by ·Comments Off on The Sparks Brothers (2021, Edgar Wright)

Edgar overusing “funny” stock footage, and it’s all people telling the band’s story chronologically with the music in background. Standard rock doc format, but I knew very little of their background and smiled through the whole thing – wonderful to see their visual history, all the promo stuff and album cover art outtakes.

The only good bit of analysis comes from Flea: “Something that’s always kind of confounded me in popular music is people’s inability to take humor seriously.” Ron says punk felt like an attack on what they were doing. They invented electro dance pop, and entered their current phase with 2002’s Lil Beethoven. The canceled Tati movie is covered, and the Tim Burton, but not the Guy Maddin Bergman – not even a Forbidden Room clip.

by ·Comments Off on King Rocker (2020, Michael Cumming)

Hate-watched this Nightingales documentary on the plane, even though the Sparks doc was right there. Turns out this was made by a popular TV comedian named Stewart Lee, and half the movie (barely) covers the pre-Nightingales band The Prefects, then Nightingales mk I, then the hiatus and singer Robert Lloyd’s solo stuff, then Nightingales mk II. The other half is “hey everyone, it’s me, Stewart Lee, and I’m making this movie, look at me, making a movie.” He also laughs onscreen at his subjects’ quips even more than Scorsese did in Pretend It’s a City. Lee sits in a pub and gets Lloyd to tell a minor incident from his past career, then they repetitively, informally discuss the incident, then cut to someone else who was there at the time saying “oy, that’s not how I remember it,” repeat that formula ten times. Maybe five minutes of good music in the whole movie. Nightingales shared a member with The Fall, were heavily krautrock-inspired, went through a mid-80’s country phase – the band still seems worth checking out, too bad about the movie.

L-R: Pikachu, Lee, Lloyd:

“How do you want to be remembered? The film will leave a record of you.” Lloyd says his songs, which, yeah, are probably gonna outlast the doc. Unconfirmed whether Lee is wearing a GBV shirt in one scene, but I did spot a Waxahatchee poster. It’s perfect that Lee spends the whole movie comparing Lloyd to a King Kong statue that used to stand in the square, then when they track down the statue for an emotional finale, there’s rain on the camera lens. They cover Lloyd’s food writing gig, the fact that he makes more money from horse betting than from the band, and stage a table read of his mid-90’s failed TV pilot – I finally had to skip ahead during this part. When the closing credits hit I was writing down names of people who I’m mad at (turns out both directors have worked with Chris Morris), but the final scene under the credits was nice – a lipsynched music video, the only good scene.

by ·Comments Off on Tom Waits: Big Time & Cracked Jukebox

I was in Tom Waits Mode for six weeks, re-listening to all his albums in chronological order – a real revelation. I posted writeups of each album on the slack at work, in a thread that nobody read, and figured I’d collect them all here – but they’re not really fun to re-read all together, just me searching for synonyms to express how cool everything sounds. So, not turning the movie blog into a music blog after all, instead here are the mid-career and late-career docs I watched.

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Big Time (1988, Chris Blum)

A live album and concert movie, the set including one sincere song from Heartattack & Vine, one reinvented song from Blue Valentine, two new originals, and the bulk of the Swordfish/Rain/Frank’s trilogy. Tom likes to completely rework the songs in concert, resulting in some great versions – the looser version of “Underground” especially destroys the album track. Most importantly though, the movie isn’t just a concert recording, it’s got skits and visuals and stagings that reveal this whole “Tom Waits” musical career as a performance-art piece.

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Tales from a Cracked Jukebox (2017, James Maycock)

Interviews with Lucinda Williams, Bones Howe, a Bad Seed, Terry Gilliam… the movie claims to be searching for the Real Tom Waits, which I’m not especially into, but fortunately it doesn’t get very far in its quest. I did learn that his dad’s name was Frank, which is somewhat illuminating re: the above-mentioned trilogy. Heavy use of Big Time in the visuals, of course… so here are some more screenshots from Big Time.

by ·Comments Off on Summer of Soul (2021, Questlove)

Superbly assembled from the original footage, news stories and present-day interviews. Some songs are allowed to stand on their own, some are used as montage fodder, or backdrops for related stories. Mainly I appreciate a music doc that never lets the music stop playing.

Stevie Wonder gets drum and piano solos. David Ruffin has a very high voice and long legs on “My Girl.” Nina Simone and Sly Stone in top form. I wasn’t expecting the gospel section to be so strong – Mavis Staples and Mahalia Jackson walked off with the movie.

Abby Sun in Filmmaker:

Politically, the films’ interviews and archival footage holds no bars. The Reverend Jesse Jackson’s sermons are woven throughout … The film is explicitly pro-Black Panthers, pro-Young Lords, pro-interracial and transnational solidarity movements. It is conscious, as its organizers were, of the complex mapping of the formation of Black identity — in style and hair, musical expression and commercial ownership, political position, Afro-Caribbean modalities — and against mainstream media narratives, while putting forward a multi-sensorial view of a festival space, integrating attendees’ memories of the smell and taste of being present.

by ·Comments Off on Rock Docs vol. 6: The High Ratty Blues

Devil Got My Woman: Blues at Newport (1966, Alan Lomax)

Either these performances were filmed outside of the actual Newport Folk Festival, or the Blues tent at Newport was just a house, capacity roughly 30. A couple songs each by Son House, Skip James, a couple other new-to-me names. The revelation here was Howlin’ Wolf (below, cash in hand) with added sax and drums.

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The High Lonesome Sound (1963, John Cohen)

Oh no, a narrator.
Oh no, Southern Baptists.

In a few Kentucky locations. No sync sound, and more exteriors and context than the blues doc. This (to its detriment) is more of a movie, the other one is more a document of a happening.

Banjoist Roscoe Holcomb:

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Ratty (2020, John Angus Stewart)

The making of King Gizzard’s Rats’ Nest. VHS aesthetic with poor sound recording, but I know the album well enough that it’s still thrilling to be here.

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I’ve watched a ton of fake online concerts, including:

Mountain Goats:

Parquet Courts:

by ·Comments Off on Monks: The Transatlantic Feedback (2006, Palacios & Post)

The Torquays was a successful five-piece band of U.S. soldiers who’d stayed in Germany after their war service, playing nightly shows when two serious German art-school dudes approached them and convinced them to rebrand as The Monks and play a pared-down but forceful new kind of rock music. We spend much time with the band members, leaving no anecdote untold and culminating in a one-off NYC reunion show with celebrities like Jon Spencer in the crowd. Still one of the greatest albums ever made… this two-hour movie has only about 15 minutes of illuminating stories, but it’s nice to spend so much time in a world where the Monks mattered.

by ·Comments Off on The Chills: The Triumph and Tragedy of Martin Phillipps (2019)

“If you do keep drinking, you will die.” Opens with Martin in the hospital, then hangs out as he curates a Chills exhibit from the lifelong collection of mementos and toys in his home, and narrates his own chronological Chills history through his clipping and media archives. A pattern is set: his band makes a record, tours, breaks up, he starts a new band. As always with these things, it assumes the audience cares most about the glory days, not the recent past, so we skip Silver Bullets and go straight into the recording of Snow Bound. Some insight into major label finance: Warner Bros says he owes them $425,000. Very average rock doc, assumes the viewer already believes Martin to be a tormented genius, and doesn’t bother trying to convince newcomers. Some nice vintage concert video, at least.

by ·Comments Off on Rock Docs and Concerts, part 5

The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2005, Jeff Feuerzeig)

RIP Daniel. This was jaw-dropping, I had no idea.

“He spent some time in Bellevue, a day or two, was released through a clerical error, and actually opened for Firehose at CBGB that night.” It all sounds perfectly unbelievable, “print the legend,” larger-than-life biography, but Daniel is real and wonderful, so you follow along from his humble beginnings as the stories get wilder. I kept pausing the movie to tell Katy stories until she asked if I was Forgotten Silvering her. Then Daniel wrestles control of his dad’s plane, cuts the engine and throws the keys out the window, and you’ve entered new ground for a rock doc.

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Industrial Accident: The Story of Wax Trax! Records (2018, Julia Nash)

Katy overheard me watching this, said it seems like there’s a lot of talk and not much music, and she’s not wrong. Wax Trax! was started by a gay couple in the 1970’s, and this is very much their story, with the colorful rock & roll stories as decoration. In fact it could’ve used more WT! music – when the label starts taking off with some Ministry singles, we hear “To Hell With Poverty” instead of Ministry. Nice touch: we hear someone say “Nine Inch Nails was a terrible catalyst,” before showing the heretic speaking the words (it’s Reznor). The label was said to be popular in the bible belt (“It almost seemed the more conservative a small town you were in, the more you needed a Revolting Cocks record”), and in fact one of the label cofounders left it all behind and moved to Arkansas in the mid-90’s, right about when I was in Arkansas discovering all this music for the first time. The Amphetamine Reptile movie was 100x better, but this one is more emotional.

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MC5: A True Testimonial (2002, David Thomas)

I watched this despite having listened to the group’s “Kick Out The Jams” album this summer and thinking it was just okay… and after watching, it turns out the MC5 is the greatest band in the history of rock & roll. One of the most unconventionally affectionate rock docs I’ve seen, with not a single celebrity testimonial, just the surviving band members and their friends and family, making the band seem smaller than they were, which lets the music (and there’s lots of it!) speak for itself.

MC5 faced down the police, constantly got arrested for obscenity, faced down the US fuckin’ Army, and formed the White Panther movement because they wished they could be as cool as the Black Panthers.

The internet says Wayne Kramer suppressed the movie for 15+ years, boooo.

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Apocalypse: A Bill Callahan Tour Film (2012, Hanly Banks)

Between songs, some very short interviews, scraps of wisdom and insight. Grab all you can from the Apocalypse man. A few short years later in 2019, Bill is healthy and happy, wide open, chatty and content, touring on another consecutive masterpiece record. Back in 2012, this was more than we expected, and it was good, each song with its own visual scheme, as in the best concert films.

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Also watched some live Malkmus/Jicks

Some reunion-era Ween

Yo La Tengo with Jad Fair

Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever

and Courtney Barnett

by ·Comments Off on True Stories (1986 David Byrne) and D.A. Pennebaker shorts

Katy suggested watching some Criterion Channel, and had never seen True Stories, one of my all-time favorite celebrations of special-ness. She liked it! Hard to believe that things like this could get released theatrically by Warner Bros. Looks like it was released around the same time as Under the Cherry Moon, Howard the Duck, The Mission, Deadly Friend and Little Shop of Horrors – an overall weird year for a major studio. Despite its studio backing it was nominated for two Independent Spirit Awards, but beaten for cinematography by that $138 million-grossing indie film Platoon, and for best first feature by Spike Lee (fair enough).

IMDB reports that two of the “Hey Now” kids went on to be voice actors, one in Disney movies and video games, the other on tons of dubbed anime including Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and Summer Wars.

and in memory of D.A. Pennebaker…

Baby (1954)

One of those 1950’s shorts where people were just discovering that you can take the camera outdoors and make short docs with jazzy editing. Brakhage’s Desistfilm and The Way To Shadow Garden (admittedly both shot indoors) came out the same year. This one stars D.A.’s young daughter wandering through a zoo.

Shake! Otis at Monterey (1967/87)

A Monterey Pop bonus performance film – D.A. and Maysles and Leacock and others filming the hell out of a short, fiery performance by Otis Redding. This was Redding’s big break in June 1967, and he was dead in December. Superb concert footage of a tight 20-minute set, each song with its own visual look/flow, so an appropriate closer to a night begun with a David Byrne movie.