... after all I liked this film and was surprised by the quality of the music. However, this movie is quite difficult to follow if you don't know the biography of Bix. When I watched it with a friend I had to explain everything, particularly the other characters and who they were..
shareI don't know how I'd react to this movie if I'd never heard of Bix. But I have followed Bix's music and life for decades and this movie makes a real hash of things. I'm not upset by incongruities like having Hoagy Carmichael play with the Wolverines, but having his friend Frank Trumbauer kiss him off and tell him to F himself is just wrong. Bix's bandmate Joe Venuti was not Bix's bosom buddy, but Joe lived until 1978 and probably had met the director, Pupi Avati, who was happy to have an Italian main character to put in the movie. OK, I can live with that, but I think Pupi's Italianness is a problem. Bix was born and died in America and lived an American life, the nuances of which eluded the Italian director who could not realistically portray what he didn't understand. Period details were also so inaccurate as to be distracting, e.g., in 1931, Venuti travels to Davenport, Iowa from NY. The better part of the journey would probably have been on the 20th Century Limited, a train that traveled more than 80 mph on a four track roadbed. It looks as if Avati rented an 1880 wood burning locomotive (or a replica he got from Disneyland) that he ran on a siding somewhere at 25 mph. The death scene is a non-event. All we see is cops, post mortem, inventorying Bix's possessions in his apartment. The definitive Bix movie is still to be made.
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