Last night I watched the documentary Big Easy Express a film by Emmett Malloy that features Mumford & Sons, Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, and Old Crow Medicine Show. The film opens with a girl skipping her way through a vintage train... as she stops in each of the compartments the audience is invited to glimpse a world made up of song and pure merriment. Then a voice narrates the beginning of a beautiful journey:
160 some odd people on a train to new orleans and we're gonna play music. If anyone asks we will just say yah no big deal.. Just playing music on a train through the country. But secretly, not even to ourselves, I think we're gonna say ya we're playing music on a train with the country, across the country, to see it the way they saw it more than a 100 years ago. When we were all children dreaming to lift ourselves and the world we come in contact with back into the magic. - Big Easy Express
What little boy hasn't played with a train set or dreamt of riding a train? Big Easy Express is a film about little boys with big dreams, growing up to see them realized in a most fantastic way.
Adults need to have fun so children will want to grow up. ― Erica Bauermeister, Joy For Beginners.
Grainy shots, dirty spectacular musicians, and never ending songs. If magic and nostalgia are what this documentary sought, then I would say they found it and somehow managed to bottle it. Can you imagine being on a vintage train with your musical heroes travelling cross country, and as a cherry on top having your own bartender?
Big Easy Express will inspire you to dream BIGGER.