Film Sweat: Soul Patrol
RECOMMENDED: Though you may not have seen much in the press about it, trust us: Run, do not walk, out your door right this minute and catch a screening of Soul Power while it’s in theaters. A documentary chronicling the Zaire ’74 music festival — propped up originally as an adjunct to the legendary “Rumble In The Jungle” Ali/Foreman fight in 1974 — Soul Power is itself essentially a companion film to Leon Gast’s When We Were Kings. And, oh, what a companion it is: Part fly-on-the-wall showbiz story and part historical document, the movie is a warts-and-all retelling of the chaos surrounding both fight and fest, especially once it becomes clear that Foreman is rescheduling the fight, which nearly derails the festival altogether. But those performances: James Brown, The Spinners, Bill Withers, BB King, Celia Cruz Fania All-Stars, Miriam Makeba and the list goes on. (The Spinners’ performance alone is worth the price of admission.) And don’t even get us started on those clothes. Oh, lord, those clothes.
ALSO RECOMMENDED: One of the most surprising things about Judd Apatow‘s Funny People is that it’s more than two and a half hours long. Still more surprising, it never lets you go. Starring what feels like a cast of thousands (Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen, Leslie Mann, Eric Bana, Jason Schwartzman, Jonah Hill, for starters), Apatow’s third feature goes for the brass ring. And if Funny People has a problem, it’s just that Apatow might occasionally get confused about just which brass ring. The film’s central drama centers around a lonely but ultra-wealthy and successful comedian (Sandler), who’s just been notified that he has an almost certainly fatal disease. As he tries to tie up loose ends and get some last bits of enjoyment from his life, he employs an unknown comic (Rogen) to be his runner/joke-writer, who really turns out to be his only friend. And then one thousand centipede legs of comedic strains grow out from all of that, allowing Funny People to dabble in gallows humor, pathos, grossout jokes, any number of riffs (the “IKEA Doctor” scene being perhaps the best), childish silliness and heartwrenching drama, sometimes all at once. It’s a big, slippery gamble, but for the most part, Apatow — and his cast, all of whom deliver here, from Sandler and Rogen on down to cameos from Tom MySpace and James Taylor — comes correct.
ALSO NEW IN THEATERS:
Aliens In The Attic, in which Kevin Nealon and family rent a summer house haunted by aliens and so far as we can tell, he’s not holding any weed; The Collector, which itself seems to be a collection of modern-day suspense tropes and a very slow-moving one at that; and Humpday, a movie in which guys who are not gay decide to have sex on camera to win cash and prove how not gay they are.
