Higher calling

Muscle Shoals

Crit

A story about music and abandonment and love and obsession and divorce. And did I mention music?

Ever wonder why Aretha Franklin and the Rolling Stones and Percy Sledge and Paul Simon and Dylan and Leon Russell and Etta James and on and on and on and on came to a little shitburg on the Tennessee River in Alabama to make music with a bunch of nerdy white session players? Well, it's complicated, except that it's quite simple: the Swampers had the funk.

But I don't care about their paying props to the Swampers in their sweet-homey big hit, or about what swell boys they were and are, I'm still not down with any band that performs in front of a huge Confederate flag.

Dallas Buyers Club

Crit

Matthew McConaughey's new thing, I think we now know, is updates of Huck Finn. This time he plays the Huck character himself, growing enough to love one member of a despised group without ever coming to see that despising the group itself is inconsistent with his love. But as with Huck, it's a start. Jared Leto is, yes, of course, positively amazing as the transvestite who takes her name from a synthetic fiber.

This is, in the end, I think, a movie about the fact that every damn one of us is living with a terminal disease, and every damn one of is going to go sooner or later, but there's nothing wrong with fighting it all the way.