You must rread this review of ther movie.. its scathing!!! I may post it on its own thread...but here ya go...
"'Shut Up and Sing'
Dixie Chicks refuse to leave well enough alone in candid documentary
Friday, December 01, 2006
By John Hayes, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Fans support Natalie Maines and the Dixie Chicks.
Click photo for larger image.
'Shut Up & Sing'
Rating: R for language.
Starring: The Dixie Chicks.
Director: Barbara Kopple, Cecilia Peck.
Web site: www.dixiechicks.com/06_dcmovie.asp
As the Post-Gazette's country music critic, I found it easy to support The Dixie Chicks' 2002 release of "Home," perhaps the best mainstream country album of the past decade. After singer Natalie Maines' notorious 2003 gaffe sparked an anti-Chicks backlash among the group's core audience, I took some heat from readers for continuing to support their music. During subsequent years, I continued to separate the art from the artists as the Chicks appeared to do the opposite of damage control, further alienating themselves from a country music community that had made them rich and famous.
Now, in a candid backstage documentary sarcastically titled "Shut Up & Sing," I find Natalie Maines, Emily Robison and Martie Maguire conspiring with manager Simon Renshaw to intentionally deepen the rift separating the group from its fans. They're clearly shown planning ways to get the media to buy into the group's pleas of right-wing victimization, and trying to turn the anti-Chicks phenomenon into the band's defining element.
That's it. I'm appalled. I've had it with these Chicks.
The most remarkable thing about "Shut Up & Sing" is that although it's not a hostile documentary taking shots at the band, it reveals its members to be smug, arrogant and manipulative, intentionally growing the monster that cripples their career, then whining about it to the press.
Think I'm exaggerating? Not long after Maines tells a London crowd the group is "ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas," directors Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck take us into a dressing room for a damage-control meeting. Quickly, it morphs into something far more nefarious when Renshaw suggests a counterintuitive tactic: instead of taking conciliatory steps to mend fences with fans, what if they could stoke anti-Chicks sentiment and instigate CD burnings and further rejection of the Chicks by the country music audience? It's not a quip -- Renshaw says it with relish, implying that the Chicks might then be seen as free-speech heroes by the much larger mainstream music audience. You can almost hear the "ca-ching" in his voice as he lays out plans for using the incident to move the group out of the country camp and into the mainstream.
Throughout the 93-minute film, Renshaw and the Chicks repeatedly conspire to provoke country music fans. On the set of an Entertainment Weekly photo shoot, a publicist stridently argues against allowing one of the world's top-selling bands to appear nude on the cover with self-deprecating insults like "Dixie Sluts" written across their bodies. She loses the debate. Renshaw later offers talking points for a nationally televised interview in which the group insults its former fans.
Renshaw is revealed as the Chicks' brain. In meetings, Maines blabbers and whines like the protagonist in a dumb blonde joke, while sisters Robison and Maguire are more guarded but seem willing to go along with just about anything.
"Shut Up & Sing" documents The Dixie Chicks belittling the conservative values of country fans and manipulating the media into reporting that the group is valiantly defending free speech. It's a ruse. From their pre-Maines cowgirl sweetheart origins through their successful mainstream country career, their songs have never been political. They voice no cohesive political doctrine in the film, other than to express a general opposition to the Iraq War and a pointed hatred of George W. Bush. Their claim of a conspiratorial radio "boycott" attempting to silence them is pure spin -- after years of playing to the values of country culture, they simply lost their audience when they abandoned those ideals. The filmmakers reveal the entire Chicks fiasco for what it is: a ploy to turn a minor gaffe into a major career move -- the intentional alienation of an artist's core audience in hopes of springboarding to a larger and more lucrative demographic. By their own admission, it hasn't worked.
As such, "Shut Up & Sing" is a fascinating fly-on-the-wall account of what may be one of the most blatant media scams in entertainment history. Kopple, who won Academy Awards for pro-labor films "Harlan County, U.S.A." and "American Dream," and Peck, who was among the producers of Kopple's HBO special "The Hamptons," take a nonlinear filmmaking approach, backtracking to the London gibe, hop-skipping to the band's reaction, jumping to planning sessions and concert footage, and flashing forward to meetings with producer Rick Rubin, who helps the Chicks to make their first non-country album. The digital cameras are rolling as the group discusses ways to spin the rerouting of a failing concert tour to make it seem like a win. They're witness to the creative process when songs are born and arrangements evolve, and they observe the human process when the artists collapse into the arms of loved ones.
Don't be surprised if movie critics and left-leaning documentary film audiences adore "Shut Up & Sing" and the right-leaning country crowd ignores it. As for me, my left-brain film critic knows a good movie when it sees one, and my right-brain music critic, which took heat for supporting the Chicks, knows when it's been snookered.
Frankly, I just wish they'd just shut up and sing."
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06335/742592-120.stm