Searching for Sugar Man

Not sure where to begin with this one.  I’ve been meaning to check out Sugar Man since it came out and then when it won best doc at the Oscars I made it a higher priority.  Turns out it’s just ok.

So the film focuses on this 70’s singer songwriter from Detroit called Rodriguez.  He made a couple of records but they went completely unnoticed in the States.  In South Africa though he caught on like wildfire selling half a million.  The thing is Rodriguez never knew about this until almost thirty years later.

What’s disappointing is that there isn’t a whole lot to the story.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a sweet tale of getting due credit and recognition.  And Rodriguez himself seems like a real nice and humble guy.  It’s just that there isn’t a lot of meat on the bone.  The guy put out some albums, they went nowhere, but today they’re hailed as forgotten masterpieces and that’s pretty much it.  No real twists and turns.  And Rodriguez is just a regular dude, not an eccentric or flamboyant character.

I thought the whole movie was going to be about trying to find this guy but that manhunt wrapped in the late 90’s when one of his daughters told folks where he was (still living in Detroit).  So this is all a recap doc and not an investigative one.  It seemed like things were going to get interesting when the filmmakers confronted the owner of the label Rodriguez was on.  Rodriguez saw very little, if any, royalties so I thought this was going to be a scandal and there was going to be a lot more to this story but the royalties angle goes nowhere.  I mean the searching part of Searching for Sugar Man is actually a fairly small portion of the whole picture.  It feels like more time is spent on his comeback and first visit to South Africa.

Now I want to make it clear that I’m not belittling Rodriguez or his fame in any part of the world.  It’s a cool story; it’s just not a very interesting cool story.  It doesn’t leave you thinking about it afterwards. 

What’s really strange is that this won an Oscar for best doc.  The other films it was going up against were about real serious shit like rape in the military, AIDS, Israeli counterterrorism and the West Bank.  I know the Academy is all politics but I wonder what the thought behind giving this category to Sugar Man was.  It kinda bugs me that The Central Park Five wasn’t even nominated and it’s a more well-crafted doc as well as a more important story to tell than Sugar Man. 

If you’re into late 60’s/early 70’s folk rock then you might enjoy this more than I did.  There are a lot of breaks where you’re just listening to Rodriguez’s music in here.  And the music has a lot to do with how you’ll view this picture.  I thought the songs were just ok and nothing particularly special so I didn’t care that much that this artist got lost in the shuffle.  If you’re like the folks in the film that absolutely love the tracks (they suck his dick really hard, calling him better than Dylan and say shit like he’s the best/most memorable artist they’ve ever encountered, etc.) then you’ll probably be into the mythology of Rodriguez and the poetic, philosophical lyrics he sings.           

You know, I wonder if the Sugar Man is really Bob Sugar from the Jerry Maguire movie.  They should make a sequel all about that guy.  I would see it, Jerry Maguire II: Sugarland.