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Christian Science Monitor: It's About You A- Review
01.07.2012 - John Mellencamp: It's About You: movie review
'John Mellencamp: It's About You' captures the rocker on summer tour in the
South along with the poetic melancholy of rural America.
Christian Science Monitor By Peter Rainer
In 2009 John Mellencamp suggested to his friend Kurt Markus, the well-known
photographer of Western landscapes, that he make a documentary of the
Indiana-born rocker’s summer tour and the recording of his new album "No Better
Than This." Despite never having made a movie before, and utilizing
comparatively primitive camera and recording equipment, Kurt and his son Ian
crafted a movie unlike any other in the rock-doc genre.
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“John Mellencamp: It’s About You” follows Mellencamp as his tour stops in the
First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Ga., (billed as America’s oldest black
church); in Littlefield, Texas, hometown of the late country star Waylon
Jennings; and the Sun Studio in Memphis, with its posters of Elvis Presley and
Jerry Lee Lewis and the rest gazing down upon Mellencamp and his musicians as
they record their own songs.
In San Antonio, they record in the famous Room 414 of the Gunter Hotel, where
the legendary bluesman Robert Johnson made his first recordings in 1936.
Throughout it all, Markus and his son capture the poetic melancholy of a mostly
rural America with an eloquence that recalls the photographs of Robert Frank.
Grade: A- (Unrated.)
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