Pete Seeger: The Power of Song.

Pete Seeger: The Power of Song "reminds us, with admirable thoroughness, why we shouldn't take Pete Seeger for granted," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "He is, for one thing, more complicated than he might seem at first, much in the way that the folk music he adores reveals hidden nuances beneath apparently simple stories and tunes.... The son of an academic musicologist and a gifted violinist, he has always looked and sounded less like the product of Eastern boarding schools than like a figure out of 19th-century legend: gangly, with a deliberate manner of speaking and the zealous gleam of true belief in his eye."

"Shallow, very officially sanctioned, and overly compressed, The Power of Song plays like a PBS infomercial for the inevitable DVD box set, which will surely include even more archival footage," writes Brian Miller in the Voice.

But writing at cinemaattraction, Robert Levin finds it a fascinating portrait of a man driven to do more than make his mark on musical history. To Seeger, his music served the greater purpose of providing a source of unification for those outside the societal mainstream, a means for communal healing and a place for peaceful dissent from the injustices promulgated in Vietnam and elsewhere."

Tribeca has a video interview with director Jim Brown.

Posted by dwhudson at October 26, 2007 8:45 AM