SONG SUNG BLUE (2025) is a feel good (but also sad) movie about the power of music, based on a 2008 documentary I hadn’t heard of about a Neil Diamond tribute band. There is a family member not mentioned in the movie who says it’s “all lies,” but from what I’ve read the basic outline stays reasonably close to the true events, and that leads to an unusual structure. For a while it hews pretty closely to a familiar underdog musician dramedy formula. Then life, even in its streamlined-for-narrative-purposes form, throws in some curveballs that make the story seem pretty crazy.
I wanted to watch it because it’s written and directed by Craig Brewer, and its first chunk is like a family friendly version of some of what made his breakthrough HUSTLE & FLOW so appealing – this group of regular nobodies coming together and trying to achieve their musical dreams, which are small time by movie standards but huge in their lives and in their hearts. Mike Sardina (Hugh Jackman, VAN HELSING) is a singer and guitar player who performs under the name Lightning, wears a lightning bolt insignia on his jacket and medallion, likens it to being a super hero, but mostly he’s just a regular Clark Kent working as a mechanic, going to meetings, trying not to be a terrible father to his teenage daughter Angelina (singer-songwriter King Princess). (read the rest of this shit…)
LOVE HURTS is a trifle, a truffle, a little treat meant to be devoured quickly and forgotten. But that’s much better than I’d heard (one critic called it “nearly unwatchable,” I remember), so I feel kinda guilty that I listened to the conventional wisdom and skipped it in theaters. Ke Huy Quan got his 87North-produced action vehicle, an even greater honor than his Academy Award if you ask me, and I waited for video. For that I apologize.
When we last left novelist and heavy metal drummer turned filmatist S. Craig Zahler, he had made a distinctive directorial debut with 
