The Soul of a Man (2003)

I'll tell you why so serious

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

The documentary begins with setting the perspective to several light years. The voyager is traveling our milky-way with the sounds of our earthly lives, as a space monument for (possible?) extraterrestrials. The documentary contains footage of Willy Dixen, Robert Johnson, Skip James and J.B. Lenoir. The footage of J.B. has never been published before. The narrative is from 'blind Willie' Dixon. However, it's done by an actor. The film shows the work of all these early blues men followed by covers and interpretations by musicians, such as Nick Cave and the bad Seeds among others. The Death of J.B. Lenoir (John Mayall's song) is a striking event in the story. Lenoir got political engaged and is considered to be of the league of Martin Luther King and peers. His political interests can be found in the themes of his lyrics. Blues is found to be 'THE' native music of America. Blues is the roots and the rest is the fruits.The title 'Soul of a Man' is after a Willie Dixon song.

While all of the musicians that are featured here are great, their lives are not particularly interesting; at least not as far as I can tell from the film. I don't know if their lives were interesting because there is very little information here. It is mostly a mish-mash of performances and re-enactments filmed in the spirit of Hardcopy and Inside Edition (I hear that Wenders and O'Reilly are planning to collaborate on something) The documentary has some interesting performances, but you can get these from the soundtrack album. What's better, the versions on the soundtrack album aren't truncated like the ones in the film.

This film is deeply disappointing. Not only that Wenders only displays a very limited musical spectrum of Blues, it is his subjective and personal interest in parts of the music he brings on film that make watching and listening absolutely boring. The only highlight of the movie is the interview of a Swedish couple who were befriended with J.B. Lenoir and show their private video footage as well as tell stories. Wenders's introduction of the filmic topic starts off quite interestingly - alluding to world's culture (or actually, American culture) traveling in space, but his limited looks on the theme as well as the neither funny nor utterly fascinating reproduction of stories from the 30s renders this movie as a mere sleeping aid. Yawn. I had expected more of him.

I saw this Documentary at the Cannes Film Festival, in a small 200-seat Cinema at the top of the main building at the Cannes Film Festival.I absolutely was into it. I love the mix of awesomely made fictional scenes. It is amazing set-design. The scenes look really like they were filmed in 1920ies or 1930ies.And the music is so nice.I rate this experience 9/10.* spoilers ahead *The Documentary tells about awesome Blues-men, with black-and-white old-looking scenes of the black man playing the guitar and singing. It is really amazing. But this also mixes in new bands and that is maybe one thing I might dislike in this Documentary. It is the too abundant use of links to modern rock-bands playing those Blues songs in a modern way. I didn't really appreciate their trashed way of playing such awesome Blues songs. This is the same kind of un-perfect musical taste I found when watching Wim Wenders Buena Vista Social Club.The Documentary was such a standing-ovation at this first screening in the little cinema, that the next day this Documentary was shown for everyone and normal tourists on the beach of the Croisette at the open-air cinema. Though the sand, the quality of the projection and the bad quality of the sound probably made it a difficult experience to enjoy for the thousands of people who were sitting in the sand that night.