20 Feet from Stardom: The Secret Lives of Backup Singers

"Winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature" is a descriptor that rarely conjures up positive emotions. Oscar-winning documentaries are generally about grim subjects like war, corruption, and poverty. However, this year the Academy honored a magnificent movie about the anonymous men and women who take the stage behind world-famous singers. Brilliant performers in their own right, this is the story of the people who live their lives 20 Feet from Stardom.

Through interviews with singers (both lead and backup), music historians, and producers, the movie gradually unfurls the history of background singing. Beginning in the 1950s, this field grew to be dominated by African-American women, who came from the gospel tradition and were therefore adept at the call-and-response nature of backup singing. Unlike white backup singers, who they referred to as "readers" because they read the music and didn't do a lot else, these women sang their hearts out and helped to elevate the popular music of the day. With the advent of rock and roll, and musicians like David Bowie, Joe Cocker, and the Rolling Stones who wanted to "sound black," these backing vocalists were in high demand, helping to create the "wall of sound" that would define a generation of music.

Backup singers are responsible for many of the hooks that people sing along to when they think of famous songs, yet people rarely know the names of these artists. The movie highlights women like Lisa Fischer, Tata Vega, and Claudia Lennear, women who are legends in the background singing community, and yet never managed to become household names. It also presents the history of Darlene Love's struggle to transition from a backup singer to a solo artist. Exploited by music producer Phil Spector, who used her vocals to promote other people's records, it took her decades to earn the recognition she so richly deserved. And yet, her journey is a rarity, because most backup singers are unable to make the leap from the shadows to the spotlight.

Making that leap is a masterclass in human psychology. We hear from singers who released solo albums, achieved fame, and then slowly faded into obscurity because they didn't know how to play the game. Other singers confess that they prefer being background vocalists, convinced that fame would have just destroyed their lives. A point that is revisited multiple times is how you need ego to be a star - if you're a backup singer, you might not be self-involved enough to make it to the top. The collaborative nature of backup singing is a wonderful thing, and many of these people are artists who are above mercenary motives. As long as they can sing, they're happy to remain in the shadows.

20 Feet from Stardom isn't about the glitz and glamour of being a musician. It's about people who just want to sing. Being a backup singer can either be fulfilling or frustrating, and you will experience a rollercoaster of emotions as you hear these singers' stories. But once they start singing, your heart will soar. So the next time you listen to a song, pay attention to those backing vocals. There's a whole story behind those voices. 

Queen: The Modern Indian Woman

When Queen was released worldwide last month it was hailed with universal acclaim. The Bollywood establishment, critics, and audiences were unanimous in their praise of this fresh and wonderful story. However, now that I've finally gotten around to watching it, I can't help but wonder what they were talking about.

Queen is the story of Rani (Kangana Ranaut), a sheltered Delhi woman who is shattered when her fiancé, Vijay (Rajkummar Rao), gets cold feet two days before their wedding and calls the whole thing off. He was studying engineering in London and thinks he is too changed and wordly while Rani is still a conservative and naive girl who goes everywhere chaperoned by her younger brother. Rani hides in her bedroom for a few days, thinking about how she and Vijay fell in love, while her family members rally around and unhelpfully tell her things will get better. Finally, she decides that she is going on her honeymoon trip to Paris and Amsterdam alone. And what follows is a riotous adventure where our heroine discovers who she is and learns to become a modern woman.

The trouble with Queen is the trouble with a lot of Bollywood cinema. Subtlety is forsaken for the sake of broad strokes and generalizations. I was prepared to love this movie and the first half hour showed a great deal of promise. The opening montage of Rani's wedding preparations features Rani's internal monologue, a rare insight into what's going on inside an Indian woman's mind before her wedding. As Rani smiles and laughs with family members, we are privy to her nervous excitement and worries about various matters, both petty and significant. It was a marvelous device, one that I hoped would be employed throughout the film. Unfortunately, that is the last glimpse we have into her mind. What follows is "show" rather than "tell," and every cliché that Bollywood cinema can dream up about the clash between East meets West.

As Rani travels in Paris and Amsterdam, her female acquaintances are all South Asian women living Western lives. We have the hotel maid who had a child out of wedlock with her Parisian boyfriend and casually sleeps with hotel guests. There's a Pakistani lap dancer in Amsterdam's red light district, talking about how her conservative family would be aghast to know about her life, but hey, she has to find some way to make money and this is what you do in a recession. These are empowered women who are happy with their life choices, but is this really the only way that Rani can have a revelation about her sheltered life? Considering that her fiancé casually forbade her from working because he was perfectly capable of taking care of her, isn't it sufficient for Rani to just befriend a single woman with a job who happily supports herself? Do we really need to drive the point home by forcing her to try low-cut tops, get drunk, and dance on counters Coyote Ugly style?

The movie occasionally employs subtle but evocative imagery that makes a much more powerful statement than these other shenanigans. An example is Rani's luggage. When she first travels to Paris, she is encumbered by a heavy suitcase, which she sadly drags up to her hotel room, struggling under both the physical weight and also the emotional knowledge that she is doing this because she has no husband to help her. However, after her eye-opening travels, she returns to India with a utilitarian rucksack, her life conveniently packed up, carried by her own two shoulders, a wonderful metaphor for her new-found independence. Kangana Ranaut is an expressive and astonishing actress - it is a shame that the filmmakers couldn't trust her to carry this film on her capable shoulders rather than saddling her with a cinematic suitcase of tired tropes and predictable scenarios.

The nature of Bollywood is to go to extremes. I was hoping with movies like Kahaani and English Vinglish, we were starting to see movies about women that were told with a deeper feminine understanding, and a willingness to just let Indian women celebrate themselves rather than hold themselves up to Western standards. Even in English Vinglish, it seems like an Indian woman has to go abroad to find her voice, because society will stifle her every attempt to speak while she remains in India. So Bollywood, work on movies that focus on change from within rather than without. You've made a promising start, but you're no where near the finish line. 

Captain America 2: Who Can a Hero Trust?

In Captain America: The First Avenger, we got the origin story of how the scrawny Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) was injected with super serum and turned into the beefy superhero, Captain America. He swashbuckled through the 1940s, killing Nazis, thwarting the terrorist HYDRA organization, and defeating the Red Skull. But then he crashed in the Arctic and got frozen in time for 70 years until he re-emerged in the 21st century, where he was recruited by Nick Fury to join S.H.I.E.L.D. Subsequently in The Avengers, "Cap" was the moral center, leading the motley band of superheroes and telling them to put aside their petty difference to fight for a greater cause. But now in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, it's just him and Natasha Romanoff (a.k.a. Black Widow, played by Scarlett Johansson), and he needs to learn what it means to be a soldier in the modern world.

The movie opens on Washington D.C. in the early morning, a perfect setting for our American hero. Steve is running laps and strikes up a friendship with fellow runner, Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), a young veteran who now works at the VA. The two bond over their shared war experience, understanding each other psychologically even if their wars were decades apart. Then Steve and Natasha are called away on a S.H.I.E.L.D. mission to rescue hostages on a ship, where plenty of impressive action and fighting takes place. However, Steve discovers that Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) gave Natasha a solo mission to retrieve some data from the ship. That mysterious data will set the stage for the rest of the movie.

This entire movie is about trust and paranoia, and old versus new technology. When Nick Fury is attacked by mysterious assailants, Cap is left with no idea who he can trust to help him unravel the mystery. Of course, Natasha coerces him into cooperating with her, but every other character has to go through a vetting process, until we reach the movie's climax, where it becomes clear why it was so difficult to determine who the good guys were. Robert Redford plays Fury's longtime friend Alexander Pierce, a senior official at S.H.I.E.L.D. who is working on some high-concept project with the World Security Council at the Triskelion, S.H.I.E.L.D.'s headquarters on the Potomac River. Even though the building is a transparent, shiny, tower of glass, it hides many secrets both above and below ground. As Natasha points out, Steve is a terrible liar - now that he's caught up in a web of lies at S.H.I.E.L.D., he will be forced to air out all their secrets.

Steve's slow acclimatization to the modern world allows for some humorous exchanges, but also highlights the very real challenges he faces in this new world, not all of which were explored in The Avengers. This movie offers a chance to get to know Steve Rogers - Captain America is not a very deep character but the writers have done their best to imbue him with a more compelling inner life. His friendship with Natasha is warm and delightful, and doesn't veer off into the typical romcom territory one might expect. Of course, the banter isn't up to the Whedonesque standards set out in The Avengers, but it will do. To take the place of witty exposition, the writers have crammed in a slew of action scenes, filled with car chases, helicarriers, and explosions. The big stuff is a bit dull, but the fight sequences are quite mesmerizing. A great deal of attention has been paid to the fight choreography, particularly because Black Widow and Captain America don't use many weapons or fancy gadgets. They rely on brute strength and hand-to-hand combat, and their moves are dazzling to behold. Also, the movie is only two hours long, so it never feels like you're watching an overly extended action sequence - everything wraps up before you could get a migraine.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a solid entry in the Marvel filmverse. Not outstanding but by no means terrible. It offers a perfectly fun night at the movies and gives us slightly more insight into these characters, which I'm sure will come in handy for the next Avengers movie. The movie delves into some interesting themes and concepts: they are dealt with fairly superficially because this is still a superhero movie, but it points to Marvel's desire to elevate this particular genre of movies and make them both entertaining and thought-provoking. I'm certainly not tired of the Marvel universe, and you can be certain I'll be blogging about these movies for many years to come.

The Story of Film: An Odyssey

NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast introduces me to many of the things I end up discussing on this blog. Last week, Linda Holmes' "What's Making Me Happy This Week" pick was The Story of Film: An Odyssey. A 15-part documentary series about the history of cinema, I have spent a week glued to my Netflix account, and now I urge you to do the same.

Broadcast in 2011 in the UK, The Story of Film was directed and narrated by Northern Irish film critic, Mark Cousins. It opens with the D-Day invasion from Saving Private Ryan. As bullets whiz underwater and soldiers stumble onto the beach, Cousins' incongruously calm voice explains how this scene was shot on a peaceful beach in Ireland. How Steven Spielberg is using a lie to tell the truth. And with that, we are launched into the epic tale of The Story of Film. Beginning at the beginning, in 1895 when film techniques were being developed by Edison and the Lumiere brothers, Cousins embarks on a thorough examination of the evolution of cinema, picking it apart decade by decade. Seemingly simple things, like how to edit and cut a scene together are methodically explained, and we learn how filmmakers took a while to understand how to express story and action through this new medium of film. These minutiae are fascinating and will teach you to never take a single scene in a movie for granted.

Many explorations of film have a strictly Western slant. But Cousins rejects the notion that cinema is the purview of Hollywood and Europeans. Throughout The Story of Film, he discusses master filmmakers in Asia, Africa, and South America, pioneers who are often forgotten but produced some of the innovations that influenced prominent Western filmmakers. We see how the staging and cinematography of early Japanese cinema is replicated in the famous film noirs of the 1930s. Shot-by-shot comparisons reveal the ongoing legacy of film: a scene of a man staring at bubbles is repeated in movies that span continents and decades. This is a documentary that picks apart cinema and then puts it back together again to create one glorious tapestry of interconnected threads.

Aside from learning more than you could ever hope to learn about cinema, The Story of Film also serves as a world history lesson. Cinema does not exist in a vacuum; it is a product of its time, and Cousins discusses the influence of real-world events and their impact on movie-makers and audiences. World wars, cultural revolutions, the collapse of colonialism and the rise of Communism all form an integral part of this story, and it is astonishing how it can make the world feel both vast and small at the same time. Putting melodramatic Bollywood cinema in the context of Partition and the social upheaval of India in the 1950s was revelatory to me. Depending on your cultural background, you will find similarly astonishing points to ponder and analyze.

Each episode of The Story of Film: An Odyssey is an eye-opening delight, a reminder that movies are not a meaningless artistic pursuit but are deliberately crafted works that contain unimaginable depths of history, influence, and beauty. When I watch a movie now, I will be on the lookout for familiar shots, subtle imagery, social commentary, and anything else that can connect it to this vast legacy of movies that have preceded it. You cannot watch every movie that was ever made, but The Story of Film will certainly teach you how to appreciate the ones you do watch.