Marley streaming on Netflix

fyi: [movies.netflix.com]

Give thank s



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/08/2012 02:19PM by iriebarto.

Thank you. Forgot that I haven't watched it yet and picked up a copy.

Just watched it the other night on netflix, have to say I really enjoyed the movie!

be well
eric v

I also enjoyed the movie! Lots of interesting things about Bob and his family i did not know about!

Finally watch this last night and really enjoyed it.

First off, didn't realized it is a Magnolia films production. I LOVE everything I have ever seen from this outfit so I was super stoked from the start...

Really well done, great restored footage used previously as well as a ton of new material. I feel like they covered all of the aspects of the early years from the importance of Joe Higgs, to what was actually going on at 56 Hope Rd, to the perspective of the children growing up in that environment.

The coolest part for me was when they went into the Marley name/family, tracked down the white side of the Jamaican Marley family and played "Cornerstone" after telling them why he wrote the song. The look on their faces hearing the song for the first time in true context... simply brilliant.

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bun n cheese
The coolest part for me was when they went into the Marley name/family, tracked down the white side of the Jamaican Marley family and played "Cornerstone" after telling them why he wrote the song. The look on their faces hearing the song for the first time in true context... simply brilliant.

Agreed!

Watched this last night. Broke out my dusty acoustic and tried to pretend I could play again.

I was interested to see how much they would discuss Peter Tosh. Not much. I was disappointed to see how little Tosh was profiled as, to my knowledge, he was a huge inspiration musically and spiritually to Bob Marley.

Also, Bunny needs to fix those shoes :-)

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rappy heggae

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bun n cheese
The coolest part for me was when they went into the Marley name/family, tracked down the white side of the Jamaican Marley family and played "Cornerstone" after telling them why he wrote the song. The look on their faces hearing the song for the first time in true context... simply brilliant.

Agreed!

I second that- what a powerful scene, and I didn't know that song was about his father.

The other part that I was curious about was Bob's relationship with so many other women and if it affected his family?? Clearly it did.

I got a call from a friend yesterday asking me if I ever saw BMW in New York, which I hadn't. He asked because he had just seen this documentary and swore he saw some footage of me in there.

Well, he called me back again today, and asked me to look at the 1hr, 24 sec. mark, which i just did. It's footage from the Greek Theatre and not NY, but that's my sister 'Jammin' by my side...............


Hey Rita - Where are my royalties.....?

Smokin'

That is pretty cool, thanks for sharing the pic!

That is awesome!!! I must admit I am super jealous. LOL, always wish that I was around to see BMW before Bob died. Super cool pic, the Greek theater is one of my all time favorite venues!

The documentary indicates the staying power Bob will have to the future generations.
It also touches on some human interest elements that had only previously been reported
in print, ie. the Anglo side of Bob's lineage but, i.m.o. this 'Marley film' is superficial &
incomplete.

There have been many Bob Marley books, video clips & thousands of media articles over
the years but they have largely been the superficial efforts of outside journalists with copy to sell or,
insiders with agendas - either blinded by the light, or axes to grind. I don't believe the definitive book or
film documentary has yet to be done.

For example, the travels and travails that shaped the consciousness of the juvenile Bob Marley were
not even mentioned (ie. being abandoned on the streets of Kingston at age five)

The primary element tho, missing in this Marley documentary, is in translating just who was/is
this powerful universal archetypal spirit that Bob carried/carries. As this planet we call home
accelerates in its fulfillment of prophesy - inducing fear into the fear-prone, these issues are
ultimately the 1/2 thats never been told that will bring comfort and direction to the children of this Urth.

I encourage those interested in going deeper into it - to catch:
Roger Steffens 'Life of Bob Marley' multimedia presentation
opening for the Wailers on their current 'Survival Revival' tour.
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in good spirit
Alex Peacemaker
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New “sanitized” Bob Marley film not “definitive” bio, says famed Marley historian Roger Steffens (June 1, 2012)

[blogs.montrealgazette.com]

The new documentary film Marley is being billed as the “definitive” life story of a global pop icon. But while the film is an intoxicating and passionate account of Bob Marley’s life – especially the final six months leading up to his death from cancer in May 1981 – it has also been critiqued by some diehard Marley fans and historians for being incomplete.

“Definitive? I think the word that best describes the film is ‘sanitized,’” says internationally-acclaimed author and music historian Roger Steffens, whom Bob Marley himself personally dubbed “Ras Rojah” back in 1979 when they traveled together.

“I’ve been involved with this project from way back when it was [director] Jonathan Demme’s film,” says Steffens, who was also chair of the Grammy Awards reggae committee for 27 years, from 1984 to 2011. “Martin Scorsese was originally going to do it but he had scheduling difficulties. So he turned it over to Demme who worked on the film for 16 months, completed it and the day he turned it in it was rejected, probably for being too “rootical” – it was filled with people in the bush, three-toothed Rastas, not your Hollywood types. It told the story from a very much Rastafarian position. That film was rejected. Then Kevin Macdonald came aboard and made a gorgeous, fast paced, deeply moving film, but I have certain critiques about things that should have been included in a film that is almost two-and-a-half hours long.”

Macdonald directed the film but – perhaps more importantly – the co-executive producers are Ziggy Marley and Island Records founder Chris Blackwell, the man who turned Bob Marley into a global household name.

So I tell Steffens – widely considered to be the world’s leading historian of Bob Marley and The Wailers (“For better or worse that’s a tag I live with these days”) – that I am surprised he was even hired as a consultant for this film after he testified for Bob Marley’s bass player and bandleader Aston “Family Man” Barrett in Barrett’s ill-fated 2006 London High Court case against the Marley family and Chris Blackwell for $100-million in back royalties.

“This is the man who co-created Bob’s masterpieces in the 1970s,” Steffens told me at the time. “In reggae, bass is the lead instrument. It’s not just rhythm, it’s melody. Family Man invented those bass lines himself. Bob [also] gave the band 50 per cent of all his royalties because he knew they were co-creators, and that stopped the day Bob died. Rita [Marley] stopped paying everybody.”

But the fact of the matter is Roger Steffens’ massive reggae archives still contain the world’s largest collection of Bob Marley material.

“I ended up being an associate producer on Demme’s film because of all my different contributions. But on this film I’m just an archive consultant, though I provided a lot of material for the film,” Steffens explains. “Macdonald came to my house to see the archives and talk about the direction of the film, and I was in constant touch with his staff.”

Says Steffens, “It wasn’t so much them [Blackwell and Ziggy Marley] who wanted me as it was Macdonald. Because he ended up using so many things from [my] archives – photographs, audio tape, video, film and the [famous disintegrating] ‘Bedroom Tape’ I found at the home of [Bob Marley’s mother] Ms. [Cedella] Booker. There was a wide range of things they needed from me and I think it was Macdonald’s project.”

Other than the badly-edited use of the two-hour ‘Bedroom Tape’ in Macdonald’s documentary (“Macdonald cuts it off right before Bob’s voice cracks, [where Bob] almost sounds like he is weeping”), Steffens needs only repeat the essential fact of Marley’s life to point out the film’s major flaw.

“The theme of the film is rejection and alienation in Bob’s life,” Steffens explains. “Over and over they talk about how he was rejected by people, made to do all the dirty work from the time he was a little [bi-racial] kid in Nine Mile, how he was an outcast and rejected. But what was the biggest rejection in the life of Bob Marley? What is the most important abandonment that explains so much of his later life, that you cannot understand Bob’s life without knowing this fact? Bob Marley was abandoned as a child by his mother and father on the streets of Kingston at the age of five.”

Steffens pauses.

“It was almost a year-and-a-half before someone from Nine Mile saw him and told his mother where he was,” Steffens continues. “The abandonment on the streets of Kingston is the essential fact of Bob’s life because it informed his [lifelong] empathy for the sufferers of hideous poverty. He could have turned very bad very quickly as a five-year-old left to fend for himself. But he didn’t. And they don’t even mention this in the film! Come on! That’s why I say [this film is] sanitized.”

But Steffens also thinks director Kevin Macdonald’s film is useful.

“Kevin has said in his interviews that he wanted to present the human side of Bob Marley which is why there are no complete songs. So for the story they wanted to tell, I think they spoke to many of the appropriate people. But here you have a film about the most important Third World star in history and the fact that he won the United Nations Peace Medal of the Third World on behalf of 500 million Africans [in 1978] is not even mentioned.”

There are also a few other minor problems. For instance, the documentary also refers to The Wailers’ three female back-up singers – Rita Marley, Judy Mowatt and Marcia Griffiths – as “The I-Threes” when it was Ms. Griffiths herself who once scolded me for doing the same, telling me their proper band name is “I-Three.”

That is not the kind of error you want in a film that claims to be “definitive.”

Meanwhile, Steffens – arguably best-known for founding The Beat magazine, his six books on Marley, including the indispensable Bob Marley and The Wailers – The Definitive Discography (which he co-wrote with Leroy Jodie Pierson in 2005) – continues to tour the world with his acclaimed international multimedia lecture The Life of Bob Marley.

“You know, the majority of people on the planet today were born after Bob Marley died,” Steffens says. “I think the planet’s median age is 23 or 24 and Bob has been gone now 31 years. This film is meant for those people, not those who know all the facts. I do like this film – don’t get me wrong – but it has some major gaps and it is not entitled to be called the definitive look at the life of Bob Marley.”

check the link for rare photos [blogs.montrealgazette.com]