Page 2 June 24, 2021
Entertainment
Film Review
‘The Sparks Brothers’ is a Music Documentary
About the Best Band You’ve Never Heard
By Ryan Rojas for cinemacy.com
Spanning every bit of two hours and twenty
minutes, it’s clear that director Edgar Wright
feels indebted to both educate, as well as attempt
to make audiences appreciate the art-pop duo
Sparks–the most influential band that you’ve
never heard of–in the highly entertaining music
documentary, The Sparks Brothers.
An unabashed pop music fan himself, Edgar
Wright (Baby Driver) makes it his mission to
not only tell the story of the Mael brothers–Ron
and Russell, whose band “Sparks” not only
spans over five decades in which the pair made
25 studio albums and 500 songs–but capture
their undefinable creative identity, and show
how real commercial success would evade them
over their entire career while they refused to
compromise their vision.
But Wright the established filmmaker is
up for the job, telling Sparks’ story with an
inspired assortment of zany and diverse animation
styles whose tongue in cheek humor mix
with the band’s own ironical detachments. By
intercutting these animations with an array of
interviews from the music and entertainment
world–including Beck, Mike Meyers, Jason
Schwartzman and Flea (as well as Wright himself),
who all profess their love for Sparks–it’s
a wealth of riches to tell Sparks’ story.
To understand Sparks is to understand the
Mael brothers: born in Santa Monica, California
(already confusing, as most everyone thought
they were a British band), there’s Ron (the
“older” one) and Russell (the “cute” one),
who were raised on a diet of Hollywood and
cinema by their late father (who passed away
before the boys were teens). It was this level
of theatricality and cinema that would inspire
the band aesthetically, and would later influence
them philosophically through the appreciation
of French new wave film, in which the brothers’
self-awareness would rally them to churn
against the mainstream of pop music that they’d
would eventually operate in.
Of course, Ron and Russell themselves are
present in this doc, too. So too do they want a part
in constructing this (their) story, as their
authorship has always been integral to their
presentation. What I found interesting about The
Sparks Brothers is that, while the Mael brothers
were clearly all-too gleeful playing pop-provocateurs
throughout their career (Ron famously
sported a sort-of Hitler moustache, which
he would say curiously never got mistaken for
Chaplin), it’s clear that they were in some small
part motivated by a desire to break into the
mainstream, to be more famous than they were,
or to a more simple degree, “be understood.”
One of the most surprising and telling
reveals is when, after the album of their first
band, “Halfnelson,” didn’t sell well, it was
their manager at the time who advised them
to change their name to what would become
Sparks (as they were told they looked like
the Marx Brothers). While Sparks would (and
should) be the last band in the world to be accused
of having motivations to work to fulfill
Ryan Rojas
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The Sparks Brothers, courtesy Focus Features
See Film Review, page 4