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Country Blues => Weenie Campbell Main Forum => Topic started by: Stuart on September 30, 2016, 07:46:34 AM
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Anybody seen it?
http://www.twotrainsrunnin.com
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I haven't yet but it's showing in Austin in a few weeks as part of the Austin Film Fest. I'll have to wait til festival goers gain entrance but I plan on trying to get a 'non-festival' ticket. Assuming I make it in I'll let you know how it is. The preview gives me high hopes. It will be interesting to see how deftly they mix a bit of a heavy topic with a not as heavy topic. Definitely two aspects of American history that deserve more notice and an intereseting idea to combine the two into one documentary.
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Saw this tonight at a local theater. Very good for the most part, with interesting use of animation for historical reenactments. The melding of the two subjects is I think a bit forced but generally handled well, and certainly the subjects themselves are handled well and very interesting.
The newer music, with a couple of exceptions, is godawful and the soundtrack isn't that great either. But there's plenty of good blues to balance it out.
Definitely worth going to see!
Chris
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Several movies about the blues, or music in the South, recently have done very little to provide anything even close to realistic historical context and have instead opted to push the myth of white redemption through the fascination with black music. Peter Guralnick is most often referred to in scholarship (see Charles Hughes recent monograph Country Soul) as perpetuating this myth in his writings, and the recent documentaries Muscle Shoals and Shake 'Em On Down: The Blues According to Fred McDowell do very little to dispel the myth in any way. Two Trains Runnin' certainly seems as if it may be the most egregious of all these films, because it makes a comparison between these record collectors and the students who volunteered to register African American voters during Freedom Summer in Mississippi. While I'm sure this partly-cartoon documentary should be viewed with a great deal of skepticism regarding its historical accuracy, it does seem to depict the oblivious nature of white privilege concerning the lived experience of African Americans very well.
SNCC organizer and later folklorist Worth Long once admitted that he did not know a single blues artist who also had a civil rights arrest record.
I am looking forward to the film about the Memphis Country Blues Society and Festival, which began in 1966 and ended in 1970, a very complex period in the history of Memphis. I doubt that film will find it so easy to divorce the music from all that was occurring in the city during those years. The current trailer is old. https://vimeo.com/168100532 (https://vimeo.com/168100532)