Songcatcher dvd movie.|
Songcatcher buy bestselling dvd movies, videos find reviews, ratings, prices |
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List Price: $14.98 Our Price: $12.99 You Save: $1.99 Features • Closed-captioned • Color • Dolby • DVD-Video • Subtitled • Widescreen • NTSC In Theaters : 2000 DVD Release : 03 June, 2003 |
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Songcatcher description Hauntingly beautiful folk music and stunning Appalachian scenery take center stage in this winner of the 2000 Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Prize for outstanding ensemble performance. Musicologist Dr. Lily Penleric has a deep love of English folk ballads. After a humiliating failure to make full professor, she heads off to visit her sister's tiny school in rural Appalachia and finds herself in folk music central. Lily is entranced, but the locals are suspicious of the outlander's motivations. Issues of tolerance, clashing cultures, and Big Bad Men abound, but Songcatcher wisely focuses on the music. Janet McTeer does fine with the "repressed academic gets in touch with the earth" role, but her truly outstanding work is in revealing scholar Lily's rapture in her discoveries. McTeer leads a truly great cast, including the wonderful Pat Carroll, and a just-for-the-hell-of-it cameo by bluesman Taj Mahal. Songcatcher has a healthy respect for the mountain people it portrays, and an absolute reverence for their music. --Ali Davis |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | Beautiful Mountain Scenery And Great Music But Film Has Some Flaws |
| Dr. Lily Penleric is a professor of music who, while visiting her sister Elna's settlement school in the North Carolina mountains, finds she has uncovered a treasure trove of lost English and Scotish folk ballads among the rural residents.
Lily proceeds to record these songs on phonograph cylinders as she comes into contact with local singers and musicians, such as a young girl named Deladis, wise, old Viney Butler and a talented banjo and guitar player, Tom Bledsoe, who becomes her love interest in the film. What works about this movie is the outstanding cinematography that successfully captures the green, rugged beauty of the Southern mountains. Also the incredible music, which features classic folk songs such as "Barbara Allen" and cameo performances by Taj Mahal and Iris Dement. But the film's subplots, particularly the lesbian relationship between Elna and an older woman named Harriet as well as the unlikely romance between the intellectual, artistocratic Lily and the hard drinking, hillbilly Tom, seem extremely forced and unrealistic considering the historical and regional context of the film. Also the secondary characters lack nuance and complexity, typically shown as either having hearts of gold, like sweet, innocent Deladis, or as violent, intolerant brutes, such as Deladis' boyfriend Fate. I have family roots going back to the early 1800's in the mountains of North Carolina and can promise you that this is definitely a simplified Hollywood version of Southern mountain life rather than a realistic portrayal of this region and it's people in the early 1900's. Still I enjoyed the music and the natural scenery so much that I would recommend it to those who likewise enjoy these two extraordinary aspects of traditional Southern mountain culture. |
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