by Chadwick Boseman as James Brown. It seems like biopics bring out the best in actors (like Jamie Foxx and Joaquin Phoenix showed in the previously named biopics) The actor disappears in his role and is almost as hard to understand as Brown. He also is able to copy his dance moves to perfection.
Is Get on Up the definitive James Brown film? Thanks to Boseman performance the movie comes close, but because of the unstructured way of editing the movie something is lost unfortunately.
Nice piece.
Thanks Alex!
I really liked the movie despite some of the story telling flaws you point out. I think directors want to avoid the straight narrative approach because it is so cookie cutter, but they don’t always find the right hook to make the story work. Chadwick Boseman is fantastic in this part.
(I’m going to put a link to my review here for you to follow if you are interested. Feel free to edit it out of the comment if you like, I’m not trolling for traffic, I just want to compare notes)
http://kirkhamclass.blogspot.com/2014/08/get-on-up.html
Thanks, it is a shame the movie didn’t turn out better, because that performance was awesome!
Yeah, I haven’t heard many great things about this one.
It is a shame really as it had a lot of potential.
Not a huge fan of the “fourth wall breaking” way of filmmaking, with only several films doing it well (or with purpose), so to hear this one does it is annoying. I don’t think a biopic should have the hubris to make itself think that it can directly interact with the audience…. Ahh well, I’ll give it a shot anyway.
I really like that technique in House of Cards and I thought it was funny in Annie Hall, but besides that I can’t think of many other examples that left a lasting impression.
Loved Chadwick in this (and 42) but had the same issues with the film that you did.
Yeah, it is a shame as with different editing this could have been a very good film.