2017 Directed by Sophie Fiennes
The life of the magnetic Jamaican musician, actress, model and party queen Grace Jones featuring concert performances and intimate, personal footage.
Amazing Grace, Grace Jones: Lidenskabelig, vild, sårbar og guddommelig, Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami - Das Leben einer Ikone, Grace Jones. La pantera del Pop, גרייס ג'ונס: על הבמה, 그레이스 존스: 스튜디오와 빵, Grace Jones, Грейс Джонс: Хлеб и зрелища, 葛蕾丝·琼斯：血光和巴米
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Grace Jones is incredible, there's no doubting that. She is one of those rare, astonishing icons who just seems to do everything well. When she appears in a movie, your eyes are immediately on her, whatever else is happening. When she models, she absolutely dominates the camera. She's a powerhouse. When she sings? It's incredible. You might think she's going to be a novelty act if you don't know much about her but her voice is out of this world. Her songs are great. She's more than a true artist, she is a living work of art.
Unfortunately, Bloodlight and Bami kind of lets down its subject. The concert film footage is well shot and captures Grace in her element…
Grace Jones seemed like an intriguing personality from the trailer for this documentary, so I decided to check it out. I briefly checked out her music several years ago. While it wasn’t for me, she does have a powerhouse voice and costume choices that make Lady Gaga seem tame.
We go on a journey with Grace as she tours and visits her family.
Sophie Fiennes directed and edited it. Unfortunately, it’s not only overly long, but it runs 20 minutes past the 1 hour and 55 minute runtime listed on Laemmle’s site. I have to admit it made me run late and so I didn’t have time to get a decent dinner. Plus it sort of meanders at the…
I'm a big fan of documentaries that take this more observational approach, presenting the subject as is. No talking heads, no narration, just the material in its most authentic form. Of course, as a narrative medium, documentaries still need to have some kind of arc. Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami doesn't seem to have much of one, nor does it even attempt to.
This is not to say that most of what we see isn't compelling -- I loved watching Jones perform, and I loved listening to her yell at people over the phone. Everything about her image is so carefully curated, not to present something that is false, but to assure the greatest sense of authenticity of vision. I…
Grace Jones shucking oysters in a headpiece and shouting “I wish my pussy was this tight” is an image for the ages
A year ago today, I saw Grace Jones in concert for the first time. It was one of those concert experiences that I expect will stay with me for the rest of my life. I felt like the music was flowing through me as the divine Grace held the stage and the audience completely spellbound and in thrall to her performance.
This doco made a couple of years ago gives us some insight into Grace Jones away from the stage - yes there are still concert performances interspersed throughout this but what really engages is the time she spends in Jamaica, reconnecting with family and living a regular life, far removed from expensive hotel rooms with champagne and oysters. It's…
Kinda like the film version of the 'Slave to the Rhythm' album -- an assemblage of interview fragments, studio footage, and live tracks that seek to give a picture of Grace Jones as both a person and as a persona. While that album was built around endless reworkings of a single song, there's no real grounding to any of this -- Grace is ostensibly recording her comeback album, but we're hardly given any sort of context for what we're watching or why any of it is included.
In the end, this feels less like an actual coherent feature than it does a series of pre-album web featurettes strung together between (great!) concert footage. For something that was shot over a decade ago -- the album itself came out in 2008 -- it's kind of baffling that the final product is as messy, dry, and overlong as this.
Interspercing live concert footage from Grace Jones' latest live performance with snapshots of the great lady visiting her home and family in Jamaica, making phone calls to persons unknown, chatting with her predictably sycophantic entourage who agree with her every word like a brain washed cult, this documentary breaks every rule by providing nothing remotely fresh, interesting or educational on its subject.
The live footage is unimaginative in terms of how it's filmed while everything else remains flat, unstructured, lifeless and limp.
Director Sophie Fiennes (sister to Ralph and Joseph) labours under the illusion that getting "unprecedented" access to this great lady's life for a few weeks or so is sufficient enough and that her film will write itself -…
Would this make any sense if you're not familiar with Jones and her work? Would it just be some pretty good concert footage and some oddly (or poorly) mic'd scenes of her talking to people who are never introduced. The theory of everything here is to put the camera in as few places as possible, and roll.
I'm not one of those Jones neophytes, but I only had like a graf of information in my head about Jones (cool songs, cool videos, "View to a Kill") and I was mostly confused, but I think I still prefer this style to the doc-in-a-box where talking heads describe the artist's greatness and a move to LA or SF is soundtracked with "California Dreamin'." The soundtrack of this is Grace Jones complaining, far superior.
[7]
Sophie Fiennes is fast becoming the queen of biographical documentaries, having already produced unique profiles of Slavoj Zizek and Anselm Kiefer. With those films, however, the cultural eminence of their subjects wasn't something that audiences needed to be convinced of. By contrast, Jones was someone I never really thought about very much. While many of us remember Grace Jones as a disco diva and an 80s scenemaker, I cannot be alone in being unaware of the full range of her artistry.
Bloodlight and Bami is a striking open-form documentary that makes a powerful cumulative argument. After watching Jones at work (mostly on her last studio album, Hurricane), in performance, and among her family and friends in Jamaica, a complex…
