Young@Heart.

"Time revises every taste and closes every gap," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "To observe the Young@Heart Chorus, a fluctuating group of about two dozen singers whose average age is 80, perform 'Stayin' Alive' by the Bee Gees in Stephen Walker's documentary Young@Heart is to be uplifted, if slightly unsettled."

"Though it overplays the 'feisty oldsters' angle and Spencer's Gifts-level ribaldry, the movie can't entirely smother its subject's inherent questions about how we relate to pop music," writes Nick Pinkerton at indieWIRE. "It's basically a question of shifting context - as in listening to the 1977 Langley Schools Music Project recordings, in which Beach Boys and Bowie covers are invested with new level of meaning when eerily harmonized by kids in the Vancouver suburbs."

Updated through 4/10.

"The Rolling Stones, as it turns out, are not the only senior citizens singing rock 'n' roll," quips Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "This may sound like a suspect enterprise, a musical gimmick impossible to embrace, but the reality is otherwise. For what the members of this uncanny chorus lack in pure ability they make up for in irrepressible spirits and a desire to simply have fun. It's as much of a heady tonic for these folks to take on these unlikely lyrics as it is for us to watch it all go down."

And Paul Brownfield tries this angle: "They sound like mockumentaries, variations on that comedic standard-bearer This Is Spinal Tap.... By chronicling the rise of pop music in these unlikely contexts, both of these unusual documentaries shine a light on subjects from which most Americans would prefer to avert their attention: old age in Young@Heart and the Iraq war in Heavy Metal in Baghdad." Well, he tried.

"Young@Heart's worst enemy is its director, Stephen Walker, whose incessant pushing and prodding strives to manipulate in ways both needless and trite," writes Nick Schager in Slant. Still, "though Walker refuses to let his story breathe sans embellishment, it's hard not to be touched by the group's performance at a local prison, the performers and inmates discovering solidarity in a shared familiarity with the desire for joy and sorrow of loss."

Scott Foundas, writing in the Voice, finds it "so slavishly embodies the creakiest clichés of British television documentaries that you begin to wonder if it's not all a big put-on." But the singers "more than carry the day.... Not surprisingly, a feature remake is already in the works."

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with director Stephen Walker "about the conception of the film as a rock opera, the transition from small to big screen, and choosing Halloween 4 as an antidote to plane turbulence."

Sylviane Gold hangs a bit with the group for the New York Times: "Both on film and in person, they know part of their job is to be adorable old people, and they're very good at it."

Online listening tip. Matt Singer and Alison Willmore discuss "Seniors of the Silver Screen."

Updates: "The filmmakers tread a fine line between exultation in their subjects and the hint of the grotesque, beyond even the humbling infelicities of old age," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "But Young@Heart gets at least one painful truth right as the chorus comes to terms with the inevitable departure of its members: The show must go on."

Edward Douglas: "A few weeks back, ComingSoon.net sat down with Stephen Walker and musical director Bob Cilman to talk about making the movie."

Update, 4/10: "Every so often even cynical film critics come across a movie that's so painstakingly good hearted and upbeat, so hopeful about the potential for transcendence in everyday life, that any critical inclinations simply melt away." Robert Levin at cinemattraction.

Posted by dwhudson at April 9, 2008 12:44 AM