Reviewed by Jan Mclaughlin at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.<\/p>\n
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Cure for Pain: The Mark Sandman storey is an arresting biographical portrait of the band Morphine’s front man. The film opens with TV footage of Kurt Loder reporting for MTV “one plays drums, one plays 2 saxes and one plays a two string bass, together they call themselves Morphine and there’s is a sound like no other”. Boston based Mark Sandman pioneered low-rock, a stripped down lo-fi sound with an aggressive bass.<\/p>\n
From Newton Massachutes, Sandman endured the death of both his younger brothers as he struggled to become a musician. Just when his unique and sultry sound found an audience Sandman suffers a fatal heartattack on stage in Palestrina Italy in 1999 at the age of 46.<\/p>\n
The director\/producers Robert Bralver, David Ferino and Jeff Brodway tell Mark Sandman’s storey with a\u00a0fluidly edited mix of interviews, concert footage, TV appearances and family home movies. The music of Morphine compliment’s this in the soundtrack. Among those appearing in the film are Ben Harper, Les Claypool (Primus), Matt Watt ( The Stooges), Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age), \u00a0Morphine band members Dana Colley (baritone sax) and Billy Conway (drums) and surviving family members Robert and Guitelle Sandman (his parents), sister Martha Holmes and girlfriend Sabine Hrechdakian.<\/p>\n
Sandman’s parents speak of an artist and unconventional son wanting unconditional love. His dad gave him an ultimatum work, college or go. ” so he left in a blinding snow storm”. They didn’t hear from him until he became gravely ill in Brazil and came home.<\/p>\n
Morphine was found in 1989 and the band had one rule. Each member had to be able to carry their own gear into the venue in one trip without help. This must have helped contribute to the stripped down sound. The bands manager Deb Klien said ” they never went Hollywood if anything Hollywood went Morphine”. There music could be heard on soundtracks for film (Dreamworks) and television ( The\u00a0Sopranos). Morphine starts to play larger and larger venues,\u00a0\u00a0there is footage in Italy, France and Brazil and impressive is how\u00a0Sandman addresses the audience in the native language’s.<\/p>\n
This\u00a0documentry \u00a0is super informative if you are a fan of Morphine. I was\u00a0always under the impression that Sandman had died\u00a0a drug related death due to the bands name.\u00a0Turns out he picked the name because the word Morphine comes\u00a0from the word Morpheus who is the God of dreams. This film brought a better understanding to Sandman’s poetic lyrics for me. Hopefully Cure for Pain will introduce the music to a new\u00a0generation of listeners.<\/p>\n
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Reviewed by Jan Mclaughlin at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. Cure for Pain: The Mark Sandman storey is an arresting biographical portrait of the band Morphine’s front man. The film opens with TV footage of Kurt Loder reporting for MTV “one plays drums, one plays 2 saxes and one plays a two string bass, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1964,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,181],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films","category-santa-barbara-film-festival-2012"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1964"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19011\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}