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.

by ·Comments Off on Total Balalaika Show (1994, Aki Kaurismäki)

Did not realize the Leningrad Cowboys (their hair in full glory) would be backed by the massive Russian Red Army Chorus and Dance Ensemble, playing to a crowd of 70 thousand. After the first guitar rock song, the Cowboys stand by patiently while the Russians sing a loud, dull vocal number, then we get a Cowboy/Russian duet on “Happy Together” and a huge version of “Delilah.” It’s an expert combination of the solemn and the silly, and one of the all-time great concert films.

by ·Comments Off on New York Dolls: Three Rock Docs

All Dolled Up (2005)

Based around lo-fi backstage and onstage video of the Dolls in their heyday playing grungy NY punk clubs, also a local news report. It’s all archival, with plenty of hanging out – scenes and songs fade out abruptly. Primary source footage of artists is inherently interesting but when the cameraperson follows them on a trip to San Francisco, there are whole minutes of aimless filler.

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New York Doll (2005)

This one plays more like a standard rock doc – famous talking heads tell us the Dolls were important, then the filmmakers follow bassist Arthur Kane, now working part-time at a Mormon library, en route to the big reunion shows curated by lifelong fan Morrissey. There’s some tension (moments before going onstage Johansen antagonizes Arthur over the church) but largely plays like an advertisement, feel-good story of a forgotten man getting to re-live his rock & roll youth, with a twist ending (Arthur dies of cancer days after the gig). But the most shocking thing in the movie was learning that the golden key society of hotel concierges from The Grand Budapest Hotel really exists.

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Personality Crisis: One Night Only (2022)

Like with his George Harrison doc, Scorsese pulls together the previous sources – we see Morrissey bits from the Arthur Kane movie and stage footage from the archival doc. This is built around a live performance in a small club – David admits that his cabaret show is for his friends, and a wider audience wouldn’t understand it, and I didn’t, but the song “Totalitarian State” was good. Between live songs the movie nicely roams across art-related topics: Harry Smith stories, love of opera, song title inspirations. David says “intelligent ridiculousness” appeals to him, and I can get behind that.

by ·Comments Off on A Bookshelf on Top of the Sky: 12 Stories About John Zorn (2002, Claudia Heuermann)

Heuermann’s second of three(?) Zorn movies contains some gems. Zorn credits Carl Stalling’s cartoon scores with teaching him new forms. He explains the rules of Cobra to its participants, which would’ve been useful for me to see a year ago. We sit in on a remaster of the Morricone album, and catch JZ’s enlightening interactions with the musicians during a rehearsal.

But the movie is also tediously about making the movie, about Claudia’s struggles to book an interview with Zorn, and questioning what the movie will be and how to piece it together, including footage of audience screenings of scenes we watched earlier. It returns to re-enactments of the director first hearing the Naked City record and getting into this kind of music, but these meta-elements feel like filler, because all we learn about Claudia is she likes Zorn’s music and is making a doc about him… two things that were pretty easily assumed going in.

by ·Comments Off on George Harrison: Living in the Material World (2011, Martin Scorsese)

Feels like an outtakes shuffle of pre- and early-Beatles stories with long lingers on old photos and scraps of George solo songs, then finds its footing as the Beatles start losing theirs, around the 1hr mark as drugs turn to meditation and Ravi Shankar and the gurus enter the picture. As he uses clips from the Get Back sessions and the Concert for Bangladesh, my Beatles movies are starting to eat each other. Conclusions: George was a beautiful man, and Yoko didn’t break up the Beatles – Eric Clapton did.

by ·Comments Off on Two Rock Docs by D.A. Pennebaker

Jimi Plays Monterey (1967/1986, Pennebaker & Chris Hegedus)

Ten minutes of intro fluff and and opening title painting before the performance starts, but once it gets there, it’s as good as the boomers promised it would be. Lighting the guitar on fire gave us a terrific poster image, didn’t do much else. This was the band’s U.S. debut, having made their career in England.

“Speed painter” Denny Dent:

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Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1973/1979, Pennebaker)

Unexpectedly, we hear Wendy Carlos music before Bowie. Low-detail blur, the light not high enough to make a proper film. Great singing, sometimes some nice guitar. Fun scene when we see a big guitar solo after Bowie leaves the stage, then rewind to another camera following Bowie through a costume change as the solo plays again. I love the idea of Bowie, and was hoping that blasting this movie through the soundbar and pretending I was at his career-peak concert would help me enjoy the music, but the costumes beat the songs. “White Light/White Heat” was cool at least!

by ·Comments Off on Tina (2021, Daniel Lindsay & TJ Martin)

An upsetting movie to watch after Tina’s death. It recounts how she had a bad life with Ike, then divorced him but the press kept saying “haha where’s Ike” so she did an interview to say Ike was abusive, so the media wanted to know “HOW abusive” so she wrote down her life story about the bad times with Ike, so the media wanted her to talk about Ike more, then they made a feature film, and Tina sat at the Venice premiere next to Angela Bassett saying she hasn’t seen the movie and doesn’t want to, and just wants everyone to leave her alone about Ike already. Funny that Tina was initially as unenthused about her signature solo song as I am, complaining that it’s not her kind of music. Barely a glimpse of her superior work in Tommy and Thunderdome.

by ·Comments Off on Four Half-Hour Shorts (Wong, Tsai, Gomes, Mandico)

One-Tenth of a Millimeter Apart (2021, Wong Kar-wai)

Making a Wong film out of outtakes fom other Wong films. It’s a cute idea – pushes its egg-metaphor too much, but gives us some scenes that I honestly can’t recall if/how they existed in the source features since I don’t watch his movies often enough.

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Wandering (2021, Tsai Ming-liang)

A woman walks through Tsai’s installation, watching a scene from each of the eight Walker films, alone except when the director appears at the end, transfixed by his own footage of Lee in a bath. A nice introduction and/or culmination to the slow monk project, with some new-to-me scenes, including a non-Lee monk in a white void.

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Redemption (2013, Miguel Gomes)

Four sections of archive footage illustrating narrated letters from the past. The end credits is where things get exciting, revealing the narrators and the letter writers (Maren Ade reading Angela Merkel!) then immediately revealing that all the letters were made-up. Per Vadim Rizov in Filmmaker, the letters are by “some of contemporary Europe’s least-liked leaders,” and the end result “a sympathetic but also fundamentally facile experiment.”

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Dead Flash (2021, Bertrand Mandico)

A scrapbook for Mandico completists – rushes and backgrounds with a mood-music mixtape. Extended shots of a multiple-stabbed dude, a double-dicked light-up crystal statue, the usual. Then the second half is ape-people as model and photographer (both played by Elina Löwensohn) in split screen with dialogue (“I want you to magnify this dirty memory”).

Fellow Mandico completist Gianni helps spot the source films on lboxd:

Outtakes from previous shorts (Extazus, Niemand, A Rebours and Huyswomans – Huyswomans is reproposed integrally) plus a brand-new short film about two anthropomorphic monkeys … the outtakes of Extazus have been released separately in a dvd box-set – Ultra Pulpe et autre chairs – with the title of A Black Sunset Upon a Violet Desert.

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bonus shorts from Criterion Channel:

Dream City (1983, Ulysses Jenkins)

Music and theater performances and other assorted stuff, mixed together with muddy sound recording and early video chroma effects.

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Black Journal: Alice Coltrane (1970, Stan Lathan)

Short, effective doc portrait on Alice at home and playing music. Beyond a few photographs previously seen, this is now everything I know about Alice.

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And we got access to that animation streaming site that I already forgot the name of, and watched two of this year’s oscar-nominated shorts that I already forgot the name of.