A new documentary about George Michael, Andrew Ridgely and the music they made as Wham. — It’s simply called “Wham!” — I found myself in a moment when I needed a nostalgic and fantastic elixir. It’s short, sweet, and close to my national blues sentiment. First, the duo Wham! made pop soul music. And this movie navigates all the moral and ethical thorny issues of a white man making a black film. There are no such questions in this film. That’s the illusion. And I am here for that. But also Wham! There were no thorns.
Here were two white boys from England of Greek Cypriot (George) and Egyptian (Andrew) descent. Born during Motown’s heyday in the early 1960s, they bonded during their adolescence when disco handed over the party baton to new wave and rap. . They integrated it all (plus Barry Manilow and Freddie Mercury and a bit of Billy Joel) into a genre where the only other alchemists were Hall and Oates. All about 24 songs of the duo have “everything she wants“”wake me up before i go“”i am your man’, it’s all jam-packed — impactful, but unnerving in the magic of cinema. Race does not exist here at all.
The film doesn’t care about journalism, criticism or music history. Just tons of photos, archival interviews, performance footage, outtakes and music videos. The film was essentially adapted by director Chris Smith and a busy editor from scrapbooks kept by Ridgely’s mother, from the first attempt at a radio wave breakthrough in 1981 to 1986. Celebrating everything leading up to their acrimonious breakup. That was a year before Michael’s smash hit album “Faith” was released, and decades before he died in 2016 at the age of 53. Ridgely’s accidentally out-of-print 1990 solo album Sons of Albert is also not mentioned.
I don’t even have a talking head. The disembodied voices of Michael and Ridgely guide it all, conveying memories as ruminations and narrations. (Most of Michael’s content comes from BBC radio interviews.) They describe how they met as students in his mid-1970s and inherited a mini-block of 1980s culture. increase. Ridgely can still be heard warmly calling Michael by his nickname “Yogg”, since his real name is Georgios Kyriakos Panayiotu, and two men who look like pinballs from a leather bar. You can see people. Richard Simmons.
