Cool fact

Searching for Sugar Man

Crit

You sort of expect Rob Reiner to turn up as the interviewer, so implausible is this documentary about a guy from Detroit who cut a couple of brilliant but unbought albums in the early '70s, then disappeared, only to become a rebel icon for antiapartheid Afrikaners, who adopted his antiestablishment ethos and were crushed to learn of his on-stage suicide--either by self-immolation or by hangdun--but continued to buy the records, probably a half-million of them over the years. And then, of course, the discovery that he was still living in the same house in Detroit where he'd been for 40 years, working construction and building-preservation, close to his three daughters, and oblivious to his bigger-than-Elvis, bigger-than-the-Stones fame in South Africa.

I mean, come on.

I only wish I could report that I was blown away by Rodriguez's music. I like it--lyrically Dylanesque, vocally very Feliciano--and I may buy Cold Fact, the first album, but the story rather dwarfs the music. And like Reiner's stuff, it evokes laughter, but laughter of sheer joy, not of hilarity. Sorry for the spoilers, but you will leave the theater happy.

Trailers

• Smashed--I actually saw this before, but forgot to blog it. It seems to ask what happens when out of a couple of drunks, exactly one decides to get clean and sober. A possibility.
• Promised Land--Van Sant directs Damon; hey, worked last time.
• Hyde Park on Hudson--I'd seen a teaser for this, but the full-scale trailer makes it look even more appealing; The King's Speech on our side of the Pond.