Hendrixby Anonymous

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March 04, 2007: I’m not much of Hendrix fan but after watching this film last night I think he would of been extremely disappointed. Leon Ichaso’s biopic of Hendrix does a decent job of showing the rise and fall of Jimi Hendrix’s career. What you get here is some shoddy casting and uninspiring use of documentary-style filming causes the film to lose much of its entertainment value. However tired it might be, the standard biopic format deserves credit for its flexibility: It's capable of accommodating just about any sort of celebrity life that began unassumingly and ended prematurely. Start with some childhood scenes, segue into a young adulthood filled with wide-eyed innocence and unbridled promise, re-create the most famous moments of success, dwell on the period of decline, draw out the final days, and, boom, you've got yourself a biopic. Even class acts like “Man On The Moon” and “Pollock” wallow in the old clichés. Often, filmmakers seem more interested in following the formula than in portraying their subjects' actual lives. So it is with Hendrix, a made-for-cable look at the life of Jimi Hendrix that could just as easily have been about Sam Cooke, Gram Parsons, Bix Beiderbecke, or anyone else who made beautiful music and died too young. Relative unknown Wood Harris plays Hendrix, and plays him well, but the film never really gets at what made Hendrix's music special. It seems to spring fully formed from his guitar while the rest of Hendrix travels through one bit of expository dialogue after another, when he's not thrown into lovingly shot scenes of rock 'n' roll decadence. "You're gonna lend me your boyfriend Keith Richards' guitar?" goes one helpful line of dialogue, spoken shortly before Hendrix's ascent to stardom. Once there, he seems to wander in and out of the psychedelic harem from the original cover of Electric Ladyland, when he's not arguing with manager Michael Jeffrey (a villainous, bewigged Billy Zane) about the direction of his career. All the while, director Leon Ichaso (El Súper) pauses occasionally for montages of stock footage featuring pictures of The Beatles and hippies, lest anyone forget that Hendrix lived in the '60s. In the time it takes to watch this movie, you probrably could of listen to at least two Jimi Hendrix albums. There are way better films of him out there,stay away from this one.