My Guitar Lessons Review of The New Jimi Hendrix Movie.

Jimi Hendrix the movie ‘Jimi – All Is By My Side” was released in the UK over the weekend and my girlfriend (Sally Burrows) and myself ventured to the cinema to see the film. So what was our joint opinion on the movie?

Well first of all, an obvious factor that certainly didn’t help the film was that the estate of Jimi Hendrix refused to loan the music rights to the film for André Benjamin to perform as Hendrix. The estate stated that they would not grant the rights unless they were allowed full participation in the film’s production. This in our opinion turned what should have been a fantastic incite into the sadly short life of a very talented young man, into a less than average production. So no ‘Hey Joe, Purple Haze, Voodoo Chile, Foxy Lady’ etc. We got ‘Killin’ Floor and Wild Thing’ and that was the only tracks we where familiar with that Hendrix played. How can they make a Hendrix movie without his music!

We arrived looking forward to learning more about the man, his life and the times in which he lived, and came away with a slightly nagging feeling that it was a wasted opportunity to teach a whole new generation about this very important historical period of music history.

There where a couple of great scenes one of which was when Jimi blows Eric Clapton off of the stage at their first meeting and also the performance of St. Peppers in front of The Beatles 2 days after its release, but all in all it was a disjointed and poor attempt at what should have been an outstanding movie.

Andre Benjamin is great at being Jimi  although most of the time you can see his guitar moves do not match up with the music. Saying that he had to learn to play left handed so credit due there. Imogen Poots as Linda Keith steals the show with some good performances from Hayley Atwell as Cathy Etchingham (wait for the snot bubbles), Andrew Buckley as Chas Chandler and we loved Burn Gordon as the fiery Mike Jeferies who was only in the movie for no more than 2 minutes and disappered without any return. All other performance where well below par, even the normally great Adrian Lester giving  a poor performance.

Great guitar sound track by the legendary Waddy Wachtel but again he was restricted by what music he could play. Production was very poor and all over the place. We know Hendrix was stoned a lot but we felt like the film was forcing us to feel stoned when we just came to see a movie biography.

If you have seen the trailer you have seen the best bits already. Sally said “Not knowing his full life story, I had rather hoped to find out something new about this legend, Sadly this was not the case”.

We scored the film 3 out of 10! Don’t go if your a fan as you will be disappointed.