Word: amenability
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...lips around Carlyle's jive slurs until they are twisted into madhouse poetry. He glides through the barracks like a hipster on a death mission. Charlie Parker, meet Charlie Manson. Carlyle is the creepily irresistible spirit of all wars, hot and cold, global and interior, war without end, amen . - By Richard Corliss...
...pent-up storm, rising to the rafters and the stained-glass portrait of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. With the practiced rhythms of preacher and pitchman, he launches his sermon on power. "There's a freedom train acoming," he intones. "But you got to be registered to ride." Amen! "Get on board! Get on board!" There is fire in his eyes, a pin in his starched collar, a finger in the air. "We can move from the slave ship to the championship! From the guttermost to the uppermost! From the outhouse to the courthouse! From the statehouse...
...round, sweet-faced woman with a shrewd yet sentimental eye, a determined spirit and a powerfully moving voice, now somewhat cracked by long, if lively service to the Lord. She is a beloved gospel singer, much looked to for moral and artistic guidance by people in her profession. Say Amen, Somebody is a documentary that follows her on her exhausting rounds, from bustling home to jumping church services to emotionally galvanic singing conventions. Following in her wake, the audience meets her mentor (Thomas A. Dorsey, a onetime blues singer and composer, now 83, who is credited with inventing gospel music...
...like almost all good documentaries in the cinéma vérité style, Say Amen, Somebody is a work of cultural anthropology. It is an exploration of a small, isolated world one would not ordinarily have a chance to penetrate, and it is exotic to the outlander's eye until the film makes the connections to our ordinary ways of life clear and uncommonly affecting. Take Dorsey, for example. He combines a holy man's zeal, a performer's ego and a revered older man's self-contentment, and the film's portrait...
...selection of these moments. There are just enough of them to ground in a recognizable reality what could have been merely a well-shot and -edited compilation of irresistible music. But they are never so many that they interfere with the film's soaring flights of song. Say Amen, Somebody is a movie to which even a tone-deaf atheist will say amen. - By Richard Schickel