Phil Nugent's Favorites:
DiG! (2004)
The director Ondi Timoner worked on this project for seven years, hanging in there with it long past the point where a less committed or desperate person would have started thinking about law school. Her prize at the end of the rainbow turned out to be an amazing, high energy film dissertation on just how crazed the pop scene and music business got in the 1990s, as well as one of the definitive examinations of that never-ending discussion topic, the "authenticity" question. The movie stars Courtney Taylor-Taylor, front man for the Dandy Warhols, and Anton Newcombe, who is ostensibly the front man for the Brian Jonestown Massacre, though Anton comes across here as a malfunctioning one man band who surrounds himself with putative collaborators so he'll have somebody to fight with after he's broken all the mirrors in the house. Starting out as nobodies and mutual admiration societies in 1996, the bands become more and more combative as the Dandys begin to forge themselves a career. Meanwhile, Anton issues manifestos, starts fights, sabotages his band's big chances, and makes ever more ambitious displays of his fecund creativity to ever-diminishing returns. Based on the evidence here, the Dandys deserve their success and Anton should be modeling a straight jacket, but it feels indicative of something widespread and eternal that Taylor-Taylor, who must know these things to be true, also seems to feel kind of guilty about them. Meanwhile, Newcombe magnetizes the camera as only a good-looking guy set on perpetual auto-destruct really can.
END OF THE CENTURY: THE STORY OF THE RAMONES (2004)
Jim Fields and Michael Gramaglia's documentary about the pride of CBGB's captures the spirit of radio-unfriendly American punk in all its ornery glory. The filmmakers got in there in the nick of time, scoring interviews with all four of the original band members, and the replacement personnel too, which is especially impressive in light of the fact that two of the core group, Joey and Dee Dee, were dead by the time the movie opened, and a third, Johnny, would die a few months later. In their memories of how it all went down, they seem to share the conviction that there's no reason to start lying about it now, and the brutal honesty of their testimony makes their professional devotion to each other that much more inspiring: imagine how much they must have cared about their music, that they were willing to tolerate each other for so long. Joey gets to the heart of things pretty early when he says that, while he and Johnny might never have liked each other much, they both liked Iggy Pop, and if you knew somebody else in the old neighborhood who liked Iggy, that counted for a hell of a lot. But nothing gets to the heart of it faster or with greater potency than the grainy old footage of these four gorgeous knuckleheads rocking out in the Bowery. They plant their feet down solid, as if expecting the King of Persia and all his legions to be coming around the corner at any minute, then hoist their instruments, and blast away. A Martian's first guess might be that they're trying to channel sonic energy as a method for digging through to China.
A GREAT DAY IN HARLEM
This short (sixty-minute) feature was directed by Jean Brach, whose background was in radio, and it might almost be an illustrated radio documentary: it's basically a bunch of interview subjects talking about how photographer Art Kane, working on an assignment for Esquire, got as many of the jazz musicians in New York as he could together one morning in 1958 and snapped a legendary picture of them posing en masse for a two-page spread in a special "music" issue. But the talkers -- who include Kane, Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, Buck Clayton, Art Blakey, Hank Jones, Milt and Mona Hinton, Marian McPartland, and Nat Hentoff, as well as some of the now-grown little neighborhood kids who clustered around Count Basie -- are not only great talkers but great camera subjects, and the vintage clips of those no longer around to do their own talking, such as Henry "Red" Allen, are a treat. And the photo itself looks great on the big screen.
HEARTWORN HIGHWAYS (1981)
James Szalapski shot the footage for this long-gestating documentary about country music singer-songwriters during the Christmas season of 1975 and the early weeks of 1976. The people in it aren't the big wheels of the Outlaw Country movement, the Willies and the Waylons, but the also-rans and the cult heroes -- offbeat troubadours such as Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Rodney Crowell, Larry Jon Wilson, and the very young Steve Earle, and second-line arena stars such as David Allan Coe and The Charlie Daniels Band. These are people who work on their personas at least as hard as they work on their music, and they really hold the camera, especially Van Zandt, whose melancholy air only intensifies when he's being funny. (Some of the footage turned up later in Margaret Brown's fine, posthumous documentary Be Here To Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt.) Even when the people on-screen aren't playing music, the movie captures the special quality and the shared bond of intelligent, lyrical crackers, people who don't quite fit in when they're in the only place where they can ever feel at home.
JAZZ ON A SUMMER'S DAY (1960)
Bert Stern's record of the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival remains an ideal example of a concert experience caught on film. The cast includes Thelonious Monk, Sonny Stitt, Anita O'Day, Dinah Washington, Gerry Mulligan Quartet: Gerry Mulligan, Big Maybelle, Chuck Berry, Chico Hamilton Quintet, Louis Armstrong, Jack Teagarden, and Mahalia Jackson; the local color includes graceful shots of the 1958 America's Cup yacht races. It's a time capsule of sheer happiness, and watching it won't give you a sunburn.
LET'S GET LOST (1988)
The fashion photographer Bruce Weber built his own trademark style out of an iconography of spoiled-looking butch men and West Coast cool, then returned to the source to pay tribute to the look and the sound from which his fantasies sprung: Chet Baker. This gorgeous-looking black and white movie was filmed during the last year of Baker's life; he died in 1988, around the time that the movie was nominated for an Academy Award. The movie incorporates William Claxton's classic, image-making photos of the young Baker, as well as old TV clips and footage from Italian movies the musician, who was a ruthlessly grifting junkie, made after his legal troubles shut down the possibility of a Hollywood acting career. In the new footage, we see Baker's creased face with its sunken cheeks -- he'd had his teeth knocked out and, in his late fifties, could have passed for seventy -- and the romantic aura that still clings to this untrustworthy, often irascible old gargoyle gives the movie a special mystery. A more pleasing mystery is how Baker's music on the track, Claxton's photos, and the movie's own cinematography (by Jeff Preiss) appears to seamlessly tap into the same vein of timeless cool.
Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Five, Six & Seven
Contributor: Phil Nugent
