Monday, January 28, 2013

The unknown superstar













Sixto Rodriguez is a music superstar, bigger than Elvis or The Beatles or The Rolling Stones, but the weird thing is that he's only that big in South Africa. Rest of the world has no idea who he is as he made only two albums in Detroit at the beginning of the 70's which didn't sell at all and he was soon forgotten. That is except in South Africa where he became a legend and as no one there knew anything about him except for his music rumors started to spread and soon became “known” facts. One of those being that the man is dead. Two South African fans decide to find out who he was and what happened to him. The story in this one is actually quite brilliant, words like amazing and incredible would seem like an understatement. However this is not a brilliant documentary. The problem is how it's constructed. The biggest twist to the story comes around the half way of the film and after that it actually sets more questions than answers them. I kind of understood that they wanted to leave a bit of mystery around the character, but still there were so many juicy topics they could have covered more deeply. So in the end I was at the same time amazed but yet disappointed. Amazed about the story but still disappointed about the structure and focus of the documentary. Technically I didn't find anything wrong with it, it looked good even though there were quite a bit of old amateur video material in there as well, but it fit in there very well. Also it was very “approachable” as in easy viewing even if you're not a huge music fan and if you are then you will get even more out of it. I have to rate this as a good documentary even though it was somewhat poorly made direction wise.
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