I've had this DVD for quite some time, but put off watching it, since I really wasn't expecting it to be very good. While it's not the greatest biopic I've ever seen, Hendrix is far from the worse. Wood Harris plays Jimi Hendrix and does a competent acting job, although I never believed I was watching anything more than an actor pretending to be someone else.
The plot of Hendrix is built around an interview he is supposed to be doing on the last day of his life. This allows exposition from Jimi to move the movie through the various years of his life. We first see Jimi as a young boy living with his single father and a brief glimpse of his mother and her problems. The film then skips to Jimi getting out of the Army after breaking his ankle. Hendrix then follows Jimi through his early years of performing in different bands. One specific instance shows us Jimi being fired from Little Richard's band, because he felt Jimi was getting too much attention with his guitar playing and theatrics. Little Richard also claimed Jimi copied his pencil thin mustache. All of this moves pretty fast, since they're trying to fit Hendrix's lifetime into 100 minutes.
Jimi gets his big break when Chas Chandler (formerly the bass player for The Animals) sees him performing in a club and convinces Jimi to come to England, where he will manage him. In England, the one thing Jimi really wants to do is jam with Eric Clapton. After some persuasion from Chas, Clapton agrees to let Jimi jam with Cream (Clapton, Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce) on stage. This goes so well, Chas tells Jimi that he should form his own power trio and they recruit Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell and The Jimi Hendrix Experience is born.
The rest of Hendrix takes us through the ups and downs of his wildly successful career: We get a look at Jimi playing The Monterey Pop Festival. A short snippet with Jimi as the opening act for The Monkees. A look at the dissolution of The Experience. A quick stop at Woodstock with Jimi performing "The Star Spangled Banner". A very short looks at his free form jazz group, Sky Church, and the formation of Band of Gypsies featuring Buddy Miles on drums and Billy Cox on Bass. During all these phases in Jimi's career we get an inside look at his excessive drug taking and womanizing, his struggle to control and expand his own music, and the toll the road took on him.
There were two parts of Hendrix that I thought could have been done a little better. First, between a lot of scenes, we get shown "real life" clips (Beatles, Monkees, Woodstock, Kent State, Martin Luther King assassination, etc) to establish time and place. Unfortunately, a few of these scenes included people/events in the wrong time line. The other thing that jarred me out of the movie was Wood Harris' guitar playing. The movie, with some careful camera work, manages most of the time to hide the fact that Harris wasn't really playing the guitar and they used someone else's hands in any close-up shots. The trouble came when, in some wide shots, you could definitely see Harris' hands and the actual music being played didn't match.
Hendrix was denied the use of any original material that Jimi had recorded, so the movie is filled with covers of Jimi's covers - "All Along The Watchtower", "Hey Joe", "Wild Thing", etc. This worked out pretty good for the most part, but it did leave me wanting to hear "Are You Experienced", "Purple Haze", etc. I will say that Harris did a really good job of lip synching....whether he was lip synching his voice or someone else's I haven't been able to determine. IF you're a diehard fanboy of Jimi Hendrix, then you probably won't like this movie. IF you want a pretty decent overview of Jimi Hendrix's life, then I would definitely recommend Hendrix.
Do I like British teen pop movies, pre- "A Hard Day's Night"? I can't answer that question, since this is the first one I have ever seen; however, I certainly enjoyed Live It Up (released in the U.S. as "Sing and Swing"), even though it had a few spots that made absolutely no sense with the rest of the movie.
The plot centers around a group of boys (David Hemmings, Heinz Burt formerly of The Tornados, Steve Marriott, John Pike) that work for the GPO (General Post Office) and in their spare time dream of becoming famous rock stars with their band The Smart Alecs. They even mention once during the movie that they would like to be as famous as The Beatles. They cut a demo, but it gets lost, the band has a "bust up" over this, but eventually all works out in the end. A pretty simple plot that allowed not only The Smart Alecs to perform, but since the movie was revolving around music, allowed the insertion of other musical groups. To make things even better The Smart Alecs song "Live It Up" was actually good enough that it could have been a hit in real life.
Record producer Joe Meek wrote all of the songs in Live It Up and according to the commentary, all the artists in the movie, except for Kenny Ball, were from his stable of performers. Joe Meek is known as the Phil Spector of England and is best known to us here in the U.S. as the producer of The Tornados "Telstar", the first record by a British group to hit #1 in the U.S. Hot 100 charts.
It was nice seeing the parents and adults being supportive of the kids in Live It Up. The U.S. versions of this same type of movie during this period seemed to always have the parents degrading that evil rock and roll. Even the most resistant character to his son pursuing a music career here is Hemmings' father, who has given him 30 days to finally break into the business or to get a "real" job. When Hemmings wants to give up early, his father shows his support by insisting his son take the whole 30 days and not give up.
In this day and age, it was odd to see the young guys smoking during their scenes, but I guess in the early 60s, this didn't look out of place. The motorbikes and the messengers reminded me of "Quadrophenia" in which the lead character was a messenger. According to the commentary the time period of Live It Up is just a little bit before the Mods vs Rockers riots era. I imagine Pete Townshend had seen this movie in the UK and I wonder if it had any influence on him when he wrote his rock opera "Quadrophenia".
The commentary on the DVD is very strange, they did one commentary for both Live It Up and for its sequel "Be My Guest". About 1/2 way through the commentary, they stop talking about this movie, Live It Up, and start talking about the sequel Be My Guest. I stopped listening to the commentary, since I know it will also be on "Be My Guest", which I plan on watching in the future. I'm not much for listening to commentaries, but this one gave me a lot of insights into the UK during the time period of this movie.
There is one very odd part in the movie that was never mentioned in the commentary, but nonetheless sticks in my mind. The teen girl (Jennifer Moss) who was a brunette and had been trying to attract the attention of Hemmings changes her hair color to blond. After a short trip to find the missing demo tape, she suddenly is a brunette again. One of the other boys asks has she done something different with her hair, but she ignores him. Later Hemmings says with his back to the camera(making it appear this was a voice over) "I'm glad you lost that wig, I never did like blonds". I can only guess that this blond hair was going to be part of the plot, was abandoned and covered up with the above explanations.
Some of the musical numbers are worked coherently into the plot, but on a few occasions, a musical number just suddenly appears between scenes with no rhyme or reason. I'm not sure if this was poor editing, time restraint, or just "let's get another performance into the movie", but it didn't detract from my enjoyment of Live It Up.
The musicians featured in Live It Up: Steve Marriott (The Small Faces and Humble Pie) had been a child actor who had received raves for his earlier stage work in Oliver. His previous acting pays off well here since he is quite good in every scene he is in. You can also spot future Deep Purple and Rainbow guitarist Ritchie Blackmore in the group the Outlaws (photo above), Jennifer Moss plays David Hemmings girlfriend, Gene Vincent who had moved to the UK because of tax problems in the U.S. does one song, Heinz Burt played the lead singer of The Smart Alecs, the Australian singer Patsy Ann Noble, Sounds Incorporated, Kim Roberts, and Andy Cavell and The Saints all perform one song each, Mitch Mitchell who would later play drums in The Jimi Hendrix Experience, plays Andrew (listed in the credits under his birth name John Mitchell) and Dave Clark of The Dave Clark Five listed as David Clark is credited as Recording Man.
