| “Of all the unlikely casualties of the war in Iraq, the poor Dixie Chicks appear to have sacrificed their enormously successful career over an offhand remark in front of a London audience on the eve of the invasion. As the extraordinary documentary by renowned filmmaker Barbara Kopple, Shut Up and Sing, makes abundantly clear, the comment was not a slip of the tongue or a misunderstood piece of media garble. Dixie Chicks vocalist Natalie Maines meant what she said and she did not try to take it back, mitigate the damage or even back away from the sentiment. But then, she's no politician. Maines had some reservations about her country's inevitable march to war in those waning days of peace in 2003 and she exercised her freedom of speech, nervous in front of a foreign audience in a country that on that very day was torn by anti-war demonstrations. She also makes it clear in this astonishingly candid, intimate film that she doesn't think she has anything to apologize for, and sisters Martie Maguire and Emily Robison, her two colleagues in the biggest-selling female vocal group of the modern era, back her up all the way. Documentary filmmakers pray for something to happen to their subjects when the cameras are rolling, and two-time Academy Award-winning documentarian Kopple struck gold when Maines told a crowd on the opening night of the band's first European tour that she was "ashamed" that President Bush was from Texas. Kopple and co-director Cecilia Peck were there to record what turned out to be a historic event....”
|
