Gospel According to Al Green Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		4.0
Overall		4.0

Gospel According to Al Green Blu-ray Movie Review

Hallelujah.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman July 12, 2017

Say what you will about Barack Obama, laud him as one of the finest Presidents in recent memory or deride him as potentially worse than, say, Millard Fillmore, but there’s one thing that hopefully most folks can agree on — the man can sing (and I say this as someone with perhaps an above average knowledge of decent singing technique). Obama repeatedly surprised folks at various functions by breaking out into song, sometimes frankly with attempts to be inspirational, but often in more playful, even whimsical, moments of pure entertainment. One of the most iconic moments from Obama’s presidency in fact came when he started singing a song long associated with Al Green, “Let’s Stay Together”. Rarely has one song been so strongly associated with a performer, and it’s notable that Obama’s performance of Green’s signature tune put Green himself in the spotlight again, after some years where he (arguably at least) really hadn’t been. Green’s journey from soul superstardom to the ranks of believers in something bigger than chart success is nicely documented in Robert Mugge’s 1984 documentary Gospel According to Al Green. Green is seen in a number of often fascinating if pretty low key interview segments, but some of the most visceral footage in the film features Green taking the pulpit at his Memphis congregation or at a more public, but still gospel infused, performance at an NCO Club in Washington, D.C.

For a performer with such raucous, almost near revival tent, sensibilities, Gospel According to Al Green begins almost suspiciously quietly, with Green sitting in a chair in his Memphis rehearsal studio and strumming an unplugged electric guitar while he sings with that voice. Green, who looks kind of like a cross between Denzel Washington and Stevie Wonder, has an almost ferociously charismatic smile, which he indulges in as the song comes to a close, suggesting whatever spiritual clarity Green aims for is reached when he sings. Mugge returns to this rehearsal studio footage for several extended interstitials where Green discusses various aspects of his career, including a couple of life changing moments that convinced him his true path forward lay with pastoring rather than soul music stardom.

An interview with Robert Mugge included on this Blu-ray disc as a supplement details the rather long quest Mugge undertook to actually get Green to agree to this documentary being made, including sitting down for the interview segments. Mugge has a long and actually pretty legendary career as the crafter of documentaries about various musicians, folks as diverse as George Crumb and Gil Scott-Heron. It was in fact his Scott-Heron piece which indirectly led to his idea to forge a piece around Green, though Green was not the first choice of some of Mugge’s collaborators. Mugge reportedly spent well over a year “courting” Green before agreement to film was given, and of course when it was given, it turned out Mugge only had a few days to get his crew down to Memphis to film Green at his church, which was about to celebrate Green’s seventh year with the congregation, a kind of “jubilee” festival that Mugge rightly felt was absolutely indispensable to capture on film.

Green is completely unguarded and seemingly inspired from beyond in the performance sequences, especially those in the church, where one almost expects him to break out into whatever the singing equivalent of speaking in tongues is. While he seems to be forthcoming in the interview segments, one senses a certain reticence at times, where he elides some data and even questions whether other epochal events (like the now infamous incident involving a woman committing suicide in his home) ever really happened. That said, Mugge himself states in his supplementary interview that Green’s staff was gobsmacked by the amount of information he shared with Mugge, since they themselves had never heard a lot of this data before the interview.

Along with Green, Mugge also enlists the interview aid of folks like record producer Willie Mitchell, who guided Green’s early chart topping career. Also on hand is Ken Tucker, then a music reviewer based in Pennsylvania, but a name some readers may recognize from later television and film reviewing for publications like Entertainment Weekly. There may be some who view Gospel According to Al Green as a kind of ironic hagiography, especially considering Green’s at least occasionally troubled past and eventual matriculation into a preaching career. But there’s a solidity to Green’s spiritual transformation that’s quite striking and which this documentary presents in a really viscerally effective manner.

Gospel According to Al Green Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Gospel According to Al Green is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of MVD Visual with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.36:1. While this is touted as a new 4K transfer, there's only so much information available from the 16mm source, and as a result videophiles will need to temper their expectations in terms of overall clarity and especially detail levels. As Mugge relates in his interview, he also wanted to go for more of a stylistic approach than many music documentaries offer, and so there's a kind of red tinged aspect to many of the interview segments, something that, along with an intentional darkness, tends to even further tamp down detail levels. A lot of the rest of the film has a somewhat yellowish quality that doesn't look especially natural or accurate to my eyes. There are also some transitory compression issues where the already swarthy grain field tends to flirt with noisiness. All of this said, the appearance is generally quite appealingly organic looking, and there's no real damage of any import to report.

Gospel According to Al Green Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Gospel According to Al Green features a clear sounding LPCM 2.0 mono track. Mugge evidently carted around an array of 24 track recorders for this shoot (according to several online sites I visited in researching the background of the documentary), and so some might have wished for a more fulsome, even surround, accounting of the soundtrack, but what's here boasts excellent fidelity in terms of both the music segments and the talking head elements.

Gospel According to Al Green Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Bonus Video

  Soul and Spirit: Robert Mugge on the Making of Gospel According to Al Green (1080p; 16:51) is an appealing interview with the noted filmmaker, who documents the history of the project.

  
  

  Extended Song from Church Service (1080p; 4:51)

• Bonus Audio

  Al Green Complete Interview (1:32:50)

  
  

  Climax of Church Service (1:05:47)

  
  

  Bonus Concert Audio (3:21)

  
  

  Answering Machine Message (00:20)

Notes: All of these audio supplements feature the same LPCM 2.0 audio as the main feature. Both the Bonus Concert Audio and Answering Machine Message have an authoring anomaly where there's evidently no chapter information, and so chapter forwarding isn't allowed and at the end of the supplement, nothing happens other than a black screen appearing. Pressing Top Menu gets you back to accessible data.

Gospel According to Al Green Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Green told Mugge going into this project that he (Green) didn't want to revisit any of his soul hits and instead wanted to focus on his evangelical persona. That makes the studio performance of "Let's Stay Together" in this documentary all the more appealing, but truth be told, it is the gospel music that propels this piece into the musical stratosphere. The interview segments are revealing, sometimes in unexpected ways, and any fan of Green should be well pleased with both the musical and informational aspects of this film. Recommended.