Documentaries for Guitar Crazy Kids
It Might Get Loud (2009) PG
Imagine U2s The Edge, Jack White of The White Stripes, and Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, having a chat in your living room and an impromptu jam, picking out each others songs.
It’s heartening to see them ask questions of each other, always as curious beginners, never experts in each others eyes.
The guy next door, easy going, yet individual, attitudes of the three musicians, colour this documentary with an inspiring can do attitude.
The documentary allows us individual, fly on the wall, access to the artists’ memories, archives, and influences.
Jack White builds a guitar. The Edge walks us through his school and kitchen. Jimmy Page reminisces about the accidents that led to towering classics like Stairway to Heaven.
But the real star quality of this documentary is the passion each musician shows us for their lives and the unwavering dedication to the form, to developing new sounds, and creating the soundtrack, for modern western culture.
With the nerdy enthusiasm of a train spotter, these knights of modern music inhabit a world of dedication to guitar music as if it were the Holy Grail – and there are many who believe it may be!
As someone who would normally be quite passé about guitar, I found myself passionately entangled in, and entranced by, the strange love affair with the guitar that these men extolled.
For the kids, it will renew their passion in playing, learning and pursuing their dreams and show them what it takes to succeed.
This is a highly accessible, serious, documentary with a light touch that riveted me from start to finish – all ten times I’ve watched it.
Searching for SugarMan” (2012) for Teens (rating 12s)
You may also be interested in a sensitive and heartbreaking documentary about what happened to a 1960s artist that producers thought would be a huge hit and who was – just not when and where anyone expected.
Searching for Sugarman is soulful and sad, but poignant. It illustrates how a life can go in different, and unexpected, directions yet reach out and inspire the lives of others from across the globe.
Copyright © 2018 Lyn Hagin Meade, All Rights Reserved.