Though filmed in black and white, the dominant color of Sam Jones' film about Wilco, I AM TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART, is a murky gray.  Even the closing credits, unspooled over the haunting song "Imagination" from WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY are tinted gray rather than traditional white.   Rolling Stone music critic David Fricke (who also appears on camera in the film) compares the dingy images to security camera footage, an appropriate metaphor for the intimate nature of Jones' revealing film. 

But the visuals do so much more.  The film's drab look underscores the movie's bleak story of a world in which record labels and rock bands are equally chaotic.  Here the only thing that is truly black and white is the music; bold and beautiful.  And the songs themselves, haunting blends of rock, folk, and pop like "Ashes of American Flags" and "Poor Places," are about survival in the midst of destruction and decay, which, ironically, is what Wilco found itself forced to do when their record company refused to release their album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. 

Fiction films are shot first and then acquire soundtracks.  I AM TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART is sort of the reverse; an album given a "videotrack" to compliment the songs; faded pictures of sad stories to accompany the eleven songs on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.  It is one of the best rock and roll movies of all time, equally about the dark side of the music industry and the triumph of the music itself over everything else.

YHF was recorded in the winter of 2000 and 2001 by Wilco, a band that was formed out of the rubble of alt-country pioneers Uncle Tupelo. First-time filmmaker and rock photographer Jones arrived in Chicago expecting to simply document the album's recording only to find a band in a wild state of flux; one day earlier, Wilco had fired its drummer. Jones would later capture the disintegration of the relationship between key member Jay Bennett and the rest of the band, as well as Reprise Records' rejection of Wilco's completed album for its perceived lack of commercial appeal. 

Through it all Wilco persevered.  I AM TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART is not the great film that it is because they succeed, but because they survive. The minor accomplishments of the documentary's final minutes do not negate the loss of one of key member and the band's dismissal by a record label.  When you watch the film -- and you most definitely should, even if you aren't a Wilco fan -- compare Bennett's last performance with the band with those after he was fired.  Before his removal, the band is powerful and lively on "Outtasite (Outta Mind)," even if the tension between the members was never higher.  After Bennett leaves, the loss to the performance of "Monday" is tangible.  It's clear the band hasn't quite adjusted to playing their old rockers as a four-piece with only one guitarist.  Yet without Bennett, the band performs a startlingly beautiful rendition of one of YHF's best numbers, "Jesus, Etc." as if the new music could not be performed any other way.  Bennett's firing ultimately feels sad yet necessary, an obviously talented musician who is not in sync with Wilco's continually evolving attitude.

I AM TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART is a film that seems casually entertaining on first viewing, and infinitely more carefully constructed and powerful each time I watch it.  The whole experienced is enhanced by the film's terrific DVD, which offers you an extra disc with more than an hour of illuminating additional scenes and concert footage (On a side note, documentarians shoot dozens of hours of footage for and use only a tiny percentage of it.  Why, then, do so few use DVD, as Jones does, to share some of the unused gems they captured?).  The only significant disadvantage to the film is that Wilco's career has only grown more interesting, but Jones isn't around to film it.  A sequel would be great, but it's almost certain Wilco would never be interested in making another documentary; they are not interested in doing the same thing twice.

IF YOU LIKED I AM TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART, CHECK OUT: SUPERSTAR: THE KAREN CARPENTER STORY (1987): A early film by director Todd Haynes (SAFE, FAR FROM HEAVEN) that tells the tragic story of rock singer Karen Carpenter’s battle with anorexia.  The catch?  Haynes cast Barbie dolls as his actors.  A trippy flick that’s not commercially available, since Haynes couldn’t get the Carpenter estate to license him the songs (Mattel Toys wasn’t too pleased either), but bootleg copies are exist if you look around.

THE BAD

Any movie could be good; it's just the case that most aren't.  Sometimes, what sounds like the worst idea can evolve into a good movie.  Jerry Lewis' lost Holocaust comedy THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED (lost because it was so bad Lewis has kept the film from ever being released) sure sounds awful, but Roberto Begnini recycled its basic plot for the very popular LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL. 

THE POSTMAN is closer to a good movie than THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED.  It needn't have been remade by another director.  Conceivably, a significantly shorter cut with some reshot dialogue could have made this infamous clunker into something worth seeing.  As it is, this not the ISHTARish bomb it is made out to be.  It's problems are vast and numerous, but not as painful to endure as expected.

Its main problem is that damn running time, just a hair under three hours.  Very few movies deserve to be three hours long, and most of that do have already been made by Francis Ford Coppola.  Kevin Costner became one of the most successful actor/directors in Hollywood history with his DANCES WITH WOLVES, originally a 180-minute film that is now available in an extended cut on DVD that runs nearly four freakin' hours. 

Apparently Costner chalked up WOLVES' popularity to its length and, blinded by his incredible success, then made it his personal life mission to never appear in another movie shorter than two and a half hours. It didn't matter how good the film was, it didn't matter how much they cost.  If it was really, really long, he was going to be in it (if he could wear his hear long and flowing, and sport some sort of strange facial hair, that didn't hurt either) Throughout the 1990s he went through an unprecedented stretch of bloated bladder-busters.  Just look at this partial resume:

DANCES WITH WOLVES: 236 minutes
JFK: 206 minutes
ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES:  155 minutes
WATERWORLD: 176 minutes
THE POSTMAN: 177 minutes

Others may have made more movies, but no one asked asked his audience to physically spend more time in theaters than Kevin Costner.

Astoundingly, by the time THE POSTMAN rolled around in 1997, Costner had already faltered once with WATERWORLD, the most expensive movie ever made to date.  Some may have been discouraged by such failure but Costner charged ahead; after TIN CUP (a fluffy sports comedy that still clocks in at well over two hours) he returned to the epic scale that he blindly loved with THE POSTMAN.  Though it cost less than half of WATERWORLD it was just as big, just as long, and a much bigger flop (Believe it or not, WATERWORLD's worldwide box office ensured the picture just about broke even).

THE POSTMAN reminds me of a other movies by successful stars who have lost their grip on reality. Steven Seagal made the wildly popular UNDER SIEGE and suddenly he was directing himself in ON DEADLY GROUND, where he was single-handedly saving the environment by kicking the shit out of Michael Caine (the connection made even less sense on screen).  Costner was a far more talented an actor and director than Seagal (though give Seagal a slight edge in the hair department) but he was just as deranged.  Only a man completely in love with himself would play a character who, in the course of a movie, goes from post-apocalyptic drifter (who answers to the name Shakespeare, as if Costner is somehow carrying on of the Bard's legacy) to postal worker impersonator (I'm pretty sure that's a felony, buster!) to freedom fighter who inspires an entire nation to rise up in revolution while he kills bad guys and leaves notes on their bodies reading "POSTAGE DUE."  Postage due? Did Schwarzenegger have a hand in the script? (Probably not, he would have preferred something more direct, like shooting his nemesis between the eyes before barking "Return... to sender!")

Costner based his story on a novel, and perhaps on the page the idea of a country being reborn thanks to belief in United States Postal Workers was handled with more delicacy.  On film, the characters' slavish devotion to the ideals of prompt package delivery feels more than a little preposterous.  By the end, if you managed to make it to the end, when men are dying as they yell "I believe in the United States of America!" it's clear that Costner was either totally misguided or making a movie for an audience that hadn't existed since at least the 1950s (and even then may have only existed then in the minds of people who idealize the period).

There are numerous shots of natural beauty in THE POSTMAN, though perhaps three great shots in three hours is just a matter of the law of averages.  The rest of the time, the desolate apocalyptic landscape seems straight out of Creed music video (thankfully, Costner never cries tears of blood).  The ideas behind the film are fairly sound, but the execution is far too earnest and can't seem to cut out any of the fat. The DVD of THE POSTMAN has 44 chapters.  I've read huge books that were long at 30 chapters.  Kevin, it's not the size that counts, it's how you use it.

INSTEAD OF, CHECK OUT: FIREFLY (2002), yet another outstanding television series available on DVD, Joss Whedon’s superior blending of Western and science-fiction tropes.  Whedon convinced Fox, who canceled the show after just 13 episodes, to let him make a feature film (SERENITY, due out this fall) so check out the show now so you’re all caught up for the big release.

THE UGLY

The key to the charm of blaxploitation masterpiece THE HUMAN TORNADO is the conflict between the fiction created on the screen and reality that anyone watching the movie will be able to discern.  Its star is a comedian-turned-actor named Rudy Ray Moore, who plays Dolemite, a hard-loving, hard-hitting pimp.  TORNADO is endlessly amusing because Moore consistently acts like he is terrific at things he is blatantly incompetent at.  His kung-fu fighting closely resembles uncontrollable asthmatic seizures, yet Moore insists upon the monicker "The Human Tornado" and dispatches dozens of men with punches and kicks filmed at hi-speed.  He kisses like a fish, and has a egg-shaped physique, yet women are drawn to him and his incredible lovemaking prowess; in one scene, Dolemite's encounter with one buxom woman causes furniture to move and doors to spontaneously open like a scene from Disney's Haunted Mansion.

TORNADO is actually the sequel to a film entitled DOLEMITE where, in an unprecedented display of trust by the United States Penal System, Moore's character was released from prison in order to prove his innocence (Think Charles Manson's ever tried that one?).  There's little connection between the films other than the lead character's lewd behavior and subpar fight choreography.  In a move I wholeheartedly applaud, THE HUMAN TORNADO finds Dolemite, who previously only rapped in his nightclub act, using rap as a means of conversational communication (Example: "Turn up in that cave!  I got a plan to make that son of a gun dig his own grave!")  As a result, TORNADO is sort of like THE GODFATHER PART II, a more complete, complex version of its predecessor.  And trust me, that is the only way in which it is like THE GODFATHER PART II.

Dolemite's in trouble with the law again, having screwed the wife of a racist sheriff who then accuses him of murder.  After a standup comedy performance (Sample so-unfunny-it's-funny Dolemite punchline: "He screwed her three times and hit her in the head with a rock!") Moore travels to Los Angeles to evade his enemies, where he comes to the aid of a friend who is being threatened by mobsters.  There he hooks up with an old flame named Hurricane Annie (I suppose the only suitable lover for a man like The Human Tornado would be another person with a meteorological nickname) and shags and slaps his way to victory.

Like its star's dogged insistence on his own superstardom in the face of insurmountable evidence to the contrary, THE HUMAN TORNADO, clumsily but enthusiastically directed by Cliff Roquemore, fashions itself as a grand enterprise that it is incapable of delivering.  Cars are blown up, men are shot and killed, massive karate fights are staged, and none of it without a modicum of basic human competence.  The acting is sub-porno quality and the sound is so poorly recorded that if the boom pole hadn’t popped into the show so much you would swear they had pointed the wrong end at the actors (In the original DOLEMITE, the boom mike appears so frequently it deserved a supporting actor credit).

If you've ever wished to see a man in thong (who is actually supposed to be naked, but nevermind) jump off a cliff, freeze in midair then shout "So y'all don't believe I jumped huh?  Well watch THIS good shit!" and then see the whole thing done again in an "INSTANT REPLAY!" you should probably see THE HUMAN TORNADO. Although I have the sneaking suspicion that if you really did want to see such a sight you either already own THE HUMAN TORNADO or you are The Human Tornado.

IF YOU LIKED THE HUMAN TORNADO, CHECK OUT: THE HEBREW HAMMER (2003), a Jewish version of a blaxploitation humor.  The execution could have been funnier, but I positively loved Andy Dick in the role he was born to play, as a murderous Santa Claus.