(Shut Up & Sing – documentary - 93 min – directed by Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck – starring Natalie Maines, Emily Robison, Martie Maguire - 2006)

We're branching out here at bravenewfilms.org, and I thought a good step would be movie reviews. The movies we'll be reviewing at BNF will be ones with political aspects or significance, which will be defined as broadly as possible. Sometimes the movies will be current releases, but in this age of NetFlix, DVDs will probably make up the majority. But we can all use a few more movies for our queues, right? Several months ago, I reviewed Jeremy Earp and Loretta Alper's great documentary "War Made Easy", but I'll try to review a movie on a more regular basis (schedule permitting).  

So I'm starting with Shut Up & Sing, a documentary about the Dixie Chicks and the turbulent ordeal and transformation they experienced during the firestorm created when Chicks’ lead singer Natalie Maines' had the audacity to tell a British audience days before the start of the Iraq war, “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.”

The first thing I'd like to say is that I don't like the Dixie Chicks' music, though I like it slightly more than I did before watching the movie. I always saw their music as belonging to the genre of what I call pop country, which sounds to me like Christian rock from the 80s but with country accents and occasional songs about murder, adultery, and alcoholism. And in the movie’s concert footage, you can see that the Chicks perform dressed as some weird kind of cyberpunk hooker clowns, which I find odd. So I didn’t approach the movie as a fan.