SIFF: The Thief of Bagdad as Re-imagined by Shadoe Stevens . . .
There seemed to be quite a bit of chatter about SIFF's showing of The Thief of Bagdad as Re-imagined by Shadoe Stevens with the Music of E.L.O.. I wanted to see it because I've never seen this classic 1924 silent film starring Douglas Fairbanks Sr end to end. The ELO music was an added fillip as far as I was concerned.
I had no idea who Shadoe Stevens was until I Googled him yesterday afternoon. With a name like that, I figured he was some rap impresario I'd never heard of. Turns out, he's a longtime DJ and voice-over guy from the Midwest whom it's unsurprising I've never heard of. This project, laying down ELO tracks against The Thief of Bagdad, has been his personal obsession for something like 30 years. He's showing it at festivals partly to share his love for the film and partly as a kind of market test to see what people think about the film with this new music, as well as the permutations he's considering for release (to 3D or not to 3D, to colorize or not, and so on).
The movie itself is still as eye-popping and impressive as it was when first released. The effects still make the viewer wonder how they were achieved. Fairbanks is gorgeous and charismatic, and the story is full of the sort of fairy-tale intrigue that lights up the kid in me. The addition of the E.L.O. soundtrack was surprisingly effective in some spots and unfortunately repetitive in others. When you're working from a limited catalog of music, your choices dwindle as a project progresses, and toward the end of the film, the repetition became a little tiresome.
After the movie, Stevens talked about his working on the project, and talked a little bit about the history of the movie. While I was initially skeptical about him (a personal prejudice, I admit--I found the spelling of his first name a little off-putting, a little too deliberately contrived), he was nothing but genuine in his enthusiasm for the project and his love of the movie. I can't fault a fanboy his affections, and it made him a rather appealing character in the end.
Overall, the movie was terrific, the music pretty good, the combined effect--not bad but not what I'd call definitive or world-changing. I think that the aforementioned repetitiveness of the music is a little bit of a liability, at least for those of us who aren't die-hard ELO fans. But Stevens makes a good point with this project, in that if the music makes this nearly-90-year-old film accessible to a new generation of film-goers, then it's doing something worth doing. I enjoyed the combination of the two and support such an effort wholeheartedly.
I had no idea who Shadoe Stevens was until I Googled him yesterday afternoon. With a name like that, I figured he was some rap impresario I'd never heard of. Turns out, he's a longtime DJ and voice-over guy from the Midwest whom it's unsurprising I've never heard of. This project, laying down ELO tracks against The Thief of Bagdad, has been his personal obsession for something like 30 years. He's showing it at festivals partly to share his love for the film and partly as a kind of market test to see what people think about the film with this new music, as well as the permutations he's considering for release (to 3D or not to 3D, to colorize or not, and so on).
The movie itself is still as eye-popping and impressive as it was when first released. The effects still make the viewer wonder how they were achieved. Fairbanks is gorgeous and charismatic, and the story is full of the sort of fairy-tale intrigue that lights up the kid in me. The addition of the E.L.O. soundtrack was surprisingly effective in some spots and unfortunately repetitive in others. When you're working from a limited catalog of music, your choices dwindle as a project progresses, and toward the end of the film, the repetition became a little tiresome.
After the movie, Stevens talked about his working on the project, and talked a little bit about the history of the movie. While I was initially skeptical about him (a personal prejudice, I admit--I found the spelling of his first name a little off-putting, a little too deliberately contrived), he was nothing but genuine in his enthusiasm for the project and his love of the movie. I can't fault a fanboy his affections, and it made him a rather appealing character in the end.
Overall, the movie was terrific, the music pretty good, the combined effect--not bad but not what I'd call definitive or world-changing. I think that the aforementioned repetitiveness of the music is a little bit of a liability, at least for those of us who aren't die-hard ELO fans. But Stevens makes a good point with this project, in that if the music makes this nearly-90-year-old film accessible to a new generation of film-goers, then it's doing something worth doing. I enjoyed the combination of the two and support such an effort wholeheartedly.