Weekly round-up

Serious comedy and sensational soul

MUSTACHIOED MUSICAL MAGNIFICENCE: Soul Power

by MARK SLUTSKY

Funny People

Judd Apatow has gone from hit to hit in the last five years or so with comedies that blend casually raunchy humour with gentle, male-oriented, relationship stories. The success of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, not to mention the dozens of other

projects he’s had a hand in, attest to his good instincts. So it’s not surprising that he’d eventually pull an auteur-ish move and lean more on the human drama angle, as he does with Funny People, his latest directorial effort.

Adam Sandler plays an Adam Sandler-ish movie star who’s diagnosed with a rare and frequently fatal blood disorder and who returns to the stand-up world from whence he came to deal with his mortality. There he notices struggling comic Seth Rogen, and, perhaps seeing a little of himself in the guy, hires him as his writer and assistant. The relationship between the two men, similar in character but holding vastly different positions in the world, is the source of much of Funny People’s drama.

This is a very funny movie, in line with Apatow’s other work, but it’s also an intensely personal film as well (the movie opens with old video tapes of Sandler making crank calls that Apatow shot when they were roomies many years ago). Sandler and Rogen are both great, as is Leslie Mann, who plays Sandler’s “one that got away.” The movie’s only real problem, and it is a significant one, is its running time; there’s no need for this film to be two-and-a-half hours long and the last act really drags.

Soul Power

The 1996 documentary When We Were Kings, about the 1974 Muhammad Ali/George Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle” fight in Zaire, is one of my favourite movies, so when I heard that Kings editor Jeff Levy-Hinte had gone back to the unused vintage footage the original film drew on to make a movie about the Zaire 74 music festival that accompanied the bout, you better believe I was excited.

Soul Power does not disappoint. It’s a perfect companion piece to the original film, and if you’re a fan of the first movie, and of soul music in general, there’s really no way you’re not going to love this movie. The movie follows the festival’s hectic planning and setting up before turning into an exuberant concert movie with performances by Bill Withers, Miriam Makeba, B.B. King, the Spinners and of course a magnificently mustachioed James Brown.

The movie captures the sound and colour of its era, especially the vivid and gorgeous colours of ’70s Africa. There’s some Ali and Foreman in there too, if not as much as Kings, and of course a whole lot of Don King. Soul Power is pure pleasure on many levels, a wildly enjoyable and unexpected parallel story to the original film. My only wish is that it eventually comes out on DVD with even more performances, as you can tell they’re just skimming the cream of the crop to ensure a manageable running time. Highly recommended.

BOTH FILMS OPEN THIS
FRIDAY, JULY 31