George Michael: Freedom Uncut (15.)
Directed by George Michael and David Austin.
Featuring George Michael, Ricky Gervais, Stevie Wonder, Tracy Emin, James Corden, Elton and almost every other celebrity you can think of. In cinemas Wednesday, June 22nd. 109 mins.
At the start, Kate Moss (obviously, Kate Moss) swivels around in a high chair to face the camera and inform us that this is George Michael's final work, the film he was putting the finishing touches to just days before he died. In it, he explores the impossible pressures of being globally famous and his battles to be free of his restrictive contract with Sony, while a bunch of celebrity mates tell us how great he is.
The use of the present tense is poignant, but rather alarmingly the film views its subject, at least in terms of creativity, as being in the past tense. And it lacks a personal touch. Apart from the recurring shots of him sitting over a typewriter in his Highgate abode, there is nothing to set this apart from the run of the mill documentaries made about music acts. The credits, with their various divisions and duplications of labours – additional editing, different interview directors for each month, director of assembly cuts – and the six years it has taken for it to be posthumously completed, suggest a fraught production. You have to wonder exactly how much this is George Michael’s final work, especially as, by cruel irony, it is being released by Sony Music.
It is riven by the contradictions of being a work by a private man with a pressing need to be honest and open, but a terrible fear of being open and honest. It shows you enough to give the impression of intimacy, that you are seeing the man behind the star. But then it will abruptly pulls back to show something anodyne: Nile Rogers, Mary J Blige, Mark Ronson or another celeb listening and reacting to a personalised vinyl recording of a GM track played on bespoke turntables. I can’t imagine any fan will learn anything new from this. It doesn’t say anything he hadn’t already told us in the song Freedom. The film’s only shocking revelation is that Liam Gallagher appears, both in mannerism and dress sense, to be mutating into Jimmy Savile. Now then, now them.
Directed by George Michael and David Austin.
Featuring George Michael, Ricky Gervais, Stevie Wonder, Tracy Emin, James Corden, Elton and almost every other celebrity you can think of. In cinemas Wednesday, June 22nd. 109 mins.
At the start, Kate Moss (obviously, Kate Moss) swivels around in a high chair to face the camera and inform us that this is George Michael's final work, the film he was putting the finishing touches to just days before he died. In it, he explores the impossible pressures of being globally famous and his battles to be free of his restrictive contract with Sony, while a bunch of celebrity mates tell us how great he is.
The use of the present tense is poignant, but rather alarmingly the film views its subject, at least in terms of creativity, as being in the past tense. And it lacks a personal touch. Apart from the recurring shots of him sitting over a typewriter in his Highgate abode, there is nothing to set this apart from the run of the mill documentaries made about music acts. The credits, with their various divisions and duplications of labours – additional editing, different interview directors for each month, director of assembly cuts – and the six years it has taken for it to be posthumously completed, suggest a fraught production. You have to wonder exactly how much this is George Michael’s final work, especially as, by cruel irony, it is being released by Sony Music.
It is riven by the contradictions of being a work by a private man with a pressing need to be honest and open, but a terrible fear of being open and honest. It shows you enough to give the impression of intimacy, that you are seeing the man behind the star. But then it will abruptly pulls back to show something anodyne: Nile Rogers, Mary J Blige, Mark Ronson or another celeb listening and reacting to a personalised vinyl recording of a GM track played on bespoke turntables. I can’t imagine any fan will learn anything new from this. It doesn’t say anything he hadn’t already told us in the song Freedom. The film’s only shocking revelation is that Liam Gallagher appears, both in mannerism and dress sense, to be mutating into Jimmy Savile. Now then, now them.
