No doubt Michael "Meathead" Stivic, Reiner's radical hippie character long ago on "All in the Family," wouldn't look at Johnson nearly as favorably as director Reiner does. Overlooked is his escalation of the Vietnam War, which led to his political downfall. The film focuses on his abrupt transition to power after the tragedy in Dallas and his subsequent efforts to pass the landmark Civil Rights Act. president, portraying him as a sensitive man with an enormous ego, a master of backroom politics who felt unliked as the front man at the White Office. Director Rob Reiner helps Harrelson slide comfortably into the role of the 35th U.S. This plethoric multitude of musical styles and flavors is frequently mixed, matched, and melded, into delicious, new concoctions by an imaginative team of musical gourmet master chefs.Woody Harrelson requires heavy makeup but not a lot of heavy lifting to play Lyndon Baines Johnson in this sympathetic biopic.
And zyedeco, acid rock, Muzak, bubblegum, cumbia, classical, and the twist, to still not exhaust the list. It's all in a night's music for Brave Combo, often in a synergistic fashion that includes everything from klezmer surf rock to rocking cha cha to what The Washington Post calls "mosh pit polka," as well as to the hokey pokey and the chicken dance. In the same breath, to name some but hardly all of the colors found on Brave Combo's musical palette, one can describe them as a groundbreaking world music act, a hot jazz quintet, a rollicking rock'n'roll bar band, a Tex-Mex conjunto, a sizzling blues band, a saucy cocktail combo, a deadly serious novelty act, a Latin orchestra, and one of America's dance bands par excellence.
Succeeding in its first mission, Brave Combo is America's premier contemporary polka band, and a Grammy winning one at that. Over the last 26 years, Brave Combo has collected a dizzying array of descriptive musical pegs, boldly going where few bands have gone before, and even fewer could (or would) dare to venture. Yet it clicked and launched a stunning run that has now catapulted it into the new century. At first glance, back in 1979, the Denton, Texas, based outfit was, in shorthand, pegged as a New Wave polka band, a courageous if not almost oxymoronic endeavor during that particular rebirth of the cool. Rarely, if ever, has a band name been more apropos, not only at the group's inception, but even more so 26 years after the fact.
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