Some things are best in small doses. Cheesecake and Ketamine come to mind. The more-is-not-necessarily-better conundrum confronts the creators of “Scream of My Blood: A Gogol Bordello Story,” a Vic…
Story,” a Vice News documentary about the punk folk band Gogol Bordello and Eugene Hütz, the band’s charismatic lead singer. Hütz also doubles as a Ukrainian activist/raconteur/resident deep thinker. He can be a lot. Audiences’ appreciation of the doc will depend on their patience with Hütz, a man whose intentions are good even if his volume is always set to 11.
But soon the film drops into Hütz’s origin story. He was born in Ukraine during the last decades of the repressive and rotting Soviet regime. He had the double strike of being both Ukrainian and Roma. Hütz remembers only three colors: the gray of the buildings, the yellow of the sand needed to build more gray buildings and the blue sky above. His first real introduction to Ukrainian music and dance happens when his family flees Kyiv for Western Ukraine after the Chernobyl meltdown.
Hütz’s story is fascinating and triumphant as the band progresses to semi-stardom in the 2000s with appearances on Conan and David Letterman. Still, the film is less claustrophobic when he is off-camera and other members are interviewed. This is true, even if there is an unintentional Spinal Tap moment in their appearances as the years they were in the band flashes on the screen like dates on a tombstone. . But they have something to say.
Eventually, the grind even beat down the maestro. Hütz talks of shows where he “went horizontal to vertical without a lot in between.” He eventually escapes to Brazil where he learns meditation and qi gong between DJ gigs. While important to Hütz’s growth and sanity, the footage of him actually doing qi gong leaves a “Documentary Now!” aftertaste. It’s one of the films’ flaws: taking Hütz too seriously.
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