Actuakers
One of my all time favorites.
Tayyab Torres
Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.
Scarlet
The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.
moorarr0
While, as a musician, I enjoyed many of the performances, I found this to be an entirely off-base depiction of the American south. Born and raised in Nashville, TN, I have "ventured off the highway ten miles" many times in Tennessee and never found anyone resembling the mythical southerners depicted in this film. My mother's family has lived in Tennessee for around two hundred years, and of the many stories I have heard about Tennessee as it was seventy-five years ago, I have heard only of intelligent, hard-working people who lived in small-towns, attended church regularly, often went to college out-of-state, drove cars, had electricity, were respectful of their spouses, and did not speak in tongues or pass snakes around on Sundays. These were not the richest of Southerners, they were just average Southerners. The South depicted in this film died with the founding of the TVA, if it hadn't died prior, and frankly it disgusts me that people from Canada and elsewhere are viewing this film and thinking that is at all an accurate depiction of the South.I currently live in Franklin County, TN, and even poorer southerners who live in cities like Cowan or Decherd do not resemble in the slightest the extreme versions of Southerns found in this film, so if planning a trip to the south to see the southerners sitting on their front porch playing a banjo with a hound dog next to them, save yourself plane fare and don't bother.
Sibella
I am a huge fan of Jim White the musician, and I didn't make it through more than 23 minutes of this film. Now maybe things changed later; I'll grant that. Right at the beginning of the film, White procures a concrete statue of Jesus. He and some others remove it from where it lies in state along the entire length of the inside of a car trunk. But when it goes into the trunk of his seemingly equally large car, it protrudes beyond the back of the car, as if it doesn't fit--so we can see White's burden. It seems a telling incident: the heavy-handed symbolism and artsy contrivance stick out from White's cinematic vehicle like...well, You Know Who.By the time I stopped, nearly all of the people I'd seen talking were No Depression- magazine-darling musicians and other people who might have used the film toward an MFA. Not that there's anything wrong with the highly qualified and sometimes actually Southern talent here. (I especially enjoyed Harry Crews' storytelling.) But the film purports to be a sort of documentary road trip, exploring Southern spiritual culture, and instead was on its way to becoming--I repeat, I quit a third of the way in--a sometimes evocatively pretty, sometimes maddeningly awkward music video.Why drive around the Louisiana bayous if the people you "find" playing banjos and singing spirituals are, like you, likely to have tour schedules on MySpace?I emphasize: Jim White is a musical genius, and this film should not dissuade anyone from checking out his work or that of artists like Crews, the Handsome Family, etc. It's just an unfortunate misstep as a movie.
JustCuriosity
Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus takes the outsider on a beautiful lyrical esoteric journey through a part of the South that most of us have never seen. In that sense, it is eye-opening. However, its Cinema Verite approach lacks context and leaves the outsider to understand that are being presenting with something truly central about the essence of the modern "South" when in reality they are only seeing a highly-selective isolated and fading subculture of the poor, rural, white, poorly-educated, mostly Pentecostal world of a few small Southern towns. By only presenting this small piece of the South, the director seems to reinforce, probably unintentionally, the negative stereotypes of Southerners as "hicks" that too many outsiders unfortunately already hold. As someone who has lived in more urban parts of Virginia and Texas for the last 26 years, I find this selective picture of the "South" to be very off-putting and incomplete. The outsider is not given the context to understand the true complexity of the American South. Most Southerners live in urban and suburban areas. The importance of African-Americans to southern culture is sadly not shown. Most Southerners are not Pentecostals speaking in tongues. Most Southerners are better educated and more sophisticated than those shown in this film. The South is an increasingly multi-cultural region as well. Nor does this picture provide the viewer with any sort of analysis or economic understanding of why this part of the rural South has been left behind. Rather than presenting the heart of the South as the film implicitly claims, it shows the margins of the modern South. That's fine and important, but without more context it risks doing a disservice to the world it is trying present fairly. The viewer would be better served by a fuller accounting of today's south and an explanation of why these people shown have been marginalized.
b-zondag
As a 'stranger' to the American culture, I was really impressed by this docu-movie. It gives me a look in the American South. Of course one can not give a complete portrait of something. There always a need for some subjectivity. I understand there a million other sides of the American South. For example, if you make a movie about Holland, surely you'll see mills and klompen. This is not representative for modern-day Holland, but it's a part of our culture, our history. I think the same applies to this movie. Apart from this, the movie is intertwining music, art and storytelling. This is fantastic!
