Secret Window (2004, David Koepp)

Our first-ever Criterion Channel pick, to see if this movie is as silly as I remember it (yup). “The only thing that matters is the ending,” says Johnny Depp (Yoga Hosers), justifying our little project, a welcome rejoinder to Bill Pullman last year. Maria Bello (A History of Violence) arrives at Depp’s trashed place and the camera isn’t sure what to do while she looks around. Depp is lurking in a pilgrim hat doing his Southern John Turturro impression, having scratched “shooter” into all the walls. She tries to escape but has fatally forgotten how cars work. Tim Hutton (The Dark Half) shows up too late and they both get shovel-murdered and buried in the cornfield, closing on Depp relishing his homegrown corn, a meta-commentary on this corny movie, which I watched in theaters even though Koepp’s Stir of Echoes wasn’t good.


The Watchers (2024, Ishana Night Shyamalan)

On to HBO, which I probably won’t have for long so let’s max out our enjoyment (heh). Dakota Fanning (Coraline) and Georgina Campbell (Barbarian) are waiting in a roachy house when the real Georgina arrives, turns out their friends are being possessed by shapeshifting humanoid ancient insect creatures. Now the new Dakota arrives, calls herself the daywalker, and discovers she’s part-human, hmmm. “I’m so glad it’s over” says Dakota later to her identical twin, but their CG parrot knows it’s not. I’m on an M. Night kick and was sorely tempted to watch this new one from Lady Raven’s sister, but just saved myself 90 minutes


Godzilla II, King of the Monsters (2019, Michael Dougherty)

Sequel to the Gareth Edwards remake, starts and ends with people shouting names in rainy wreckage. Just as the family unit of Kyle (Day the Earth Stood Still Remake) and Vera (Orphan) and Millie is reunited, Rodan flies Gz into space then drops him like a bomb onto the city, then Mothra intervenes and gets vaporized. Vera sacrifices herself using an electro gizmo to lure King Ghidorah away, then Molten Godzilla rises and explodes KG and the whole city. Rodan arrives late, missed the whole fight. I saw Zhang Ziyi for two seconds! Unfortunately, Dougherty directed the great Trick ‘r Treat.


Godzilla vs. Kong (2021, Adam Wingard)

Godzilla is fighting Mechagodzilla, Kong is awakened with a small nuclear device and a deaf girl with Rebecca Hall tells Kong to help out, so he does. Tables turn on Kong, computer guy Brian Tyree Henry helps out, and our guys fuckin destroy Mecha-G. This must be a different city, since most of the buildings are standing. I’m glad Kyle is still alive, since he was in the Peter Jackson Kong, uniting cinematic universes through his pointless presence. This movie looks more fun than the others – I actually forgot that after not liking Wingard I started liking him again.


Godzilla × Kong: The New Empire (2024, Adam Wingard)

It’s gone fully cartoon, as all manner of CG monkeys and lizards fight in Narnia or somewhere, until Evil Anti-Kong escapes to the beaches of Brazil, followed by Power Glove Kong, Gz, and Ice Gz, who all destroy Rio, then team up to PG-13-slaughter Anti-Kong. The humans in these movies always seemed like time-wasters but now I see that without any grounding presence, all that’s left is loud empty colors. A lasting peace between giant apes and lizards is achieved, and Mothra and Rebecca Hall are still alive, fwiw.


Saw 7 aka Saw 3D: The Final Chapter (2010, Kevin Greutert)

The timer’s countin’ down and a bunch of saps are stuck in killer traps. Sean Patrick’s nipples aren’t strong enough for him to stop Gina Holden (death non-escaper in Final Destination 3) from getting cremated alive. Meanwhile, Mandylor from the last couple movies puts an exploding head trap on Jigsaw’s secret assistant Jill, then gets taken down by Jigsaw’s secret-secret assistant… Cary Elwes, sure, why not.


Jigsaw (2017, Michael & Peter Spierig)

And it’s over to Netflix for the prequel. Their fast-forwarding is slower than HBO’s, but the thumbnails load properly so you get a nice sense of the movie leading up to the last ten minutes. No clear winner. Two dudes are locked in laser collars, but Dr. Logan’s collar is fake, trying to get the corrupt detective (Callum Rennie of Hard Core Logo and Goon 2) to confess his corruption. It seems Jig had let the doctor live, now he’s jigsawing people himself, and his clip-show flashback explanation of this takes up the whole ten minutes. Directed by Australian twins who made an Ethan Hawke time travel movie, and the new writers would also take the next two Saws… one of which is on Hulu, who has the smoothest fast-forwarding of all…


Spiral: From the Book of Saw (2021, Darren Lynn Bousman)

Max Minghella is already in the midst of backstory infodump, telling Chris Rock how he killed
a bunch of dirty cops and wants to apply the ITIL continual improvement process to the city police department, but Chris is more concerned that his dad (chief dirty cop Samuel L. Jackson) is hooked to a blood-removal device, which transforms into a suicide-by-cop machine. Max just takes an elevator out of the abandoned factory surrounded by SWAT and the movie ends, what?


Pearl (2022, Ti West)

Mia Goth repression prequel to X, which wasn’t great, and reviews of this and MaXXXine didn’t convince me that it’s a trilogy worth the time. Bouncy haired girl Mitsi is over at Pearl’s place, admits to getting the dancing role that Pearl wanted, but they’re cool, still friends, oh no Pearl is chasing her with an axe. Some pretty good split-screen body-choppin’ shots.


Madame Web (2024, S.J. Clarkson)

Okay, just for the heck of it, the year’s most mocked superhero movie. Dakota Johnson has slow-mo future-sight spidey-sense among a meteor shower of CG metal scraps in a sparks factory. Oh boy, Tahar Rahim plays an evil spider-assassin, until a giant letter P falls on him. She astral-projects to save her useless friends, then they have to save her from drowning, and Adam Scott shows up during hospital recovery. The friends are terrible: Reality Sweeney, Isabela Romulus, and Ghostbuster Celeste, and it ends by teasing a sequel where all of them become heroes. Half of the writers also wrote Morbius, haha.

The Sea of Trees (2015, Gus Van Sant)

Just for a change of pace, let’s start with something that played in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, by a director I’ve often loved. McConaughey is searching for his missing friend Ken Watanabe, to no avail. He limps into the Japanese forest, leaving a trail of objects, while the music soars (and soars! and soars!), finally discovering not Ken but an orchid. The orchid gives him flashbacks, and he opens a package he’s been carrying for years I think, finding a children’s book, which he reads on the plane ride home to his old life in a gorgeous house, teaching undergrads about “forces of attraction” whilst remembering his dead wife. So I think Ken was a ghost in a haunted forest. Writer Chris Sparling also did Buried, which I’ve been low-key wanting to watch for six years.


Captain Fantastic (2016, Matt Ross)

This won a directing prize at Cannes and lead actor Viggo got an oscar nomination, but the Guardian says it’s terrible, so who to believe? Viggo has already lost his beard from the movie poster, has gathered his clan for the viking funeral of his wife. That’s two dead wife movies in a row! The kids play a hippie “Sweet Child o’ Mine” while their mom burns up, then her ashes are flushed down a toilet. Really glad I didn’t watch this one – thanks, The Guardian. The director is better known as an actor, in American Psycho and The Aviator.


Anthropoid (2016, Sean Ellis)

I thought Inglorious Basterds would’ve halted the nazi assassination attempt movies for a while, but nope, here’s another one based on another extraordinary true story. Looks like it’s all gone to hell and our heroes are being shot at. Well-directed scene of Jamie Dornan’s last stand. A captured ally tries to convince Cillian Murphy and his remaining buddies to surrender from their church basement hideout, but they finally get flooded and blasted, shooting themselves when all hope is lost, but not before Cillian sees the ghost of his dead wife (so that’s three in a row). At least the closing titles say they killed their target nazi, though 5000 civilians were murdered in response. Whatever the Czech Lion awards are, this movie got nominated for a hundred of them.


Equals (2015, Drake Doremus)

The movies are getting less respectable now, though this won an award in Venice for its many-layered scratch-roar music, as Nicholas Hoult pretends to wanna jump off a building. That’s four suicide-referencing movies in a row… this is what I get for watching serious festival shit instead of the usual dumb horror. Hoult has a tearful reunion with Kristen Stewart in their dark blue apartment, the whispered dialogue buried under the yelling of my suddenly-active birds. I think the idea is these are the only two people in a future universe who have emotions, and I guess at the end they get separated and she is sad – or he loses his emotions and she is sad. It depends whether this guy in the final scene is Hoult or not. I cannot ever recognize the guy. Doremus previously made Like Crazy with Anton Yenchin and Jennifer Lawrence, which Katy has probably seen.


Terminator 5: Genisys (2015, Alan Taylor)

I missed the future-set Salvation but it costs four bucks to rent, so let’s see if this alternate-timeline sequel makes any sense without it (or at all). Out of respect for a formerly-beloved series, I’m gonna give it twelve minutes. Ol’ one-eyed Arnold is back from part two, fighting another liquid metal thing. I guess Genisys is a virtual baddie with a dramatic countdown clock before he becomes Lawnmower Man all over the internet, and John Conner has turned evil. “You are nothing but a relic from a deleted timeline.” Arnold stolidly sacrifices himself yet again, and yet another big building blows up, as Jai Courtney and some fake Sarah Conner make their escape into a hopeful future, aided by new T-1000 liquid Arnold. The director did Thor 2 and lots of television, the writers did Alexander and Dracula 2000, and I can’t believe that Terminator was handed over to these bozos.


Yoga Hosers (2016, Kevin Smith)

This feels like an SNL movie or an Austin Powers sequel, since it’s all painful jokes extended past their breaking points. Hey, miniaturized nazis inside a Friday The 13thAlien costume, so maybe this is an Austin Powers sequel after all. The bad guy wants to kill art critics – that’s the only Kevin Smith-sounding thing I’m hearing. Johnny Depp’s makeup is excellent since I only realized that’s him after looking up the character name – but then, why cast Johnny Depp at all? I don’t get how terrible this looks, since I thought Red State was good. An important precedent has been set – I couldn’t bear this any longer and didn’t watch the full ten minutes. I guess the extra couple minutes for Genisys evens things out.


Antibirth (2016, Danny Perez)

AV Club gave this a C- but I almost watched it anyway because of the sweet blacklight poster. Chloe Sevigny tells Natasha Lyonne that she knew about the horror experiment from the start, so Natasha escapes with Meg “sister of Jennifer” Tilly. None of the dialogue or camerawork is good, and now villain Stephen Stills from Scott Pilgrim is driving Chloe somewhere while Natasha gives birth to a rubber demon head (which I guess is better than a CG demon head), then in some of the most incompetent strobe-light flailing I’ve seen in a movie, she gives birth to a full-size demon body that pummels Stephen Stills to death. Danny Perez also made Oddsac, which I rather loved.


Sinister (2012, Scott Derrickson)

Ethan Hawke finds the director’s cut of some ghost home movies in the attic of his haunted house, and a thrilling, poison-coffee-fueled film-splicing scene follows. Deputy James Ransone calls to say a serial killer will probably kill Ethan tonight, then Ethan calmly returns to his film screening, learning that the missing children of the murdered families did all the murders. Then I guess his own missing daughter chops him up with an axe. I think they hoped to do for small-gauge film what The Ring and V/H/S did for videotape. Derrickson made previous LTM entry Hellraiser: Inferno, and I don’t have high hopes for his Doctor Strange.


Hush (2016, Mike Flanagan)

The one about a deaf woman being stalked at home, not the one that premiered the exact same day about a blind man being stalked at home. Scared Kate Siegel emails her family a physical description of her attacker, says “died fighting,” and waits for the inevitable. But the attacker is super dumb, and tries sneaking up behind her as if she has no other senses, gets stabbed. Fight ensues and he chokes her to death. But wait no, she is alive and corkscrews him in the throat. Seems like your standard-issue murder thriller. Director and star also made Oculus and a Ouija sequel together, are working on Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game.

Kind of a dark movie, as Depp moves west towards nothing good, becoming a killer of white men before/after being killed by one. But it’s also possibly Jarmusch’s funniest and most beautiful movie, with great music.

Nobody: Gary Farmer (how did I miss him in Adaptation?)

Thel: Mili Avital, whose film career didn’t take off after Stargate

This was possibly Robert Mitchum’s final film:

Two Marshalls named Lee and Marvin:

The Kid: Eugene Byrd, a regular on Bones
Conway: Michael Wincott of Alien Resurrection and Basquiat

Benmont Tench (at right): Andy Warhol in I Shot Andy Warhol

Crispin Glover played Andy Warhol in The Doors. This movie has two Andy Warhols!

Whahappan:

I’ve read a couple of great articles about The Clock – never thought I’d have a chance to see it, but we were in Minneapolis while it ran at the Walker, so we watched almost two hours of it, which seems like a lot but is only seven percent of the total. And we could’ve easily kept watching (yes, Katy liked it too) – it’s not only a great conceptual achievement, it’s also very entertaining and ingeniously edited. To my great pleasure, as much care was given to the sound mixing as the picture, so audio will overlap in interesting ways. And the picture isn’t as clock-obsessed as I’d assumed. Clocks aren’t always onscreen, sometimes in just one fragment of a scene, or sometimes not at all, instead with characters speaking (usually in English) about the time or its passing (Nick of Time with Johnny Depp and Chris Walken got some repeat play), and clever connective shots will be used to fit scenes with similar times together. Plenty of humor – we got a confused phone conversation between two different movies, and Karl Malden in Baby Doll honking his horn to annoy characters of a whole different era.

A prequel to Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas that I was very excited for in 1999, less so in 2011 when it finally came out. Depp does a good job dialing back to an earlier, less insane Hunter S. Thompson impersonation, but this origin story for HST’s career, based on his early (but belatedly-published) novel, doesn’t have much to recommend it besides the pleasure of hanging out with Depp’s HST and a new comic sidekick in Michael Rispoli (Summer of Sam) and a decent comeback for Robinson (Withnail & I).

Aaron Eckhart plays a slick wealthy bad guy (and Depp’s part-time employer), gets to make a nice F&L reference, pointing at the ocean saying he needs someone with the right kind of eyes (or maybe HST just wrote that dialogue twice). Amber Heard (star of The Ward) is Eckhart’s hot wife with a thing for Depp. Giovanni Ribisi isn’t entirely successful as a drunk and dangerous crime correspondent on the newspaper (run by Richard Jenkins with a hairpiece), but he isn’t significantly outclassed by the rest of the film so it works out. Someone uses the term “living wage” – did that exist in the late 1950’s?

Drunken Fantasy scene 1: rum bowling alley

Drunken Fantasy scene 2: Rispoli tongue

Katy’s first time watching this, and of course she liked it (though she complains that Edward ends up alone, the tearjerker snow-story somehow not enough to compensate for a romantically unhappy ending).

I thought I knew Kathy Baker, the housewife who tries to seduce Edward, but I guess it’s just her resemblance to Katey Sagal. 1980’s mainstay (and director-substitute in Synecdoche, New York) Dianne Wiest is excellent as Edward’s host mother. Anthony Michael Hall is strangely cast as Ryder’s miscreant boyfriend.

The movie lost its only oscar nomination, for best makeup, to Dick Tracy – a movie I don’t remember having an Avon lady trying to make a scissor-scarred artificially-pale boy look normal, so I call bullshit on that.

This shouldn’t have worked… a typically overstuffed Gilliam fantasy, riddled with CGI, with a lead actor who died in the middle of filming. But if there’s anything Gilliam seems to be great at, it’s dealing creatively with catastrophe, so this came out miles better than the relatively smooth Brothers Grimm (oops, nevermind, research indicates that Grimm was ruined by fights with studios).

No surprise that the cowriter of Baron Munchausen and Brazil is along for the ride, since this is crammed with dreams and costumes, little stories and bizarre images. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer, having a good year with this, Up and The Last Station) is immortal thanks to a deal with devil Tom Waits (his own sinister self plus a little mustache), who will claim Doctor P’s daughter Lily Cole (Rage) when she turns sixteen in a few days. Dr. P and his gang of circus misfits (including a shockingly good Verne Troyer and young Andrew Garfield, star of Boy A and the Red Riding trilogy) kidnap citizens within a magic dream-mirror, and try to make them pursue their ideal selves instead of succumbing to the devil’s lazy temptations. A bet is made, and they race to save enough souls to win back P’s daughter.

Enter Tony (Heath Ledger) as a charismatic con-artist who attracts Tom’s interest as he begins helping the carnies win the bet, modernizing their look and sucking people into the show. He’s a mysterious dude, which makes his shapeshifting into three other immensely likeable actors inside the dreamworld work, both narratively and visually. I didn’t even notice for a while when Johnny Depp replaced him. Way to save the movie there, Terry and gang. The movie tells us and tells us that Tony is a bad guy, a liar who steals from children, but it still came as a shock when he’s killed at the end. Charisma counts for a lot.

With all the negative-nellying I’ve heard about Parnassus, I’m glad to see it’s got a high IMDB rating and a couple oscar nominations. I was especially suspicious of the computer graphics, but they are bright and cartoonish, fake without trying to seem real, and work great in context, shaming Tim Burton’s Willy Wonka flick and Terry’s own Brothers Grimm. I’d already like to see it again… maybe rent the DVD and listen to Gilliam’s commentary when it comes out.

Michael Mann switches between scenes of a master criminal and the cop assigned to catch him, until the criminal is caught because he came back for his girl… but enough about HEAT, here’s Public Enemies.

Johnny Depp is bank robber John Dillinger – previously played by Martin Sheen, Robert Conrad and Warren Oates – and Christian Bale is devoted cop Melvin Purvis – previously played by Will Patton and Dan Cortese. I also recognized appearances by Leelee Sobieski (girl Johnny takes to the movies when he’s killed at the end) and Giovanni Ribisi (wannabe train robber), but failed to recognize Stephen Dorff (my The Gate fan club membership is in peril) and Billy Crudup (as an amusing J. Edgar Hoover). Also apparently the paranoid guy from A Scanner Darkly played an FBI agent and Duke in the G.I. Joe movie played Pretty Boy Floyd.

Sometimes the digital camerawork yielded interesting perspective and depth of field effects, but sometimes in the indoor scenes it just looked like a made-for-TV movie. It’s weird that a low-light movie like Collateral looked less video-like than this one.

K. Phipps:

Mann fills the background with a lot of fascinating detail but often has a hard time keeping the foreground in focus. Sometimes literally: Mann and cinematographer Dante Spinotti opt for hard, handheld digital-video images. These lend a sense of excitement to some of the action scenes—particularly a thrilling nighttime chase through the Wisconsin woods—but often give the film an unpleasantly unfinished look. That unfortunately matches an unfinished feel. Neither Depp nor Bale get a chance to get beneath the surface of their characters, supporting characters bleed together, and a love story between Depp and his moll (Marion Cotillard) never finds a heartbeat.

Mann, as ever, remains a master of methodical pursuit, but as the film inches toward Dillinger’s fateful night at Chicago’s Biograph Theater, he doesn’t offer much beyond methodical pursuit. Depp goes about the business of not getting caught; Bale goes about the business of catching him. In the end it doesn’t really come to mean all that much.

I wasn’t sure what to think about this – it felt flat and over-long, a procedural thriller without the procedure or the thrills, a character bio-drama without much character, and a digital look that called too much attention to itself for reasons unknown. I’d been looking forward to it so much, then it wasn’t even that I didn’t like it; I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to like.

But that was before reading a convincing article by M.Z. Seitz for IFC, which makes the movie seem like a good case to study, if not a killer fun time at the theater. Maybe I’ll appreciate it more next time, focusing on the digital video’s sense of immediacy and reality, and the “moment-to-moment shifts in emotion,” instead of trying to enjoy the story and the acting. God, I’m such a failure as an auteurist… speaking of which, a whole bunch of articles in The Auteurs this month should help me feel worse about not understanding Michael Mann (and there’s an epic article/video series at Moving Image Source).

I.
Movie opens exactly how I would’ve opened a Tom Petty movie, with a concert performance of “You Wreck Me”. And this is a four-hour movie, a four-HOUR movie, so I thought we’d have some breathing room and could afford the four minutes to hear the whole song uncut, set the stage for your epic Tom Petty documentary by letting us hear a whole Tom Petty song, just so we know what exactly we’re celebrating here. But P.Bog goes the obvious talking-heads documentary route instead, cutting into the song so people like Eddie Vedder, Stevie Nicks, Dave Grohl and Johnny Depp can tell us that they love Tom Petty and his music so much. Damn, almost had something there. I guess P.Bog doesn’t want people tuning in and thinking it’s gonna be a straight-up concert, but still, I hope in the next four hours he finds time to play one song, just one song all the way through without voiceover. Can you celebrate a musician without actually playing any of his songs?

We may not get to hear a song uninterrupted, but we can enjoy watching Johnny Depp talk without any bothersome on-screen text saying “Johnny Depp”. But I didn’t recognize half the people who spoke, so if he doesn’t eventually start with the text, I’ll just never know.

But look at me complain. It’s an enjoyable show so far, talking ’bout Petty’s early obsession with rock music and his meeting Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench and early days in Mudcrutch. All songs I’ve heard before from the box set with nice home-movie footage to go with it.

II.
Tom drives to L.A. to find a record deal, gets a few of those, Mudcrutch breaks up because the studio wants Tom more than the rest of the band, and the Heartbreakers are quickly formed to replace it. Their record producer wrongly assumes that they mean the name Heartbreakers ironically. Tom is shot in arty black-and-white.

III.
First two Heartbreakers albums are out. There was all of one sentence about the second album being more difficult than the first before they cut to people raving about it. Some good live footage, some talk about drug use. And finally, one entire TV performance of a song with no cuts or voiceovers. Hoorah! A “required monthly test” on my tape cut out one talky segment. The band was initially popular in Britain before they caught on in the U.S.. Someone’s trying to convince us that Tom Petty was part of the Talking Heads/Sex Pistols rebel new-wave/punk movement, since the Heartbreakers’ roots-rock was out of fashion on the radio, replaced by bloated dinosaur rock and disco. I guess it’s a workable theory but I want to hear David Byrne’s opinion first.

IV.
Third album was a big deal. Jimmy Iovine shows up and tells us that third albums are always big deals. Petty found out he was being dicked around by his record company and he sued them… big unprecendented event, led to settlement giving Tom more control and royalties from his music and the eventual release of “Damn The Torpedoes,” feat Refugee, Even The Losers and Don’t Do Me Like That. Movie plays nearly the whole album over the story.

V.
Some pressure for the fourth album, “Hard Promises”, another great one, feat. Insider and A Woman In Love. Very nice segment on The Waiting that starts with Petty singing it acoustic, cuts into music video / studio version, then after an interview piece closes out the song with Eddie Vedder on vocals during a live performance. We lost a bass player (no hard feelings), gained a new one (Howie Epstein), won another fight with the record company (over album pricing), dealt with Stevie Nicks, and played the great Stop Dragging My Heart Around. First time diving into Tom’s angry youth, his abusive father (plenty of hard feelings) and sweet mother who died during the recording of this album after long illness. Iovine presents his theory: missing mother + abusive father = rock star. Towards the end of 1982 I drove back to work blasting Insider with the windows open. Man, it’s only 1982… how long can P.Bog keep this up? Did he ever watch the whole thing at once?

VI.
Next album “Long After Dark” (the one with “You Got Lucky”) isn’t as good as it might’ve been. Producer Jimmy Iovine is blamed for his involvement. Next album “Southern Accents” (feat. Eurythmics-penned “Don’t Come Around Here No More”) isn’t as good as it might’ve been. Producer Jimmy Iovine is blamed for his lack of involvement. We get a full pretty-recent concert performance of the song “Southern Accents”, and a brief description of the drug-fueled two year period around the Accents album leading to Tom’s smashing his left hand into a wall. P.Bog uses an innovative cutting style during this segment, and intimate camera work reminiscent of his film “Texasville”. Haaaa I’m just kidding, it’s the same ol’ interview stuff. I turned it off after a black screen announcing the end of part one. I hope part two is on my videotape!

VII.
The album: “Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough)” feat. Bob-Dylan-co-penned “Jammin’ Me”. Here in part two, Petty’s rock cred and history firmly established, we take an immediate P.Bog-style veer towards talking about all Tom’s Famous Friends. Tom and his group back up Dylan (who hadn’t played with a band since The Band), hang out with ex-Beatles and Jeff Lynne and Otis Redding and finally form the Traveling Wilburys, marking the point when Tom went from rebel-rocker to a guy whose records my mom would buy. I haven’t seen The Last Waltz but mentions of The Band got me wondering if this is P.Bog’s answer to that movie, a big rock statement blending his two main talents of reminiscing about the old days and namechecking famous friends. Oh but I shouldn’t be mean to P.Bog, don’t really know much about him.

VIII.
Wilburys record comes out and is a huge hit, then Roy Orbison dies so that doesn’t go any further. Tom alienates the band by making a solo-ish record in “Full Moon Fever,” but it’s the biggest hit of his career and the Heartbreakers play the songs live and they don’t seem so bitter anymore.

IX.
Tom continues to alienate the band, this time with the help of Jeff Lynne, “Into The Great Wide Open” producer who likes to record the band members one at a time instead of all together like they are used to doing. New drummer joins during “Wildflower” sessions and is asked to stay permanently when old drummer finally quits. They hang out with Roger McGuinn, Johnny Depp, Dave Grohl, Faye Dunaway. “Greatest Hits” sells ten million copies after Tom is finished grumbling about it. The band gets a little happier. I’m starting to be thankful that the movie is so long. It’s been nine lunch hours so far I’ve gotten to hang out and listen to Tom Petty stories, and I always feel like playing some Petty albums when I get back to work.

X.
I didn’t think I’d end up criticizing a four-hour doc for its omissions, but when it acts like it’s telling the whole story, those omissions seem serious enough to mention. Firstly, they didn’t mention the Petty/Heartbreakers soundtrack to She’s The One. I can see not wanting to spend a lot of time on it, but they could at least mention it in passing… it’s a great album. More importantly, Tom’s cameo as the mayor of Bridge City in the post-apocalyptic epic The Postman went unmentioned. “I heard of you, man… YOU’RE famous.” On the bright side, the band is back together. On the less bright side, nobody seems totally happy with “Echo”, least of all Tom, who was going through a divorce at the time of recording. Back up with a new wife and a hall of fame induction for “The Last DJ”, currently the Heartbreakers’ most recent album and a very good one. And then back down again as bassist Howie Epstein dies from drugs and is replaced in the band by original bassist Ron Blair. Oh, and the band backed up Johnny Cash on “American Recordings”, something else to be proud of.

XI.
Oh augh, the summary chapter. Would that the VCR chewed up my tape sometime between last time and this one. Tom is proud of “Highway Companion” but has nothing new to say about it. There’s some more concert and video footage, but mostly this is where we throw all the clips of people saying nice things about each other to leave us feeling good about ourselves and Tom and rock ‘n roll. Might work better if you’ve been spacing on the movie for four hours and gone through a couple six packs, but as a standalone episode it’s tedious. So I’ll keep my last words to a minimum: good flick, good tunes.