John Mellencamp: It?s About You isn?t really about you, or me, or even about John Mellencamp, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer who has built an enduring career with his eminently likable, real-person stage demeanor and his songs? connection with the way regular people live. It?s About You is quite possibly mostly about the filmmaker, Kurt Markus, a commercial photographer who has shot portraits for publications including Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone and GQ, as well as ad campaigns for the likes of BMW and Armani.
But that?s surprisingly OK: Mellencamp invited Markus and his son, Ian, to tag along, video camera in tow, to record his summer 2009 concert tour and to eavesdrop, visually and otherwise, on recording sessions for his 2010 album No Better Than This. Mellencamp even told Markus at the outset, somewhat cryptically, that the movie should be about Markus. And so It?s About You -- whatever the heck it?s actually about ? is in the end a kind of visual journal, a photographer?s way of seeing and responding to what?s around him. Those events and moments and glancing touches might include a group of musicians huddled around a single microphone in Memphis?s hallowed Sun Studios, or the flash of producer extraordinaire T. Bone Burnett?s cuff-links during another session, held in the same room where Robert Johnson cut a potent handful of songs in 1936. Markus accompanies the visuals with a voice-over narration that?s sometimes grating and other times startling in its perceptions. The result is a kind of homespun video scrapbook, bumpy seams and glue splotches and all; it?s flawed, but at least it feels handmade and human.
Mellencamp could have faded away when he was still John Cougar Mellencamp, in the late 1980s, but somehow he?s managed to thrive as a modern…
Alexis Bledel Ali Campoverdi Ali Larter Alice Dodd Alicia Keys Alicia Witt Amanda Bynes Amanda Detmer
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