User Reviews

Like in many documentaries about Bob you hear and see people talking about Bob. But this one is different. No other person then Bob himself is leading this wonderful documentary. There are enough interviews of the great Bob Marley to full many Tapes, so it was great that the makers of Time Will Tell did this in this documentary. But there is more then only Bob speaking. Like many artist people wonder what is left behind on videos and tapes. There is a big collection of unseen videos and tapes if it goes about Bob. I must say that Time Will Tell has many unseen videos and performance. From the Capitol Rehearsals in 1973 to a Jamaican TV performance in 1980 where Bob played Redemption Song. Between this you can also watch some very nice interviews, football footage of Bob in Jamaica and of course live performance. Some performance are really rare like the Get Up Stand Up version played in Germany 1980 or the rare footage of Bob in New York somewhere around his last concert.

If you saw some other documentaries and you want something new then I can recommend you to watch this one. You won't hear unknown people who are telling their story about Bob but only Bob himself talking and performing.

Good documentary, but I highly do NOT recommend watching this movie if you are someone that is new to liking Marley, or doesn't know much about him. This is a documentary to watch for fans that know a lot of about him. (They don't explain a lot of the stuff, so you probably won't understand some parts.) I highly recommend watching "Rebel Music (2001)" first, or VH1's "Behind the music: Bob Marley". Also, before watching any documentaries, I recommend researching information about Rastafari. (So you can better understand the documentaries, and Bob Marley).

Overall i give this documentary a 9.

JAH RASTAFAR-I!!!!!

TIME WILL TELL, while possessing none of the insights offered by narrator and Pan African activist Darcus Howe in the earlier Marley documentary THE BOB MARLEY STORY/CARRIBBEAN NIGHTS, is a lovely package documenting some of Marley's more remarkable concert appearances.

CLR James observed in the mid 1970s that the Rastafarian movement and its music did more to raise world consciousness of the political aspirations of the various revolutionary nationalist movements of the last century then had decades of theoretical work by the original PanAfrican movement. If that was true- and it probably was at the time of James' quote- then it is good to have a record of the cultural phenomenon that Marley became. TIME WILL TELL, for better or worse, is one such record. Perhaps it does fawn on its subject, as one other reviewer notes for some length here. But here's a question for that person: what else ya got? The hard cold fact of the matter is that Rastafarianism has always provided to Black people world wide a religion of self-love, as well as some cultural and political orientation that makes sense for millions. Marley, whether his critics would have it so or not, was a prophet of the faith, in fact, his Coptic name in the tradition was Berhanie Selassie, or Light of the Trinity. He did not pose as such in his own lifetime, and if he was self-aggrandizing at some levels, it should be noted that modesty and great gifts rarely settle on one person. Besides, as the old saw goes, it's not bragging if you can walk your talk. And Marley walked it, sang it, chanted it, soared it. False modesty is for suckahs.

TIME WILL TELL is a powerful chronicle. I use it in my class every year on the 6th of February, which was Bob's birthday. My students examine his lyrics in the context of world political questions of our own period. Watch this film using a LCD projector with a stereo hookup, and if you don't come away with a better sense of the mystique of the Honorable Robert Nesta Marley, O.M., I'd be greatly surprised. This one's a winner.

(NOTE--It's been almost exactly 10 years since I wrote this review. In the intervening decade I've become rather more educated and sympathetic about not only the sociopolitical and religious context of reggae, but about the music itself and the man who made it--not to mention that I've been fortunate enough to make some very good Jamaican friends who've put a very personal, human face on their culture. It was a younger, cockier, and somewhat naive self that wrote this review; even if I think the *movie's* flaws are still flaws, I am older and wiser now so my snottier criticism should be interpreted as such. Read on with salt-shaker at the ready.)

I'm a musician. I appreciate Bob Marley and his music. In fact, some of it I really like a lot. So I went into "Time Will Tell" enthusiastically, hoping to get some further insight into this talented fellow and his music. But here's the thing: I'm not a Marley worshipper. I admit that the whole reggae/Rasta/Jamaica thing is rather out of my sphere, and I'm approaching it from the POV of an interested outsider, mostly through the music. I think that's a good thing, to come into it with a more or less objective mind. So what did I find here? Basically a feel-good Marleyfest, an awesomely reverent but shallow publicity piece aimed right at the (one suspects white, middle-class American) already-converted.

The biggest problem is that "Time Will Tell" assumes that you already know the backstory and main characters, that you will knowingly chant along with the career highlights depicted as they are paraded along. Think of a Beatles documentary: New York airport, screaming teens, Ed Sullivan show. (check) A Hard Days Night. (check) "Bigger than Jesus." (check) Our World/"All You Need Is Love" broadcast. (check) You get the idea. But hardly any explanation is given for anything. There are what appear to be news footage of important looking people, and of some kind of urban warfare, and you realize that you have no idea what this is about , who these slick politicians and Jamaican kids with machine guns are, and who or what they're shooting about. All you get is a vague sense that it has something to do with Marley's music. Or maybe it's just there to add some ersatz drama. The opening montage of early-60s shantytown Kingston set to "One Cup of Coffee" is nice, though.

Bob-mon himself doesn't come off too well IMO. Yes, he's there talking to the camera himself. But my impression is of a guy who is alternately stoned out of his gourd, rambling on and on semi-coherently about various issues, and a self-aggrandizing religious fanatic. Look, I can dig many of his views about lousy human-rights conditions and politics--he obviously knows about the hardships of his people and his activism on their behalf is admirable--but his rap in defense of pot-smoking ("herb" as he calls it) sounds utterly silly in its self-righteous profundity. As for the messaianism, well, much of his concert footage looks suspiciously like some kind of mutant revivalist gathering, what with his "Jah! Rastafaaaaarriii!!!" histrionics and the accompanying wild cheering, the fans in videoland are obviously supposed to cheer along, between bong hits. Me, I end up feeling like I took a wrong turn into a fundamentalist church. I don't fault Marley for his religious convictions, but not being a Rastafarian myself (I'm a Christian atheist, if that makes sense), it doesn't connect with me in the least, and his grandstanding ends up being really effin' annoying after a while, when what I came for was some really incredible music.

Thank Jah, er, God, that the music IS uniformly excellent. EXCELLENT. No further comment required.

If only they woulda stuck with the music and left the faithfully uncritical biography crap for someone more capable, more objective, I would have given "Time Will Tell" a 10. "Behind The Music" (I think) did a wonderful Marley retrospective. See that instead.