Always lovely to spend another nine hours with my best friends The Beatles.
After Get Back and A Hard Day’s Night and the George Harrison doc and I Wanna Hold Your Hand and Beatles ’64 and now this, you’d think I’d had enough Beatles, but I believe I’ll go on a whole 1960s/70s rock-doc binge in 2026…
One of the last movies I watched in theaters before starting this blog. Rewatching now because I read the great J Dilla book and am working my way through a list* of related artists. At the peak of his fame and success, Chappelle’s vanity project keeps alternating between music performances on the day, and his interactions with the public. Rewatching now I wish there was much more music and less Dave. Each group gets about one song, which keeps being interrupted by host episodes. This is a choice, not necessarily a defect – Gondry’s story is more about building this event and getting people excited about it, not a you-are-there concert film. Questlove must have remembered this movie once or twice when working on Summer of Soul. Filmed when Dave was at the top of fame, released a year later when he was in the news for walking away from his sketch show, and he’s had nothing but rocky press since then (along with then-rising young star K*nye W*st, bittersweet to see both of them here).
*A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, D’Angelo, The Pharcyde, Raekwon, Busta Rhymes, Fugees, Common, Erykah Badu, Slum Village, 5-Elementz, Talib Kweli & Mos Def, MF Doom, The Roots, Jill Scott, Ghostface Killah, Bilal, Madlib, Robert Glasper, Georgia Anne Muldrow, Hiatus Kaiyote, Thundercat, Flying Lotus, David Fiuczynski, Kendrick Lamar.
Kind of a sad retrospective, a series of “here’s what we meant to say/do, but nobody got it” stories. Lot of good pop culture garbage in the visuals. Curious not to mention the reunions and box sets, but to act like the name Devo was retired in 1985 and everybody moved on. I liked the story of Brian Eno’s and David Bowie’s contributions to the debut album being removed by the band during mixing, and reports of the very early shows.
Feel-good story of a short-lived British band whose albums lived on for decades on the dance floors and they belatedly got their recognition via a reunion tour. If that sounds like the recipe for a very standard rock doc, yep, that’s exactly what we get. I don’t see a lot of dancing at Big Ears, so let’s wait and see what venue they’re playing in ’26 before making any decisions – a Mill & Mine show might be really fun.
“Everyone say amen for the technical difficulties … give the technician a big hand for the difficulties.”
Aretha murdered the audience, then the choir, then the band leader, and the movie’s only half over. The choir leader (who is named Alexander Hamilton) survived. Please give everyone in this church a bottle of water.
Christoph Huber in Cinema Scope:
Franklin conceived the album as a return to her spiritual roots (her father, also a reverend, delivers a moving speech in the last quarter of the movie), and one of the reasons she set out to record it live rather than in a studio was to capture that feeling which could only be generated by audience participation. Apart from being a musical document of the highest order, Amazing Grace emerges as a skillful orchestration of communal rapture.
Max Goldberg, 13 issues later:
Whatever they say, the music documentary gets jittery in the face of actual music. Perhaps it’s not so surprising: the most potent element of the movie — in some real sense its reason for being — is the one thing the filmmaker had no part in. Is it so hard to imagine this situation creating ambivalence, even anxiety? The film needs to do something, so it cuts … For me, the story of Amazing Grace serves as a kind of parable, articulating our wildest hopes for the music documentary: to bring sound and image back into alignment, to make the music whole again.
Listened to Cracow Klezmer Band at work, had a Czech lager, watched a klezmer movie – good day. Wedding videographer Leandro likes musician Paloma, fakes that he’s making a klezmer documentary to get her interest, then follows through, traveling from Argentina to Austria to Ukraine to Romania to Moldavia, chasing music that no longer exists in its origin lands (we hear plenty of performances but are told that technically they’re not klezmer, ha). It’s a true-falsey travelogue through folk tales and tunes, adding up to nothing much narratively but quite a lot cinematically.
Victor Covaci, Romania:
The Klezmer Project also incorporates a third, folkloric narrative in Yiddish voiceover, centered around Yankel, a gravedigger’s assistant, and Taibele, a rabbi’s daughter, as they face excommunication from their community over support for the heretical philosophy of Baruch Spinoza … The Klezmer Project meticulously subverts its structural expectations in service of a hybridized docu-fiction register, working best both as ethnomusicology and as meditation on its intrinsically whimsical and rewarding process.
Really good rock doc, because the talking heads feel like punctuations to the flow of music instead of vice-versa. Like most movies, it is 90 minutes long when it could be LP-length, but say la vee. A musician’s musician, impenetrable as a person, at least in the movies I’ve seen. I first heard him in another doc, his mouth wide open, playing technically-imperfect tunes, immediately striking, a true jazz weirdo. That movie’s archive footage was shot in 1969, this one’s in 1967, both released decades later.
Paul Grimstad for Criterion:
From the [1967] Blackwood footage, interspersed with other archival film, photographs, new interviews, and narration, Zwerin distilled an hour-and-a-half-long structure not all that different from a Monk composition: jumpy, elliptical, catchy, moving … As a counterpoint to the archival material, Zwerin shot new footage of pianists Tommy Flanagan and Barry Harris (both Detroit natives, like Zwerin) playing through Monk tunes as four-hand duets. We see how much fun they’re having, how generous and congenial their sharing of the music is, and how a Monk song like “Well, You Needn’t” allows for endless elaboration without its melodic outline ever becoming blurred.
After the tenth straight minute of split-screen I realized that Perry must’ve seen the Velvet Underground doc, thought it’d be funny to the same for Pavement, then the whole thing got out of control.
Live for no audience, the original pandemic livestream. The editing is out of control – there’s more picture-in-picture and rotoscoping than you would imagine, or desire. It’s lovely to see some pure uncut source material that inspired This Is Spinal Tap, the restoration is beautiful, and it all builds to the band’s improv blues song with a dog on guest vocals. Guess this was released as an hour-long concert film then they added 20 minutes of pre-Dark Side interview junk a year later, including a regrettable scene where Wright(?) gets defensive about the band running their technology and not vice-versa like some people say.
