music

Amy (2015)

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threehalfstar

Earlier this year the Kurt Cobain documentary Montage of Heck struggled to navigate the difficult task of having something new to say about a story that was already familiar to most of its audience. The first half of the film was pretty successful on that end, creating an impressionistic view of Cobain through a highly energetic montage that tried its damnedest to portray him as a regular dude instead of a rock god. The movie fell apart for me in the back half, though, when its preference for raw footage over actual information became much less compelling as Cobain nodded off into a life (and death) of heroin addiction. In my original review I wrote “In a lot of ways this mirrors Cobain’s actual life: a burst of creative energy stopped short & made less special by substance abuse. As an anti-drug PSA, Montage of Heck is pretty damn effective, but as a documentary it’s very thin on the information end, so when it loses its momentum to heroin addiction, there’s not much else to hold onto,” a sentiment I still feel holds true.

The Amy Winehouse documentary had a much less familiar story to work with than Montage of Heck (less familiar to me, at least), so it more or less got away with playing its material straight. All I knew of Winehouse going into the film was the shape of her hair, the single “Rehab”, and her history of substance abuse. It turns out her & Cobain’s lives were remarkably similar in a lot of ways, although her talent was cut short even sooner than his. There’s nothing particularly flashy about the way Amy tells its subject’s life story. With the exception of a couple details that are withheld until late in the film, her story is pretty much laid out here in an exactly linear progression. There’s some context of her upbringing early in the film & then a year by year recap of her too-fast rise to stardom, followed by a deeply sad unraveling & list of what-could’ve-beens. What’s interesting about the film is not exactly how the story is told, but more of what goes unsaid. Much like with Cobain, Winehouse was not built for fame & mass attention emotionally, so it becomes apparent throughout the film that the audience (including those of us at the cinema at that very moment) played just as much of a part in her demise as the three men the movie explicitly points a finger at (her greedy father, her junkie ex-husband, and her shady tour manager).

This lack of stylistic flourish makes Amy an aesthetically ugly film in an (also unspoken) way that draws attention to Winehouse’s relationship to class. Cheap digital photographs & short clips of Winehouse joking with friends & shooting pool are very much uncinematic, especially when they clash with the crisp drone shots that establish setting & act as chapter breaks. Winehouse was a working class girl with a inordinate amount of talent for singing & writing songs. She states plainly through interviews & home video that she does not want mass attention & that if she becomes famous she will likely kill herself. Winehouse’s ideal career was to sing to small crowds in jazz clubs & small-scale festivals, not to drown in a sea of screaming fans that desperately want to hear her every word just as much as they want to pick apart & ridicule her personal life. By the time Winehouse is famous in Amy, it’s disturbing how much the imagery of the film changes. It jumps from humble home photographs, mostly of Winehouse acting camera-shy, to an intense onslaught of high quality paparazzi footage that makes a spectacle out of the simplest of things like a walk down the street & much more personal moments, like the struggle to kick her heroin habit. It’s incredible that Amy didn’t come with an epilepsy warning, considering the strobe effect of the paparazzi cameras, which were disorienting to me even in brief glimpses. I can’t even imagine what it was like for her to deal with that every moment she was outside her house.

Speaking of the paparazzi footage, that was easily the element of the film that I found most haunting. Not only did photographers (as well as comedians & talking heads) make a literal killing off of exploiting Winehouse while she was still alive, but because the footage was valuable to telling her story, those snapshots are still making money today merely by appearing in the documentary. One shot of her estranged best friend weeping at her funeral particularly stuck with me. Someone filmed that intimate moment without permission & sold it to a publisher, who then printed it for a profit and now can sell it a second time for the purposes of a documentary. Again, although the active parties are obviously skeezy for doing this, there’s an unspoken implication that the audience is largely to blame as well. By giving so much attention to a person who obviously did not want it, Winehouse’s unwitting fans made a market out of her gradual death. Again, it’s very similar to what slowly killed Kurt Cobain as well & I’m sure there are to be more examples in the future.

A lot of what makes Amy interesting as a documentary is not necessarily the details of Winehouse’s personal life that it turns into a fairly straight-forward narrative, but rather the way it subtly makes you feel like a murderer for wanting those details in the first place. As I mentioned before, there are several people that the movie scolds for not doing something to save her while they still had a chance, but the audience is far from innocent on that account either. While a real life person was hurting & intentionally destroying herself in the public eye, she was met with jokes at her expense instead of sympathy. She was booed offstage & harassed by the press, despite the blatant signs that something wasn’t right. It’s a disgusting instinct, but it’s also powerful enough to support a market. Even now, years after her death, we’re still giving her more attention than she ever wanted. It’s difficult to shake that feeling while watching her hide her face & drink herself numb in a documentary that continues the very thing it’s condemning.

-Brandon Ledet

Beyond the Lights (2014)

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threehalfstar

A lot was said last year about the state of the romantic comedy, a genre long considered creatively bankrupt. An unexpected crop of mischievous, wild child rom-coms felt like a breath of fresh air for a genre that had become hopelessly stale. It’s a still strange to think that only two rom-coms I saw in the theater last year, Obvious Child & Wetlands, were about an abortion & an anal fissure, respectively. Driving the point home was the ZAZ-style spoof They Came Together that pointed out just how bland & cliché the genre had become by turning each of its recognizable tropes into a throwaway gag.

With all of this focus on retooling the romantic comedy, though, it’s been interesting that the same effort hasn’t been made for the romantic drama. Typical rom-dram genre fare like the bull-riding nonsense The Longest Ride & the ludicrously titled The Time Traveler’s Wife haven’t had their own creative antidote quite the same way the rom-com has. Last year’s rom-dram Beyond The Lights was a good start, though, even if it didn’t re-invent the wheel. Instead of deviously playing with genre expectations the way Wetlands & Obvious Child did with the rom-com, Beyond the Lights reinvigorates the romantic drama while still playing by the rules. It’s an exceptional example of a typically bland genre that somehow manages to excel without challenging rom-dram’s parameters.

The movie’s story is fairly a straightforward. After saving a budding pop star’s life by literally talking her off the ledge, a sweetly sincere police officer suddenly finds himself romantically involved with the floundering starlet. Worlds collide as the hot cop’s challenged by the reality of press & paparazzi coverage and the woman he loves struggles to break free from the overbearing control of her record company & momager. While the protagonist wants to write & sing Nina Simone-type barn burners, her mother fancies her to be more of a hyper-sexualized Rihanna type of pop star and there’s a compelling struggle between those two interests. This plays out simultaneously with the romance plot, the pop singer’s hot cop boyfriend reminding her what “real” life is & how to be true to herself.

Beyond the Lights‘ more creative tangents are confined to its pop music angle, finding an authentic visual palette in its mock music videos, BET Awards appearances, and music festival performances. The movie has a generally handsome look to it otherwise & puts a great soundtrack selection (featuring songs like M83’s “Midnight City” & Beyonce’s “Drunk in Love”) to great aesthetic use. The most impressive thing of all about Beyond the Lights, however, is how effective it is without being showy. Lines like “She needs to be in a hospital, not in front of cameras,” would play for a laugh in a Nicholas Sparks style melodrama, but some how works perfectly well here. Beyond the Lights does little to revolutionize the romantic drama genre, but instead shows you just how effective that formula can be when executed well.

-Brandon Ledet

Dope (2015)

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threehalfstar

If you’ve seen the ads for Dope, it’d be forgivable if you mistakenly assumed the film was set in the early 90s. Very much conscious of its use of that visual palette, Dope is smart to declare itself set in 2015 from the get go, opening the film with the protagonist Malcolm explaining to his mother how Bitcoins work. For every 90s-soaked skateboard, flat top hairdo, and A Tribe Called Quest music cue, Dope also features references to memes, smart phones, and online black markets, presumably so you don’t lose track of exactly when the film is set. The reason for all the 90s cultural markers is fairly straight-forward: it’s been long enough that the era has been deemed vintage cool, at least by the three high school geek main characters. Of course, since they were but young pups during the 90s, their understanding of the era is flimsy at best, as hilariously skewered by A$AP Rocky (making his acting debut here) within the film in his role as Dom, a drug dealer who sets the plot’s wheels in motion, in one of the movie’s more amusing & self-aware exchanges.

Dope is the coming-of-age story of three high school geeks who are used to pursuing good grades unexpectedly getting suckered into selling drugs. Set in a neighborhood called “The Bottoms”, a particularly rough area of Inglewood, CA, the protagonists are basically just trying to survive. Of course, because they are teenagers, they’re also trying to look cool & get laid, which complicates the task at hand at nearly every turn. Dope has a lot to say about racial identity, social inequality, and teen sexuality, but at its heart it’s really just a sweet story about three awkward high school students finding themselves having to grow up very quickly (due to a misplaced hand gun & an enormous bag of drugs). The movie doesn’t get everything right in the details (the trio’s “punk band” plays songs hilariously over-produced by Pharrell), but it’s mostly on point in capturing a very specific cultural subset that’s never received the big screen treatment before.

Watching Dope, I was reminded of my experience with Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, except with the manga & video game references swapped out for 90s hip-hop. I enjoyed the film, but like with Scott Pilgrim. I’m certain that a very specific target audience of younger folks are going to latch onto it much, much more enthusiastically than I ever could. There’s no doubt in my mind that this is going to be someone out there’s favorite film, if nothing else because they’ve never seen themselves represented on the screen before. Where I see a fairly funny, vibrantly shot high school movie with wonderfully eccentric moments & a killer soundtrack (the Pharrell songs excluded), I expect someone else will see The Greatest Movie of All Times Forever.  Even if that’s all the movie accomplishes, that’s still pretty dope.

-Brandon Ledet

The CrazySexyCool World of TLC Cinema

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I was recently presented with a question that I never expected to be asked: “Would you be interested in free tickets to see New Kids on the Block, TLC, and Nelly in concert?” As far as surprise concert tickets go, this event felt particularly odd because I couldn’t piece together exactly why these three acts would be touring together. They’re all coasting on nostalgia at this point, sure, but their heydays were all entrenched in separate decades. Having been an impressionable youth in the 90s, TLC was the most exciting act on the roster for me. If I were born a decade earlier it would’ve been NKOTB; a decade later & it would’ve been Nelly. While TLC didn’t put on the most spectacular show out of the three (that honor belongs to the surreally over-the-top NKOTB performance, another story for another day) they did touch on very emotional pleasure zones of my brain, unlocking a forgotten past of obsessively listening to the album CrazySexyCool for the majority of 1995 & beyond.

The strangest thing of all about TLC’s appearance on the concert bill and, naturally, their set itself was the absence of their deceased member Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes. Far from a dutiful background singer, Left Eye was one of the group’s strongest voices, a hip-hop vocalist that dominated their earliest effort Ooooooohhh…On The TLC Tip and helped distinguish their later records from more one-dimensional R&B fare. Left Eye’s death raised some questions about how TLC would continue to tour in her wake. Would they replace Lopes with another rapper to mime her contributions, karaoke style? Would they just skip her verses entirely? The answer happened to be neither option. Instead of altering Left Eye’s contributions, the group simply played her verses through the sound system, with her words & image displayed on a screen above the stage. It was the most tasteful option possible, for sure, and one I’m glad that they ultimately pursued.

In the days before the concert, I decided to get myself psyched up by watching the few TLC movies available for the world. It turns out that all three pieces of TLC media I uncovered were produced by VH1. In tone, they ranged from lovingly sentimental to grotesquely exploitative, each one’s good will surviving on their treatment of Left Eye’s life & death. In their three TLC movies, VH1 alternates between abusive & loving, not sure how to reconcile its own feelings on the group. I had a similarly complicated relationship with the details of their legacy, both wanting to know the grisly details of Left Eye’s untimely demise and wishing that she’d just respectively be allowed to be remembered for  how she lived, as TLC’s surviving members T-Boz & Chilli allow her to be in concert.

CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story (2013)
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The most recent entry of TLC Cinema also happens to be the best & most comprehensive. A made-for-TV (VH1’s still on TV, right?) biopic about the group, CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story is about as trite & by-the-books as a TLC movie could possibly be. Assuming you have a tolerance for made-for-TV biopics, CrazySexyCool (much like the album of the same name does for their music) defines the heights of where TLC cinema can go as a genre. Posed as a rags-to-riches story that follows the three budding starlets from humble Atlanta beginnings to international stardom, the film relies on constant narration from actresses portraying all three group members, offering the story as not the Official Truth, but with the framing “Here’s what I remember . . .”

The movie is heavily concerned with establishing the respective personalities of each group member. For short-hand: Left Eye is crazy, Chilli is sexy, and T-Boz is cool. In the film, T-Boz is posed as the group’s most aggressive member, standing up to the men in her musical scene & fretting over being reduced to being in a “girl group.” Chilli is locked in an extended, tumultuous affair with a record producer. Left Eye is a free spirit who begins her career rapping on sidewalks for tips, muses about how when she was a little girl all she wanted to do was to “be in the jungle with animals and just be free,” and dreams about taking the group’s aesthetic into the futuristic territory they eventually sought on the album FainMail (as epitomized in the music video for “Scrubs”). Although the real-life Left Eye was not around to tell her third of the story, the film is smart to portray her as a real person instead of an angel. It doesn’t glaze over petty conflicts she had with the group or the more infamous instances of her romantic conflicts (including the one where she accidentally burned down a mansion).

Although CrazySexyCool hits every possible biopic cliché within reach, including the classic hearing-your-song-on-the-radio-for-first-time freakout, it still manages to find ways to feel cool in its own authentic way.  The 90s fashions on display here are pure gold, especially in an early scene set at an Atlanta roller rink. There’s also a thorough breakdown of how a pop group can sell millions of records and still be in debt, a sequence involving a veritable girl gang breaking into a record label’s office to take back what’s theirs, and an aggressive feminist bent in statements like “Safe sex: that’s our message, okay? We’re girls that stand up for ourselves.” It’s not all hunky-dory, though. A particularly regressive scene that depicts an abortion as The Worst Thing That’s Ever Happened was a nice reminder of why films like Obvious Child are still refreshing & necessary. Despite its strict adherence to genre & brief foray into pro-life politics, however, CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story was a surprisingly enjoyable watch, a must-see for fans of the pop group. Its seamless inclusion of real-life music video & crowd footage, tasteful depiction of Left Eye’s death & aftermath, and overly sentimental statements like “Every single one of our songs came from the heart. The love we had & the loss we went through: those songs told our stories. For real,” all ended up winning me over, despite genre-specific reservations.

Behind The Music: “TLC” (1999)
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While the documentary series Behind The Music isn’t typically known for good taste, it’s still surprising that the same television network that produced such a loving portrait of TLC with the CrazySexyCool biopic was once so mean & exploitative about their career’s pitfalls. The Behind The Music episode hits a lot of the same Wikipedia bullet points as the biopic, as to be expected, but without any of the film’s tenderness. The 1999 special aired around the financial success of FanMail & looked back at the group’s bankruptcy, label disputes, and mansion burning as points of interest. A later, “remastered” version of the episode was released to update their story with Left Eye’s passing. The original 1999 airing is highly recommended, as it not only features more in-depth interviews with the group’s estranged manager Pebbles (who was publicly spanked in the biopic), but also just shamelessly rips into Left Eye’s mansion incident with phrases like “sickness, arson, and bankruptcy”, “TLC was almost reduced to ash when one of their own exploded in a fit of rage. The blaze turned up the heat on TLC’s red hot career,” and, I swear to God, “TLC burned up the charts and Lisa Lopes burned down the house.”

There’s some new information to be found in the Behind The Music episode that wasn’t covered in the biopic, like a second teddy bear fire that caused a lot less damage & some really cute baby photos, but for the most part CrazySexyCool makes the whole affair feel redundant. Left Eye’s math lesson about how a successful group can owe their record label money, an anecdote about how a rainbow inspired the rap verse in “Waterfalls”, and remembrances of eating “watermelon & popcorn for dinner” as a maker for childhood poverty were all later included in the biopic in much more satisfying ways. The most interesting thing here is just how trashy VH1 can get, despite their later affectionate portrait of the group (and their reality show Totally T-Boz).


The Last Days of Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes (2007)
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If Behind the Music was an experimental dip into trashy territory, The Last Days of Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes just gives up and gobbles the trash with wanton abandon. Part of the VH1 rockDocs series, the exploitative documentary aims to finish a project Left Eye began while still alive by capping it off with grisly images of the scene of her death. As suggested in the CrazySexyCool biopic, Left Eye had a desire when she grew up to be “In the jungle, naked, with friends with animals.” In her Last Days documentary, she documents herself achieving this dream in the jungles of Honduras. Left Eye films herself during her final 26 days of life. She obsessively documents her final trip to Honduras, vowing “I’ll never shut my camera off. The camera will follow me into my dreams.” Because she was so interested in preserving that time of her life on film, it’s difficult to say whether or not VH1 was morally wrong for releasing the film onto the world. There’s an undeniably grotesque feeling to the whole production, though, which is not helped at all by the way the film was completed after her death.

It’s difficult even to say if Left Eye was in the right state of mind to even authorize the release of such footage. The camera acts as a form of therapy, if anything, and the whole affair feels like a private diary of someone losing grip of their mind.  Left Eye found her way to Honduras via Dr. Sebi, a natural healing guru who introduced her to numerology & homeopathic medicine. On this final trip she brought along a girl group she was managing called Egypt, intending to introduce them to Sebi’s spiritual way of life. As she opines, “You’re not just a physical being, okay? You are an entity with an energy source that is responsible for your physical well-being,” and “Day 15, 1 +5 = 6, 6 = love, 6= jealousy, 6 = sexual tyranny” it’s difficult to believe she was recording this trip out of sound mind. There’s just too many personal revelations, like her comparisons of her own mother to Mommie Dearest, her admission that she liked the strictness of rehab because it reminded her of her father, and the rehashing of her experiments with suicidal cutting for the movie to be read as anything but utterly tasteless, something that should’ve remained private.

Outside of some talent show footage of her rapping & dancing as a young teen, a mention of a group called 2nd Nature that she was in before TLC, and the assertion that she was the TLC member that called out the record label for their thievery, there isn’t much new here that feels like we should be privy to. A lot of The Last Days helps sketch out a detailed portrait of who Left Eye was as a person, especially in casual moments where she’s simply drawing or sowing while talking about her past, but it’s not necessarily our business as an audience to be exposed to that side of her. By the time the film is reveling in the actual footage of the car accident that ended her life & photographs of the resulting wreckage, the entire existence of the film feels wrong, spiritually bankrupt. It’s an interesting film, but not in a way that ever justifies its own exploitative existence. I left the film with some engaging questions about how Left Eye’s obsessive return to nature relates to the futuristic aesthetic she reached for with FanMail (as well as her solo album Supernova), but those were ideas that were also touched on in the biopic. And the biopic has the distinct advantage of not exploiting her death to appeal to viewers’ morbid curiosity.

By the time I saw TLC live they had smartly decided not to replace Left Eye or erase her presence. They weren’t always that considerate. A mere three years after their collaborator’s death, T-Boz & Chilli launched a reality show on the now-defunct UPN network called R U the Girl? in an effort to replace their missing member. It took time & wisdom to learn how to continue the group in her absence in a respectful, non-exploitative way. It turns out that this was a struggle that VH1 had to live through as well. By the time they produced the CrazySexyCool biopic, the network had released more or less the perfect TLC movie. Everything else that came before it was on highly questionable moral ground.

-Brandon Ledet

Love & Mercy (2015)

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fourstar

Biopics are difficult to make interesting. That may even be especially true about biopics that detail the lives of high profile musicians. It’s a genre so engrained in its own rote tropes that, no matter the level of talent involved, it’s always probable that the final product will feel more like a made-for-TV movie than an artistic endeavor. There are obviously a few exceptions to this conundrum, but the genre’s tropes are so well-defined that they’ve earned their very own (brilliantly funny) ZAZ-style spoof in Walk Hard. Walk Hard even took the time to spoof the subject of this review, Beach Boys’ mad genius Brian Wilson. When Love & Mercy shows Wilson struggling to wrangle French horns, dogs, and bobby pins in the studio, it’s near impossible to not think of Dewey Cox demanding lamas & fifty thousand didgeridoos. Luckily, Love & Mercy also chooses to play this moment for a laugh. If it had a straight face it would’ve been a painful cliché, something the film sidesteps entirely. That’s far from the only pitfall it sidesteps.

A large part of what makes Love & Mercy special in the context of the biopic genre is its intimate, bifurcated structure. Instead of telling the entire story of Brian Wilson’s life, the film focuses on two of his most significant moments. Both Paul Dano & John Cusack play Brian Wilson in Love & Mercy and the film is smart to not apply any pressure for them to tie their roles together, but instead allows them a lot of room to breathe & make it their own. It’s okay that that both Dano & Cusack feel like they’re playing different people because at the two points detailed here, Wilson was a different person.

Paul Dano, trying his damnedest to look slightly pudgy here, has to hold down the more cliché biopic moments of the film. Portraying Wilson while he was recording his masterpiece Pet Sounds & essentially losing his mind, Dano has to both go big & literally bark like a mad dog as well as understatedly smile like a pleased turtle because he knows he’s onto something special. Trying to move away from the group’s faux surfer past while simultaneously competing with both The Beatles and his own controlling father, Wilson was under an unfathomable amount of pressure at this point of his career. As he learns how to “play the studio” as an instrument and create an entirely new kind of pop music experience with Pet Sounds, he also loses a grip on himself, cracking under the pressure. Dano does a great job of balancing humor with poignancy in these scenes, but it’s a tough balance to maintain.

John Cusack’s scenes save the film from being too predictable. If it were just Dano’s scenes the This Is Really Important vibe would be overwhelming. Cusack picks up the story after years of depression & bed rest, showing Wilson squirming under the control of a controlling quack played by a sublimely menacing, clean-shaven Paul Giamatti. Helpless, Wilson falls for an in-over-her-head Chrystler salesman, played by Elizabeth Banks, who struggles with Giamatti’s Evil Doctor for control of Wilson’s autonomy. In several key scenes, Cusack isn’t even present for this half of the story, but whenever he is it’s a great reminder of just how wonderfully talented the actor can be when he sets his mind to it.

These two halves of the movies are woven together, told simultaneously. Although Love & Mercy cannot avoid every biopic trope out there, it does itself a huge favor by aiming for a feeling instead of a complete story. With phrases like “lonely, frightened, scared” and “Even the happy songs are sad,” the movie achieves a more accurate depiction of Brian Wilson than a straightforward telling of his entire life story, (Charles Manson, “Surfin USA”, and all) could possibly have accomplished. There’s a sadness to Wilson’s life’s work that is often overlooked, but expertly captured here. In an exchange with his abusive father, Wilson pleads that “God Only Knows” is “a love story.” His dad counters, “It’s a suicide note.” Love & Mercy does little more to tie its two disparate parts together than achieving this whimsical melancholy throughout and drawing comparisons between Dano’s Wilson’s controlling father and Cusack’s Wilson’s controlling doctor. The approach is impressive in both its audacity and its results.

Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton (2014)

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threehalfstar

Initially pitched to the audience as a history of the underground hip-hop record label Stones Throw, Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton actually works a lot more like an in-depth mental profile of the label’s founder, influential DJ Peanut Butter Wolf. That’s because the label’s identity is so closely linked to Wolf’s. The periods of creative excitement & devastating losses that shape Peanut Butter Wolf’s life also shape the history of his record label. Stones Throw is Wolf’s life’s work, so it makes sense that his life would have so much influence over its general sound & direction.

It makes sense then that the story of Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton begins long before the founding of Stones Throw. Providing childhood photos & home videos from Peanut Butter Wolf’s youth, the documentary shows us a young nerdy white dude as he grows in his music tastes from funk & disco to new-wave & punk to hip-hop, where he finds his calling as a taste-maker. Even in his younger days, before the turntables, Wolf is shown making mixtapes & playing curator, a skill that will later prove vital to his legacy. It’s when Wolf begins to collaborate with young rapper Charizma that his music career takes a definite shape and it’s after Charizma’s tragic, far-too-soon death that he becomes determined to make something of it. This is just one of many tragic losses Peanut Butter Wolf would suffer over the years, and it’s not until he gets excited by working with new collaborators that he can truly move on & grow.

The list of Peanut Butter Wolf’s collaborators interviewed in Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton is a staggering who’s-who of underground hip-hop & outsider indie music: Madlib, J Dilla, MF Doom, Common, and Anika are only a fraction of voices heard here. The interesting thing about these interviews is that the subjects are all too-smart-for-their-own-good nerds who are super awkward when faced with the scrutiny of a documentary crew. Because its subjects are so soft-spoken & nervous, the film has essentially no choice but to let the work speak for itself. An original score by Madlib (one of the label’s most influential contributors), throwback animation sequences, and rare footage of reclusive acts that don’t normally get a lot of face time all combine to show exactly what makes Stones Throw’s vibe so special. As Peanut Butter Wolf puts it, he sees his label as a stomping ground, a launching pad for people to move on from. The work isn’t always spectacular (to the documentary’s credit it doesn’t look away when Wolf gets into producing some really douchey Los Angeles weirdness), but it’s incredible how much work was made possible by a single man who knows great music when he hears it & knows how to bring out the best in his collaborators. For anyone interested in exactly how everything Peanut Butter Wolf’s put together came to be, Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton is an essential document. I’m not sure anyone who’s not a hip-hop nerd will be as pleased, but they might find themselves nerding out despite themselves.

Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015)

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three star

At this point in time, twenty years after his untimely death, Kurt Cobain’s life is a fairly well-documented story. It’s not initially a problem, then, that the documentary Montage of Heck is so dedicated to the “montage” part of its title. Creating an impressionistic image of Cobain as a person instead of a rock idol through a series of almost entirely disconnected sounds & images, Montage of Heck is very light on information & heavy on aesthetic. At first this whirlwind of glimpses into Cobain’s childhood photos, personal journals, anecdotes, and cultural influences is overwhelmingly captivating, feeling like it has the potential to be the best document about a musician since (my personal favorite) The Devil & Daniel Johnston. However, once Cobain’s drug addiction & marriage to Courtney Love hijack the narrative, this lack of substance becomes a much uglier, much less engaging proposition.

Much like with last year’s dark comedy Frank, Montage of Heck is mostly focused on the idea that fame is not always a positive influence for artists, regardless of the quality of their work. Surrounded by far too many ecstatic fans & scrutinizing journalists Cobain shrinks into himself and turns to drug abuse as a coping mechanism. Seemingly completely disinterested in how his music was produced or the cultural climate that surrounded it, Montage of Heck strips Cobain of everything that makes him special, instead just posing him as a normal dude who happened to write some great songs. At first this every-guy approach is fascinating, playing right into punk’s traditional DIY ethos. Once heroin takes over and his music career begins to fade, however, the story becomes much less engaging. It’s a lot more difficult to be interested in an every-guy when he’s babbling & nodding off instead of making art with his friends.

It’s of course possible that this energy shift was entirely intentional. The early kinetic montage of the film looks & sounds absolutely great, like a top notch music video, and is effectively snuffed out by a somber, heroin-induced letdown of a finale. In a lot of ways this mirrors Cobain’s actual life: a burst of creative energy stopped short & made less special by substance abuse. As an anti-drug PSA, Montage of Heck is pretty damn effective, but as a documentary it’s very thin on the information end, so when it loses its momentum to heroin addiction, there’s not much else to hold onto. If it had either kept the same structure, but included more interviews or somehow kept up the impressionistic montage weirdness of its first half, Montage of Heck could’ve easily been one of the most incredible documentaries of all time. As is, it’s pretty good, but feels divided & misshapen, like it desperately needed a push in a more confident direction.

-Brandon Ledet

A Note on the Repetition of “It’s a Lovely Life” in Crimes of Passion (1984)

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In our Swampchat on May’s Movie of the Month, Ken Russell’s acidic sex farce Crimes of Passion, I asked a question I did not yet have an answer to. I said, “I wasn’t keeping a tally, but I want to say that the not-so-subtly sarcastic, anti-monogamy ditty ‘It’s a Lovely Life’ plays more often in this film than ‘That Thing You Do!’ plays in That Thing You Do! Every time I thought they were finally playing a new tune, a stray bar from the chorus of ‘It’s a Lovely Life’ would interrupt and remind me that there really is only one song on the soundtrack, like the movie was one overlong, salacious music video for a parody of a rock song. I’m definitely willing to chalk up that effect to Russell being a ‘prankster provocateur.’” I later decided to revisit the film to take a more accurate tally of how many times the song actually plays in the film.

If you only include the times the song plays in full, lyrics & all, “It’s a Lovely Life” only plays three times in Crimes of Passion. If you count every time the notes of the chorus are echoed in the film’s score, however, the tally is well over 30 instances. Now, according to the IMDb trivia page for That Thing You Do!, “Including full versions, alternate versions, live versions and snippets, the song “That Thing You Do!” is heard eleven times in the movie.” By the time “It’s a Lovely Life” properly plays 20min into Crime of Passion (in music video form), its theme has already been referenced in the score over two dozen times, twice the amount of times “That Thing You Do!” plays in the entirety of That Thing You Do!. The only way you could say that Crimes of Passion isn’t more aurally repetitive than That Thing You Do! is if you consider that, like I said, maybe the song never really stops and the entire film is like an extended music video.

Of course, this maddening repetition and music video aesthetic was most likely a deliberate decision on Russell’s part. As Kenny put it in our Swampchat, “This movie couldn’t be more MTV if it had a Billy Idol music set in the middle.” Well, it practically did. Released just a few years after the inordinately successful launch of MTV, it’s far from a stretch to imagine that the film was influenced by the music video format. And what’s more MTV that repeating the same song 30 times in a two hour period? Nothing, really. Nothing at all.

For more on May’s Movie of the Month, 1984’s Crimes of Passion, visit our Swampchat & last week’s list of tawdry sex jokes from the film.

-Brandon Ledet

Blame It On the Streets (2014)

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Keenon Dae’quan Ray Jackson, better known as YG, produced Blame It On the Streets, a short film that offers an interesting look into what his everyday life in Compton was like prior to his success and fame as a rapper. What was intended to be a short film was more like an extra long music video without the music. There is a soundtrack that was created to accompany the film, but the film only contains short clips of YG’s songs. The lack of music was disappointing because the film was intended to illustrate the meanings behind several of his songs, such as “Meet the Flockers,” but it’s difficult to make that connection without the songs actually being in the film.

Blame It On the Streets wasn’t very good, but I highly doubt that YG wanted to make a cinematic masterpiece. The acting was very bland and the storyline was sort of all over the place, but despite all of its flaws, the film did hold my interest for its entire 28 minutes. There was a drive by, a high-speed police chase, a robbery, and loads of inappropriate language, so there was never a dull moment. One of my favorite scenes was when YG and his pals robbed a home in an Asian neighborhood in broad daylight. They didn’t have any gloves to mask their fingerprints, so they wore long black socks on their hands. It really lightened the mood.

Blame It On the Streets is currently streaming on Netflix.

-Britnee Lombas

Charles Bradley: Soul of America (2012)

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There’s sometimes a punishing redundancy to profile documentaries. If the subject has been in the public light for long enough, a profile doc can often feel like a Wikipedia article in motion, like a flip through a scrapbook of events everyone already remembers. There’s an inherent nostalgia to the format that can make the experience pleasant, but ultimately unnecessary if the life being detailed is already well known to the audience. Soul of America, a profile of soul singer Charles Bradley, sidesteps this problem by tackling a subject that has never had his story told on a large scale before. Bradley is in a unique position as a subject in that he struggled to make it in the music business for 42 years before finally recording his debut album, an instant classic titled No Time for Dreaming. Soul of America follows Bradley for the 50 days preceding that album’s release, allowing him to reflect on his troubled past and muse about the promise of his future. Charles Bradley’s life makes for an interesting profile in that he has a long, storied past that’s still fresh to his audience, as it’s only ever been told to them through his songs.

A black soul singer in his early 60s, Charles Bradley is as unlikely of a debut recording artist as any. His eventual success story is remarkable just based on his age alone, but Soul of America makes it out to be even more of an anomaly by providing the details of where he’s been hiding for those 60 years. Bradley had already been performing live music sets before he recorded No Time for Dreaming, but he wasn’t performing original songs. As an impeccable James Brown impersonator performing under the name Black Velvet, Brown had earned the moniker “James Brown Jr.” Although his work as an impersonator was respected for its authenticity, it was a far from glamorous life, as is revealed through scenes touring the home Bradley shares with his aging mother in a cramped housing project, his anecdotes about riding subways to keep warm, and a visit from his tutor, who reveals that he is operating on a 1st grade reading level. As dire as that situation sounds, Bradley is infectiously optimistic about his future and there’s a general sense that things are gradually getting better. His goal through his reading lessons is to be able to write down his own lyrics (instead of relying on the help of his young musician collaborators) and although he is the baby of his family who seemingly loves his mother dearly, his childhood stories make it sound like he takes better care of her now than she did with him in the past. There’s an incredible perseverance at the core of Charles Bradley’s story that makes it all the more satisfying to watch him succeed.

Although Charles Bradley’s perseverance and dedication to his craft despite the shitty, shitty odds is a large part of what makes his story so fascinating, it’s his incredibly emotive personality that shines brightest both in Soul of America and in his studio recordings. There’s an arresting sincerity to the man that you can read on his face just as well as in his voice. Whether he’s meekly asking for Sharon Jones’ autograph, getting giddy over seeing his picture in the New York Post, choking up over how much he loves everyone in the world, or struggling to tell the story of his closest brother’s murder, Bradley is a rawly emotive man. As one of his collaborators puts it, “He wants to reach every single person in the audience” and he has a uniquely genuine quality to his personality that allows him to do just that.

The soul music powerhouse Daptone Records have found a real gem in Charles Bradley both as a talented vocalist & songwriter and as an admirable human being who would have every right to be bitter & distraught, but somehow chose another path. The documentary Soul of America is a great introduction to his story & his personality, but there’s really no substitute to listening to his just as genuine records & live performances. There’s an inspiringly honest sense of hope surrounding Charles Bradley that makes him a worthwhile subject in any format, but the power of his music is what makes him truly special.

-Brandon Ledet