By do you get it because Birth of the Cool it is a jazz joke sort of
Miles Davis is probably the single greatest jazz musician who ever lived. My dad raised me on his albums, and that probably influenced my musical tastes more than anything else in the world. There are currently two Miles biopics in development right now: one from Notorious director George Tillman Jr., and the other from Don Cheadle. Cheadle told the Wall Street Journal a bit about his developing project. Here’s probably the most interesting quote from the interview: “It’s not a biopic, per se. It’s a gangster pic. It’s a movie that Miles Davis would have wanted to star in. Without throwing history away, we’re trying to shuffle it and make it more cubist.”
I really dig that. First of all, I think musician biopics, by and large, are the laziest, most boring pieces of Oscar-bait film making you can find. They all follow the same narrative, and they all hinge on central performances that wind up being more mimicry than actual acting. It sounds here like Don Cheadle is trying to take more of an I’m Not There approach, telling the story of Miles Davis’s life and career without devolving into a series of bullet points. Color me excited!
[WSJ, via Collider]