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Reviews
SHU-DE! Let's Go (2016)
A musical journey across the globe, watching one artist go the distance.
I didn't know what to expect when I walked into the theater, but as someone who dabbles in their own form of musical art, I was inspired by watching this story of a man going to the ends of the earth to study a fringe form of music, in hopes of bettering his own art in ways not yet known to him. It's a spiritual experience to see the majestic land of Tuva on the silver screen, but even more so as these ancient and modern vocal techniques are linked together by open-minded passion. Even if you don't have an artistic bone in your body, you should still see this for the sake of the visual experience, alone.
It was well worth seeing, and I hope to see it again.
The Life and Mind of Mark DeFriest (2014)
A very entertaining story that leaves Alcatraz in the dust.
We've all seen movies about the Alcatraz escape, and we've all wondered, maybe hoped, that one of them got away. As far back as there were news stories about famous bank robbers or train robbers, there were legendary outlaws and the public rooting them on. This story is the best of them all, because the escape artist is impressively clever while being funny and human. If this was a series of prison interviews I think a lot of people would fall asleep, but it's a mix of comic retelling of prison breaks, a heart breaking story of a guy getting tossed in jail for nonsense and then ending up with endless sentence extensions because he refused to stop breaking out. Take the journey with Mark, his lawyer, and one of the people he passed along the way. It's a deep cutting commentary on the U.S. prison system, but it's a good story, at the same time.
If there is anything bad you can say about this film, it's that the comic animations do get silly at times, but that is because the story is silly at times, and reality deserves a chance to entertain. There's no reason a prison documentary can't be part "Ted", if we're expected to believe it's true.