The opening mashup is as good as people said, then between each ad break they pick a particular focus: Lonely Island, hip hop, star-making performances, the dangers(?) of live television. They take pains to tell us what an honor it is to play such an important show, how vital is SNL to our culture, and if you don’t agree with this premise then it all starts to feel hollowly self-promotional, but there’s sure some good music along the way.
Tag: rock doc
Rock Docs: 20 Feet & Trances
20 Feet from Stardom (2013, Morgan Neville)
Expertly put together, a great show. Attempts a late swerve into pathos because all of their solo stardom didn’t take off, which clashes with the early sentiments about being all about the music. In the discussion of who treated the singers better or worse, Jonathan Demme and Joe Cocker and Sting and Luther Vandross come out well, Ike Turner and Phil Spector less so. I thought about Kelly Hogan at least every couple minutes.
“Rock and roll… saved our lives.”
“You get hooked on music, you’re fucked.”
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Trances (1981, Ahmed El Maanouni)
An ambient rock doc – if it’s not self-evident that the music is good, if you don’t know why these guys are big, nobody’s gonna tell you. The band is called Nass El Ghiwane, and we get a mix of performance, rehearsal, and, not exactly interview, but pointing the camera at a band member until he starts talking.
I dunno about “a free-form audiovisual experiment” or “pure cinematic poetry” per the Criterion press, but it’s got nicely edited archive film and some really good closeups. The group (with two original members) was still playing as recently as last year.
Beatles ’64 (2024, David Tedeschi)
The doc companion to I Wanna Hold Your Hand.
Murray the K, Ronnie Spector, Smokey Robinson (!), and Little Richard all appear.
Unfair sneak attack by music lover David Lynch made me very upset and gained this movie an extra star.
Gimme Danger (2016, Jim Jarmusch)
Intriguing structure for a rock doc, skipping the band’s rise and opening with their downfall and breakup. When the opening titles hit, the band is over and all its members are living with their parents, then we restart the story from the beginning, leading to the triumphant reunion. Mostly just the band members talking, then when they get dropped from their label we get a nice montage of more popular groups covering their songs. So, no innovative film but it’s a pleasure to spend so much time with Iggy Pop (“In the Ashetons I found primitive man”).
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Strummer (1993)
SD handicam mini-doc covering Joe and team mixing the soundtrack for Sara Driver’s When Pigs Fly. “Computers have ruined the kind of music I like. Ultimate control, that’s what people want.” One scene is just Jarmusch recounting his favorite jokes from This is Spinal Tap.
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French Water (2021)
Fashion ad starring Julianne Moore and Chloe Sevigny, lost at a party after hours, and a randomly materializing Charlotte Gainsbourg. The music was good, at least.
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Jim Jarmusch & Jozef Van Wissem: The Sun of the Natural World is Pure Fire (2012)
People in frilly pajamas float in the river, while one guitarist plucks gentle melodies and the other plays feedback. The music was good, at least.
Zorn I-III (2010-2022, Mathieu Amalric)
Zorn I (2010-2016)
Rehearsing bands, mixing albums… setting up and breaking down equipment, cleaning his sax, unglamorous work. It documents JZ’s first time working with Nate Smith at The Stone, which is such a small place. Amalric is recruited to read some Rimbaud on the Conneries album. No onscreen text but if you cross-reference with Discogs you can figure out when some of the scenes took place. When I am rich, after buying every Tzadik album I’d like to find or recreate the black t-shirts Zorn is always wearing with his different ensemble designs.
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Zorn II (2016-2018)
“It was terrible when John started working with people who could actually read music. It fucked things up for the rest of us” – Ribot. Zorn and Dave Lombardo played a duo set at the Louvre. They soundtrack Harry Smith films, and during a dance scene Amalric cuts in some Maya Deren. This episode is more concert-backstage, shows and rehearsals, almost wall-to-wall music, and is therefore great.
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Zorn III (2018 – 2022)
Emails between Barbara Hannigan and JZ combines with some Cobra philosophy scenes to make this one about the composer’s relationship with the musician, really good. Prepping a difficult vocal piece which will be Hannigan’s JZ debut in Lisbon with Gosling as her pianist. Gave me a better appreciation for that first BH/JZ CD, which I’d written off as “not my thing” a few weeks earlier. Amalric seems intent on making each of these movies a different type of thing (this one is intensive prep/process) instead of just “more adventures in the life of Zorn.” Good quotes:
“You’ll see me start to die. That’ll be your cue.”
“You can go relatively satanic on this one.”
“I keep forgetting you people have to breathe.”
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Must hear soon:
Masada box
Moonchild trio
Psychomagia
Zorn/Hannigan 1 and 2
The Elephant 6 Recording Co. (2022, Chad Stockfleth)
Memorial screening for Will Hart. You go your whole life without hearing Olivia Tremor Control in public, then you put on the new Ted Danson show a few minutes after watching this doc, and “The Opera House” plays over the closing credits. One of those docs (see also: The Sparks Brothers) where there’s such a wealth of interesting archival material and diversity of cool music that you can’t help but make a compulsively watchable movie out of it all.
Bad 25 (2012, Spike Lee)
Quincy Jones memorial screening. Messy at the beginning then settles into a song-by-song structure. The most I’ve ever liked Kanye West was seeing him here singing “Smooth Criminal.” Origin stories of Wesley Snipes and Sheryl Crow, and MJ’s “shamon” was a Mavis Staples tribute.
Travelin’ Band: Creedence Clearwater Revival at the Royal Albert Hall (2022, Bob Smeaton)
Long wikipedia-caliber intro with narration by Jeff Bridges (haha). He shouldn’t have compared CCR’s sales records to the Beatles in the intro then followed with a bunch of interview and tour diary clips where they are infinitely less witty and charismatic than the Beatles. But after a half hour of this feature-length stretching-out, the April 1970 concert begins and is pure fire.
Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda (2017, Stephen Schible)
Environmentalism, nuclear power, aging and death and forgetting, found sounds as music, notes that sustain eternally and notes that don’t. He goes to the north pole to examine global warming effects, and records sounds of melting snow. Sakamoto has scored some great and less-great films, and not being a big soundtrack listener I don’t know his work well, so I started playing his albums (including the glitch-ambient Insen and cool 1980s Esperanto) in prep for the VR Big Ears concert which was quietly canceled after he passed away.
