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.

by ·Comments Off on Moonage Daydream (2022, Brett Morgen)

The artistic life of Bowie. Good interview bits, ok visuals – Morgen’s free-association clips of computer graphics and classic film clips don’t usually work for me (the Sparks doc was more coherent). Surprisingly the interview segments were better than the concerts, and both have horrible lighting.

by ·Comments Off on Searching for Sugar Man (2012, Malik Bendjelloul)

Failed folk musician goes decades without realizing his records became a bootleg sensation in South Africa, flies there for massive concerts then returns to his humble Detroit life. “It remains too strange to be true.” Archive footage, some of it just vintage mood stuff, bit of rotoscoping, some fun jump cuts. Repetition or rambling in the interviews is preferable to the dodgy dialogue editing we usually get in these things. This won an oscar (vs. three govt/military stories and an AIDS activism doc) and Rodriguez has now played a bunch of live shows, for which he hopefully got paid, since he’s getting nothing from the oscars or those album sales.

by ·Comments Off on Rock Doc Trio: Silkworm, Cave, Harrison

Couldn’t You Wait (2013, Seth Pomeroy)

I finally got over my terror of watching this, thinking it would be too sad. Contains some of the stories I’ve long wanted to hear – Albini recording them at no cost, why/how they changed labels. Pomeroy does a great job editing the live and studio material together, and includes a feature-length “Live Worm” compilation of concert songs. I’m only halfway through the other extras – it’s a treasure trove. “If you cant get into Silkworm then God hates you and you’re an asshole.”

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The Concert for Bangladesh (1972, Saul Swimmer)

Continuing my post-Get Back solo Beatle explorations (albums played so far: Ringo x1, John x2, Paul x3 and All Things Must Pass). My 2003 AVI file often looks better than the HD Peter Jackson movie, hmmm. George introduces Ravi Shanker, pleading with the crowd to follow along (it’s “a little more serious than our music”), then tears through some “All Things” hits. Billy Preston and Ringo and Leon Russell get vocal turns. “While My Guitar” and “Here Comes the Sun,” a four-song Bob Dylan feature, then a couple closing numbers. Happy to discover it’s another one of the great concert films.

George, Bob, Leon:

Ravi and company:

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This Much I Know to Be True (2022, Andrew Dominik)

Dominik repeats his One More Time With Feeling feat of having each song be visually distinct, maybe more impressive here since he’s got a limited toolkit in a single location and keeps showing us the tools (lights, dolly tracks) yet somehow surprising us within the moment. Another difference is that I already loved “Skeleton Tree” before watching the previous movie, while this one revealed the beauty of “Ghosteen” and “Carnage.”

by ·Comments Off on The Beatles: Get Back (2021, Peter Jackson)

Some notes I took along the way:

Day 2 opens with them looking thru Beatles fan magazines

Michael L-H is kinda an ass

Cutting between 1966+69 on “Rock & Roll Music” at end of day 4 is great

Mal is round-headed guy who plays anvil on Maxwell’s

We know that it’s magic to spend time with the Beatles, but episode two presses its luck, showing us different views of a flowerpot while John and Paul argue near a hidden mic

Peter Sellers shows up after The Magic Christian sets arrive

Reminiscing on their India trip, discussing the footage, which we get to see

Michael and Glyn are credited with the roof idea

Jackson has overbaked everything since Frighteners

Soon before the concert, John simply sings the setlist, wow

During the concert the movie thinks we want to hear everything the teenaged chinstrap-chewing pigs say, but we’d like to hear the music please

Problems with the crowd interviews on the street: British people are boring, and clearly Beatlemania is over

Beatlemania is back on in our house, though.

Aspirational Post-Beatles Media To-Do List

– The Magic Christian (1969)
– Ringo: Beaucoups of Blues (1970)
– George: All Things Must Pass (1970)
– John/Yoko: Plastic Ono Band (1970) + Imagine (1971)
– Paul: McCartney (1970) + Linda/Ram (1971) + Wings/Wild Life (1971)
– The Concert for Bangladesh (1972)
– Concert for George (2003)
– Beatles Anthology (1995)
– Beatles Love (2006)
– Rock and Roll Circus (1968)
– How I Won the War (1967)
– The Last Waltz (1978)
– Jimi Plays Monterey (1967)
– George Harrison: Living in the Material World (2011)

by ·Comments Off on Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1960, Aram Avakian & Bert Stern)

After the Prince movie, I went back to Criterion for more music docs and gave Deep Blues (1992) a shot. Looking for blues guys playing music, but we got the guy from Eurythmics shopping for voodoo stuff in Memphis. Might give it another shot sometime since RL Burnside’s in the cast and Glenn Kenny recommends it, but for now we switched from blues to jazz.

Opening credits over beautiful shots of reflections in wavy water, already a good sign. An outdoor festival, single stage I think. Since it’s mostly in broad daylight, they’re able to shoot audience member antics, which often involve impractical hats, and there’s a boat race happening in the same town in case the editors need a visual shift. Cutaway skits of a portable jazz band traveling around town, in a car, to an amusement park, houses, a rooftop. Just a perfect lesson in how to make a music doc in an engaging way, codirected by fashion photographer Stern and filmmaker Avakian, whose brother George was the fest’s music producer.

The music itself – well, my idea of “jazz” has been warped by last month’s Big Ears fest, so it took some time to get into the 1950’s groove. As with Big Ears, there’s also a non-jazz headliner in Chuck Berry. A toothy, confident scat-singing white woman almost derails it (this was Anita O’Day – apparently John Cameron Mitchell is a fan), but things pick up nicely, culminating with night sets by Louis Armstrong and Summer of Soul fave Mahalia Jackson.