Coming to theatres tomorrow, Friday, September 12: TAKE ME TO THE RIVER
Martin Shore’s love letter to the music of Memphis made its debut at SXSW this Spring, where it took home an audience award. Its fest circuit has also included Nashville, deadCENTER, Maine, Sonoma, and Documentary Edge.
Following in the footsteps of last year’s MUSCLE SHOALS, music industry producer Shore’s project celebrates the forgotten importance of Memphis soul music labels like Stax Records. He encourages an explicit link between that storied past and the present by uniting multiple generations of musicians to collaborate on a series of recording sessions here. Despite half-hearted attempts to contextualize the period sound within the racially segregated backdrop of the South, these performances serve as the audience-rousing go-to scenes, as the likes of Snoop Dogg, Al Kapone, and Lil P-Nut join forces with not quite as well-remembered as they should be performers of the past William Bell, Mavis Staples, and Skip Pitts – but there’s also some pleasure to be had in witnessing the more casual behind-the-scenes reunions of several of the music elders. It’s an overly slick production, but an often lively one, marred primarily by the awkward, cheesy, and entirely unnecessary presence of onscreen host and narrator Terrence Howard.
what (not) to doc 