by ·Comments Off on Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind (2022, Ethan Coen)

This predates Drive-Away Dykes but was withheld for a couple years until Jerry was safely dead, then slipped onto streaming to mostly poor reviews. As a doc it’s little better than a slickly-edited youtube mix of TV appearances. Some 80% of the runtime is music, and almost all the interviews are with Jerry himself, who’s particularly unenlightening about his own life and career, and absolutely full of himself. So, pretty poor by cinematic standards, but really excellent as a rock-doc (wall-to-wall music, mostly live versions, duets with Mickey Gilley, Tom Jones, Little Richard, and no celebrity talking heads). As a follow-up I spent July 4th the ideal way (reconstructing original Jerry Lee Lewis album tracklists by studying Bear Family CD box set liner notes).

In Filmmaker, Vadim Rizov calls it “as unambitiously amiable a timekiller as you might expect from Live Nation Productions” and says the doc “proceeds, in no particular thematic or chronological order I can discern, through the life and career of Lewis, as important a musician as he is appalling a human.”

by ·Comments Off on Peppers & Garlic double-feature (Les Blank)

Hot Pepper (1973)

Rock doc about accordionist Clifton Chenier, made two decades into his recording career, and one decade before he’d win a grammy. No awards or recording studios in sight here, it’s more front porches and basement parties. Interviews with locals about their thoughts on racial integration (they’re for it). No fly on the wall, everybody waves at Les while he’s filming street scenes, and his camera is attentive to passers-by and animals and clouds, as usual. I imagine the interview with Chenier’s grandma would’ve killed with a crowd. Made the same year as another Louisiana music doc Dry Wood, and right before the Leon Russell movie.

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Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers (1980)

Just a doc about garlic and its many uses and the people who are into it, but this is Les Blank so of course it’s a musical. Glad to see the featured Oakland barbecue joint is still family owned and sort-of in business. He digs up Werner Herzog for a sound bite about why his Nosferatu didn’t have a garlic subplot (this was pre-Fitzcarraldo/Burden of Dreams). Wim Wenders did some camerawork for this – why?

Garlic & Flamenco:

by ·Comments Off on Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You (2023, Ryan Daly & Will Oldham)

A feature-length music video for the latest Bonnie Prince Billy album, made of scanned 16mm film, much of it zoomed out so we can see the sprocket holes and optical soundtrack. Some real on-the-nose footage selections – guess what’s onscreen during the songs about types of trees. I was waiting to see what he got for “Satan did a dance with me and I danced right along,” and it didn’t disappoint. I liked the fuzzy neon street scenes of “Blood of the Wine.” If I was allowed to take screenshots from streaming, I would’ve picked the woman covered in pigeons during “Kentucky is Water.” “Queens of Sorrow” MVP, juxtaposing commercial imagery of dolls with women’s-rights marches. The Bonnie Man makes the briefest in-person appearance. I’ll bet this was fun to edit. It’s very inessential as cinema, but if they want to start putting entire BPB albums on Criterion Channel that’s alright with me. Do I Made a Place next.

by ·Comments Off on The Other One (2023, Henry Threadgill)

It’s hard to make time for the movies at Big Ears, but sometimes they’re programmed at 10am so you can watch one without missing any concerts. I would’ve loved to see The Tuba Thieves but it conflicted with Trevor Dunn’s Trio-Convulsant, and I later heard that Laurie Anderson’s Home of the Brave and subsequent interview got delayed by an hour, which would’ve made me miss Secret Chiefs 3 and Kronos Quartet. This didn’t conflict with anything except brunch, and I’d already seen Threadgill’s Very Very Circus ensemble and knew I like his music. This was consumer-looking-video of a few interwoven Threadgill covid-era projects. Primarily it’s a concert performance of a new piece, music played by a small orchestra he’s conducting with pauses to read poetry off projected pages (their layout and typography being as good as the language). There are sections where he’s arranging small mystical objects while yelling at cloud in voiceover, and slideshows of the photographs he took of junk New Yorkers put out on the sidewalk when they had to actually inhabit their apartments due to the pandemic.

by ·Comments Off on Dex Romweber double-feature (1987-2006, Tony Gayton)

Athens GA Inside/Out (1987)

“Mike Mills can smell ants.” A portrait of a scene and the bands within, the Decline of Western Civilization template in a more chill environment. Pylon was broken up at the time of filming, but were still nice enough to do an interview. Ends with the title “Save the Morton Theater.” They must have saved it – I saw Of Montreal there more than 15 years later.

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Two Headed Cow (2006)

After his cameos in Inside/Out, a full Dex doc, full of good stories and quotes. “I’ve found it very hard to join this society on a normal level ever since I became an adult … I became some weird alienated folk artist without even intending to.” Exene (another Decline connection) calls his music “hardcore americana.” Looser than the other movies, more downtime, hanging out on tour. Dex gives the Duo Jets history himself, no alt narrator, and explains why they dissolved (his bandmate disagrees). After the split, archive footage of “who can I count on if I can’t count on you” (harsh), and Dex says he entered a “semi-psychotic spiritual odyssey.” Half the movie is Tony’s own archive – this was his attempted follow-up to Inside/Out, abandoned and then finished 16 years later. Nice tricks: a duet between Dex’s older and younger self, a time-lapse of a full solo show with snippets of each song. Sara’s not in the movie, she replaced Crash on drums in the Dex Duo the year after this came out. I’ve been listening to all their records… RIP…

by ·Comments Off on The Past is a Grotesque Animal (2014, Jason Miller)

I don’t sit around wondering about the private/interior lives of musicians, but ever since the classic Of Montreal lineup (roughly from Gay Parade through False Priest) broke up, whenever I hear one of their songs in a mix or they release a new annoyingly-titled record, I think “what is Kevin’s deal anyway?” So I watched this to discover what is his deal. BP Helium sums it up pretty clearly at the start of the movie (“Kevin is a weirdo”) then at the end after firing all his bandmates Kevin reports that he “chose art over human relationships.”

Songs are cut pretty short until the title track, a great montage of fans singing along with his divorce lyrics. The band had been bleeding members as they got big, hiring too many new members at the peak of their popularity (Solange is onstage, Susan Sarandon is a fan), then when he recorded Sylvianbriar he fired anyone who was left. Brother David concurs: they’re here to make art, not to make friends. It’s all pretty promotional-chronological, with zero mention of Kevin’s trans alter ego, even though record reviews made a huge deal of it back then. Great scraps of concert footage anyway, a valuable collection of their antics and costumes.

with Nina Twin:

by ·Comments Off on The Decline of Western Civilization (1981, Penelope Spheeris)

Great rock doc, maybe the absolute ideal. Songs play all the way through, with good live sound. The movie conveys the experience of a high-energy club show, and she asks direct interview questions behind the scenes. They filmed in 1979 and ’80 and this came out summer 1981… where’d the bands end up?

The Bags broke up before the movie’s release. Alice’s recent solo records are good, her bandmates migrated to Gun Club.

Ron Reyes was a short-lived Black Flag member, their second singer, and by mid-1981 the band was testing out Rollins, their fourth.

Ron:

Circle Jerks are still together, kind of, and their members have been in Redd Kross, Bad Religion, Off!, and Black Flag.

Catholic Discipline was short-lived – their keyboardist became El Vez.

The Germs singer died at the end of 1980 – one band member would later form a group called Celebrity Skin, and another would join Nirvana.

Darby:

Lee Ving of Fear was in the movie Flashdance, and every few years all his band members quit over “his right wing beliefs and his lack of empathy” and he hires new band members.

X would stay together forever, more or less.

by ·Comments Off on Little Richard x2

Little Richard: I Am Everything (2023, Lisa Cortés)

It’s hard not to be overwhelmed by the very idea of Little Richard. As a teen he played gay bars in drag. John Waters stole his mustache. He brought The Beatles to Hamburg when they were nobodies; his keyboardist at the time was Billy Preston.

I watch the rock docs for story and music and personality, and it’s got all that, but the movie tries hard to make itself unlikable along the way. Firstly they made it too late, so all his first-person stories come from talk show appearances. The past is represented with cheesy foleyed-up b/w archive footage, and when Richard’s dad comes up in stories they keep slow-zooming into the only photo they’ve got. The dialogue editor can (roughly) chop pauses out of sentences and make people phrase things the way they want, but nobody can solve the problem of SD interlacing. Present-day musicians portray Richard and others from the time (Valerie June plays Sister Rosetta Tharpe covered in CG sparkles) – they’re trying to make it fun and relevant to present-day, though they also keep saying Richard couldn’t be imitated (and they make excuses for Richard ripping off styles from his predecessors). Feels like an advertisement.

As seen with the subject of my previous rock doc multi-feature:

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The Little Richard Story (1980, William Klein)

A very different sort of thing, the Casting JonBenet of Little Richard docs from a kaleidoscope of perspectives: managers, family, fans, impersonators, churchmates, crazy people. The crew went to Macon GA for a Little Richard homecoming ceremony, but Richard didn’t show, said God told him not to. The editing mixes stock footage of people who are not Little Richard, cutting back to present-day people who also aren’t Little Richard but are trying to be, most memorably three guys in back of a convertible lip-syncing the “wop bopaloo bop” Tutti Frutti intro on a loop. The city’s event goes on as planned without their guest of honor, where Klein plays around with editing and sound, subverting some of the longer speeches. It’s much grungier than last year’s doc, and leagues better.

by ·Comments Off on I Get Knocked Down (2021, Bruce & Robinson)

Hybrid doc at the start, with Chumba Dunstan angry at home, a washed-up ex-punk. Without any musical outlet, they try reenacting scenes from other movies where people are angry. Then he calls up the rest of Chumba one by one and starts excavating the band’s roots. Mekons’ “Where Were You” represents the advent of British punk as he moved to Leeds. “We wanted to shout like Crass, and then we wanted it to sound like The Beatles,” referencing the band’s blend of anger, cynicism and fun. They re-enact band arguments about signing to a major label. Finally all band members together, or as many as he could find, they watch their notorious Brit Awards performance together, where they changed the lyrics and dumped an ice bucket on a politician. It gets a bit too promotional on Dunstan’s new band Interrobang, but I’ll check them out. Some words of hope from Penny of Crass and Ken Loach, last-minute inclusion of They Might Be Giants’ “Tubthumping” cover, overall not bad.