Many have asked: why don’t you cover music in films as much anymore? Here’s a good example why. “The Guitar” was a film that interested us early this year when it debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, because it had a music angle and it starred to actors we like, French actor Isaach de Bankolé and the still rather gorgeous Saffron Burrows (admittedly, she’s never blown anyone away on screen, but we have a soft spot).
But having finally seen the trailer to this film, we’re kind of aghast. It looks brutally bad and cliche-riddled. It’s essentially about a woman who finds out she’s dying and then lives like there’s no tomorrow cause there is none! And then, cause she’s dying, she learns how to play the guitar and rock out! (or at least it sure looks that way, the shots of Burrows raising her axe and rocking out are just cringe-inducing)
The synopsis: One morning Mel, a mousy, harried New Yorker with a thankless job and an even-less-appealing boyfriend learns that the tumor in her throat is cancerous; the diagnosis is terminal, so it seems that both her job and her relationship are kaput. Rather than lying down and dying then and there, she embarks on an endless spree, the kind of self-indulgent wish fulfillment that we have all fantasized about.
To be totally crass about it, the only thing that sounds even remotely appealing about the flick is that Burrows apparently spends most of it naked according to the director. “As you can see in the movie, there are many scenes of her naked. That allowed me to have a closed set, and I liked that a lot, so I just told everybody she was naked for the rest of the movie and nobody was allowed in,” first-time director Amy Redford told Vulture.
The multi-instrument composer David Mansfield has worked as a session musician with the likes of such luminaries as Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Lucinda Williams, Victoria Williams, Loudon Wainwright III, and many others, but everything we can hear in this trailer leads us to believe this is uplifting, cheesy-rock fromage (Mansfield has done a lot of score work, but his most notable is Michael Cimino’s 1980 disaster, “Heaven’s Gate”). The soundtrack came out on October 28.
The film comes out in limited release on November 20 and we were looking forward to it slightly (or felt obligated to know something about it), but woo boy, it looks like a major stinker. And reviews don’t look good. So far the film sits with a decidedly unimpressive 37% on Rotten Tomatoes. TimeOut writes, “The movie has clichéd rebirths in mind, and you’ll resent where it [eventually] goes.” You know this thing is eventually filled with the worst kind of hopeful optimistic sentimentality. Now there’s nothing wrong with hopefulness in films, but when they look this contrived and saccharine, it sets off alarms in our internal cheese barometer.
