One of the more amazing and intriguing concert experiences I’ve ever had took place at a sidestage during the 1998 Cornerstone Festival.  It was late at night, and my friends and I had skipped out on M.C. Hammer(!)‘s main stage performance to catch a couple of Cornerstone oddballs: Soul-Junk and the Danielson Famile. 

The power kept cutting out from time to time, and so at one point, Soul-Junk started pulling people up from the crowd to breakdance onstage.  When the power inevitably cut out during the Famile’s set, the band kept on playing, the passion and quirkiness of their music overcoming any technical difficulties and quickly becoming one of the most invigorating experiences of the fest that year.

In the following years, the Famile’s Cornerstone sets became must-see events for us.  Sure, there was the off-kilter nature of it all—a band composed of brothers and sisters decked out in nurse uniforms and led by a guy singing in a most grating falsetto—that set it apart.  But even more importantly was the amazing passion and even joy that they brought to their music, such that even the most hardened punk kids and metalheads could be found dancing, smiling, and praising during a Danielson Famile set.

All of these memories and impressions came rushing back while watching J.L. Aronson’s 2006 documentary, Danielson: A Family Movie.

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There are two sides to American history.  There’s the boring side that’s been taught to you by history textbooks and schoolteachers.  And then there’s the other side where, as it turns out, America is actually littered with ruins of ancient and alien civilizations (at least west of the Mississippi), where mad zombie scientists seek to overthrow the world, and where horrific demigods lay imprisoned within vegetables, patiently waiting to be freed from their parallel universe prisons to lay waste to Mankind.

The only bastion of defense against these horrors is Screw-On Head, a secret government operative at the beck and call of Abraham Lincoln (yes, that Abraham Lincoln), and who is, well, a screw-on head with an army of steampunk bodies at his disposal.  And he’ll need them all, because the nefarious Emperor Zombie—once Screw-On Head’s closest friend and manservant before he began dabbling in ancient black magic—is seeking the power of an ancient kingdom to bring the world to its knees.

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I never thought I’d say this, not in a million years, but here it is: with Curse Of The Golden Flower, Zhang Yimou has become the George Lucas of “wuxia” cinema, and I mean that in both the good and bad ways.

But mostly the bad ways.

There’s no question that, by year’s end, Curse… will have been the most opulent, visually astonishing film to grace movie theatres in 2007.  Compared to the elaborate set designs and costumes that fill every single scene here, Zhang’s previous period pieces—2002’s Hero and 2004’s House Of Flying Daggers—look like shabby high school productions.  Thanks to the incredibly elaborate costumes and stunning sets, each frame of Curse… is awash with every color of the rainbow, so vibrant that it’s almost blinding.

Unfortunately, like those Star Wars prequels, visual splendor is about all that Curse… has going for it.  And even the visuals ultimately fail to satisfy thanks to the shallow characters, threadbare-yet-still ponderous plot, and lumbering execution—qualities that I never thought I’d use to describe a Zhang Yimou film.

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On March 10, 2003, while performing in London, the singer of the Dixie Chicks Natalie Maines said something that received cheers from the English crowd: ““Just so you know, we’re ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.”  And yet this single sentence would haunt her and her band mates for the next three years, and probably still does haunt them to this day.

At first blush, it doesn’t seem like that big of a statement.  It’s certainly not the worst thing that an entertainer has said about Dubya.  However, coming from the Dixie Chicks—a group that was deemed about as all-American as possible—it was nothing short of anathema.

Within weeks, Maines and sisters Martie Maguire and Emily Robison began experiencing a massive boycott from what had once been their core audience.  Fans began destroying CDs, stations refused to play their music, corporate sponsors threatened to pull their support, and perhaps most shocking of all, began receiving death threats.

Shut Up & Sing captures this tumultuous time in the Dixie Chicks’ lives, chronicling both the intense criticism that they weathered as well as the intense loyalty shared by the trio, who respond to the threats with a raucous blend of fear, incredulity, stubbornness, and even laughter.

The documentary begins in 2003, as the Chicks are preparing for their latest tour.  One of the most successful recording acts in recent history, having successfully bridged the gap between worlds of pop and country music, they’re literally on the top of the world.  As they begin preparations for the tour, tensions in Iraq are mounting and war seems imminent.

When Maines says her infamous statement, it’s obvious from the footage that it’s partly in jest, that Maines is clearly not intending it as a political slam.  And yet, in those halcyon days when Bush’s approval ratings were at their highest, and the United States’ involvement in Iraq seemed to be on sure footing, the statement was seen as incredibly un-patriotic, if not traitorous.

Although Shut Up & Sing attempts to capture the overall sentiment that was rising against the Chicks, from former fans protesting their concerts, from country music radio DJs decrying their records, and from talking heads like Bill O’Reilly (who said the Chicks should be “slapped around” for their comments), it’s primarily concerned with the three girls as they attempt to soldier on.

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