The Screengrab : a mighty wind

Screengrab's Favorite Movies About Music: Fiction Edition (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Last week, as part of our ongoing coverage of the South-By-Southwest Film, Music & Interactive Festival, we decided to get our collective groove on with a list of our favorite movies about real-live musicians.

But who says musicians have to be real to be memorable? Sure, Mitch & Mickey may be fictional characters portrayed by Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara in Christopher Guest’s faux-folkumentary, A Mighty Wind...yet despite the fact the duo never really existed, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house when my lovely Polish bride and I danced at our wedding reception to that non-existent classic hit of sweet, sweet romance, “A Kiss At The End Of The Rainbow." And, sure, the real Sid Vicious was nice and all...but I have equally fond memories of Gary Oldman’s fictional version in Alex Cox’s Sid & Nancy.

To blur the lines of fiction and reality even further, this week’s list also includes movies about make-believe people affected by real musicians and real musicians transforming themselves into make-believe people as your pals at the Screengrab salute OUR FAVORITE MOVIES ABOUT MUSIC: FICTION EDITION!

THIS IS SPINAL TAP (1984)

Yes, we all know it's hilarious. But This Is Spinal Tap is a classic for more reasons than simple hilarity. This was one of the first major films to be classified a "mockumentary", and in order for the style to work at all, director Rob Reiner and stars Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer had to get all the details down cold. This meant concocting an elaborate backstory involving multiple group names, format changes, and a parade of dozens of drummers who met their respective ends under bizarre circumstances. But beyond the more obvious references, Spinal Tap had to walk, talk, and play like a real aging rock band, from the principles writing and performing their own songs before actual crowds to the shorthand that the band members have with each other, as when Nigel (Guest) calls out "GSM" during rehearsal to signal that he wants to practice the song "Gimme Some Money." The gambit worked -- numerous moviegoers at the time were convinced that Spinal Tap was a real touring act, and the movie quickly became a favorite of legitimate rock acts, who identified with such scenes as the group getting lost on their way to the stage. Soon enough, life imitated farce, and Guest, McKean, and Shearer began touring as Spinal Tap, even releasing a second album in 1992 entitled Break Like the Wind. Even today, Spinal Tap endures, both in its cinematic form and its real-life incarnation, with a tour coming later this spring.

24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE (2002)

Steve Coogan has a motor-mouthed smart-guy comedian's dream role as Tony Wilson, TV reporter, pop theorist, and the man behind Factory Records, which brought the sound of Manchester to a postpunk world. Directed by Michael Winterbottom, the movie, which also provides plum roles for Shirley Henderson (as Wilson's first wife), Paddy Considine (as his sidekick Rob Gretton), Andy Serkis (as the deranged genius producer Martin Hannett), and Sean Hayes (as Ian Curtis), covers the first public performance by the Sex Pistols, the rise and end of Joy Division, the band's resurrection as New Order, the slaphappy career of the Happy Mondays and the coming of rave culture, and Factory's death throes, with Coogan's Wilson walking through it explaining himself and the culture he's part of, always talking a mile a minute. Coming from the cerebral Winterbottom, the movie itself could be called a sustained work of rock criticism, except that rock crit hasn't been this funny since Lester Bangs swigged his last bottle of Romilar.

HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH (2001)

John Cameron Mitchell energetically transposed his hit off-Broadway show to celluloid with 2001’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the story of a transsexual punk rock goddess named Hedwig (Mitchell) who narrates her life story while travelling across the country playing second-rate venues, her shot at stardom stymied by a former lover and disciple (Michael Pitt) who became a music sensation by stealing her songs. Hedwig’s is a lunatic odyssey which begins in East Berlin where, as a young boy, she undergoes a sex change operation in order to marry her U.S. army lover and escape the Iron Curtain, and which is partially conveyed via a bevy of musical numbers and animated sequences that are striking in both their ingenuity and power. Bolstered by rollicking, blistering tunes that are as well suited for arenas as they are for the stage and screen, Mitchell’s film is rowdy, bombastic, idiosyncratic and heartfelt, a combination to which only a select few movie musicals can legitimately lay claim.

THE DOORS (1991)

A close friend once derided The Doors’ music as “bad poetry with keyboards,” and while I’m generally inclined to concur with his assessment, there’s nonetheless something transfixing about Oliver Stone’s 1991 biopic, which has the type of on-the-edge, trippy-druggy dynamism that typified the director’s creatively fertile early-‘90s period. Stone’s anything-goes aesthetic showmanship is an ideal approach for a portrait of the L.A. band and, in particular, lead singer Jim Morrison, whose larger-than-life persona – drunken fool, callous bastard, earnest poet, sex god – naturally appealed to a filmmaker fascinated with mythologizing socio-political icons. The Doors oozes reverence without alienating those who might think the film’s subjects and their classic-rock canon fall somewhat short of greatness, due in part to uniformly superb performances led by Val Kilmer’s pitch-perfect embodiment of the lizard king, but mostly thanks to Stone’s lack of inhibition, his madman stylistic excesses (and yes, I’m including the Indian in the desert), supremely well-attuned to the careening rollercoaster energy of The Doors.

VELVET GOLDMINE (1998) and I'M NOT THERE (2007)

With these two films, Todd Haynes has produced the finest examples of fictional rock movies that I can imagine. Both have taken the lives of real rock musicians -- Bowie & Iggy in the former, Dylan in the latter -- and played up the mythic qualities to create a transcendent hyper-reality. No, Bowie and Iggy and Dylan didn't really live like this. But speaking from the point of view of poetry and mythology and literature, these are more true than mere reality can manage. That's what myths and stories are about: heightening everyday reality into a more universal truth. Most people's lives aren't up to the examples set by Ulysses or Hercules or even Ishmael or Natty Bumppo. But I think few would deny that there's a universal recognition of the truth in the lives of these wandering heroes. Celebrities sometimes play the role of real-life analog to idealized heroes. That's why so many urban myths leap up about the lives of celebrities; people need to believe in the extraordinariness of others. Rock musicians in particular often play the debauched Dionysian role of the glorious artistic mess, the pleasure-seeker who indulges in sex and drugs to feed his or her creative output. With these movies, Haynes pushes past the mere facts to feed the stories, and the results are fascinating, part narrative and part critique. In Velvet Goldmine, Christian Bale plays a journalist in an Orwellian Britain of the late '80s. A series of events causes him to investigate -- and recall -- the heyday of glam rock and its figurehead Brian Slade, who is basically the Platonic ideal of David Bowie (with elements of Brian Eno thrown in for good measure) as played by Jonathan Rhys Meyer. Slade's closest associate is Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), who is mostly Iggy with a little Lou Reed thrown in. The two are lovers, and Slade gleefully expresses his fluid sense of sexuality. So there's three layers right there: Orwellian future, permissive past, rockers as trangressors. But there's more. Haynes dares to suggest that the bisexual/creative impulse was a gift from aliens (or angels) to Oscar Wilde in the Victorian era, and has passed down through the ages to the instigators of glam. That's, well, audacious as all hell. Haynes specifically compares Slade to both Wilde and his horrendous creation Dorian Gray. So, that's at least two more layers, maybe more. So, yes: gay theory, rock theory, lit theory, treatises on repression and freedom combined with the cults of youth and beauty. There's a lot going on in this movie. And it rocks like hell.

In I'm Not There, Haynes similarly adopts all of the myths about Bob Dylan into a narrative that's both fractured and more meaningful than a straightforward film could convey. There are six Dylans in this film, which is fewer Dylans than real life has given us. But these six Dylans represent the greatest periods of his life. Marcus Carl Franklin, an 11-year-old African-American boy, represents the youngest Dylan myth, the farmboy who rides the rails calling himself Woody Guthrie, learning America's traditional folk and blues music along the way. Ben Whishaw plays the interior Dylan, the playful interviewee who calls himself Arthur Rimbaud and comments cryptically on the rest of Dylan's life. Christian Bale plays the young and sincere New York folksinger Dylan, the socially active songwriter who calls himself Jack Rollins and travels to the South to sing to Civil Rights workers in a field. Rollins will later morph into Pastor John, the born-again Christian Dylan of the late '70s and early '80s. Heath Ledger plays the actor Dylan, the one who is horrible to his beautiful wife and torn in two by their divorce. His name is Robbie Clark and his wife, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, is Claire, and their story evokes the mid-'70s Dylan of Renaldo and Clara and Blood On The Tracks. Cate Blanchett plays Jude Quinn, the rock star Dylan of the mid-'60s and Don't Look Back. Quinn is explicitly shown as dead from a motorcycle accident at the beginning of the movie, which references Dylan's 1966 motorcycle accident which effectively killed off his Don't Look Back-era persona. Richard Gere plays Billy the Kid, who is the Dylan of The Basement Tapes, John Wesley Harding, and Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid. Gere's Billy lives in Riddle County, where the carnivalesque/Old West/Old Testament world of the Basement Tapes springs to life. So, that's the shallowest overview I could provide, and it more or less ate up all my space. Layers and layers in these films. Watch 'em again. And again.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager, Hayden Childs

OST: "This is Spinal Tap"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Song parodies are tricky business. Done well, they're delightful, working on their own terms musically, delivering on the joke, and rewarding the listener for spotting the various musical and comedic references. Done poorly, they're about the lowest form of music there is. One of the reasons that the ouevre of Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer works so well (and here we include This is Spinal Tap, which, although directed by Rob Reiner, was written by the three performers in much the same way that the later, Guest-directed films like Best in Show and A Mighty Wind would be) is that they have some degree of genuine affection for the medium they're skewering. If Guest and company simply despised heavy metal, their parody would fall flat -- their unfamiliarity with or contempt for the music would result in unconvincing musical numbers, and their lack of feeling for the characters and the milieu would come across as patronizing rather than funny. It's an undying tribute to how successful their parody truly was -- and how deeply it comes across as both affectionate and mocking -- that amongst actual heavy metal musicians, This is Spinal Tap is treated with the kind of reverence normally saved for people who play it completely straight. The movie gets it just right, and real metal musicians know it.

One shouldn't minimize Reiner's contribution to the film -- he's a much more technically sure-handed director than Guest, and he did provide some of the funnier lyrics to the fictional group's songs -- but it's never hard to figure out, from the delightfully offhand, improvised quality of much of the dialogue to the fact that Guest, McKean and Shearer not only wrote all the music, but performed it themselves without the aid of the usual ringers, who's responsible for Spinal Tap's success. In a bizarre testament to the power of successful comedy, the soundtrack to This is Spinal Tap -- which, after all, is a movie about a comically incompetent heavy metal band -- became a huge success. Many of those who bought the soundtrack album no doubt did so as a goof, merely to remember the mocking songs of this groundbreakingly awful British hard rock outfit with the constantly rotating drummers. But many more bought it because, intended as a joke or no, these were damn good songs, written by damn good performers, who may have meant them to be insulting, but didn't do so from a position of ignorance. How good were they? So good that punk legend Mark E. Smith of the Fall lifted the riff from "Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight" in its entirety for his own "Athlete Cured". So good that, when you take into account official releases and fan-created bootlegs, the fictional Spinal Tap has more records available than a lot of really good heavy metal bands that actually exist. So good that the aforementioned "Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight" is something of a heavy metal classic despite its jokey genesis, and even appears in the video game Guitar Hero II alongside such genuinely legendary songs as "Freebird", "War Pigs" and "Billion Dollar Babies". And so good that the soundtrack itself, almost unique among movies in the musical spoof genre, is strong enough to stand on its own detached from the movie: if you have any affinity at all for the classic heavy metal sound, these are songs you're going to sing along to on your iPod even if you know, deep in your hard-rockin' heart, that they're really jokes at your expense.

BEST TRACKS: Aside from the indispensible "Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight", with its merciless bassline and barely legal teen-queen lyrics, there's at least half a dozen stone classics on this soundtrack, even if they contain the seeds of their own destruction: "Big Bottom", the classic ode to fat fannies, has parazlyzingly funny lyrics to go along with its monster hook; "Hell Hole" is a tremendously catchy screamer with New Wave of British Heavy Metal influences so strong you can easily see Rob Halford belting it out instead of McKean's David St. Hubbins; and the Motorheady "Heavy Duty" is crushingly appropriate from a band that sometimes takes to the stage with three bass players. And if for some reason you don't like metal -- like, say, you don't enjoy things that are fun -- there's also the ludicrous hippie anthem "(Listen to the) Flower People" and the dead-on early Beatles parody, "Gimme Some Money". Go, Nigel, go!

Screengrab (Maybe) Confirms a Rumor About Gael Garcia Bernal, Reports Actual Facts About Quentin Tarantino & Christopher Guest

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 17:00:00 GMT

This past weekend, at the 10th Annual Provincetown International Film Festival’s Awards Ceremony, Jane Lynch and Gael Garcia Bernal received awards for career achievement in acting and Quentin Tarantino was honored with the festival’s 2008 Filmmaker on the Edge Award. At a presentation in the non-air-conditioned auditorium of Provincetown High School (attendees received complimentary church lady hand fans), the celebrity guests received trophies in the shape of P-Town’s famous, phallic Pilgrim Monument Tower and spoke about their respective careers in a series of casual sit-down interviews and audience Q&As, during which Lynch revealed the status of the next Christopher Guest movie, Bernal got emotional for reasons that were suspected but not confirmed and Quentin Tarantino broke some news about his long-awaited (and much delayed) Dirty Dozen homage, Inglorious Bastards or Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France.

1. Just before receiving the Faith Hubley Memorial Award (named for the Academy Award winning animator who passed away in 2001), Jane Lynch was asked if she had any news about the next Christopher Guest improv all-starts project. The news was not good. According to Lynch, “It’s getting to be about the time we’d start talking about the next one,” but when she spoke with Guest recently, the actor/filmmaker/fake rock star revealed he has no current plans to create another ensemble comedy in the vein of Waiting for Guffman, Best In Show, A Mighty Wind or the 2006 disappointment, For Your Consideration. On the plus side, he may adapt Guffman as a Broadway show (unless he was just pulling Lynch’s leg with some of that trademark deadpan humor of his).

2. Gael Garcia Bernal is an attractive little bastard. That part isn’t news, of course, but it’s worth mentioning: in person, he’s the sweetest, tiniest Mexican you’ve ever seen, with lips and eyes like Julia Roberts and a sultry accent capable of seducing straights, gays and maybe even the occasional lesbian. While accepting his P-Town Festival award for Excellence in Acting, Bernal got surprisingly choked up...surprising, that is, until he mentioned something about how the honor made him think about all the exciting things in his future and how “one person in the room knows what I mean.” Then he went back to his seat and embraced a beautiful lady who looked an awful lot like Bernal’s current squeeze, actress Dolores Fonzi, who, according to internet speculation (and Screengrab’s deductive reasoning), is almost certainly preggers. Congrats, Gael!

3. And then there was Quentin. Let me start by saying QT often comes across (especially in Jane Hamsher’s Hollywood tell-all Killer Instinct) as a pompous, annoying ass, and after all the pop-culture-spouting protagonists and stylized violence spawned in the wake of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction (and after the underwhelming, unintentional self-parody of Death Proof), it’s easy to take the writer/director (and part-time actor) for granted. But seeing him in the flesh reminded me of an R.E.M. performance I witnessed at the all-day outdoor Austin City Limits music festival a few years ago. I haven’t bought a new R.E.M. album in years, it’s easy to mock Michael Stipe and I’d gotten out of the habit of thinking of the R.E.M.s as one of my favorite bands...that is, until they kicked my ass with a blow-your-face-off set of, like, a thousand songs I suddenly remembered I fucking loved. Same with Quentin: the man has given me far, far more enjoyment than grief over the years, and he’s a riot live...especially when being interviewed by fellow film geek raconteur John Waters, as he was on Saturday in P-Town. As it turns out, Tarantino and Waters are buddies and I could have watched their odd couple bantering for hours. (Seriously, IFC: get these two a weekly show!) After chatting amiably about topics ranging from the best gifts QT ever received from his fans (short answer: pussy, but the Pez dispensers shaped like Jules and Vincent Vega from Pulp Fiction were nice, too) to the directors’ shared love of torture porn as one of the few true remaining forms of exploitation cinema, Tarantino revealed that 24 hours previously, he’d really, actually, finally finished the screenplay for Inglorious Bastards and was hoping to complete the film in time for Cannes 2009...so stay tuned!

Related stories: Chevolution, Provincetown Film Festival Review: The Wackness

Cannes 2008: Late-Breaking News!

Paul Clark — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:19:00 GMT

One week ago today, the Cannes Film Festival powers that be unveiled this year's selection of films in Competition. But while there was plenty on that list to get excited about, it seems they weren't finished, as today they announced three more selections in the official Competition lineup.

True to form, one of the latecomers was a French entry, and it proved to be a pretty interesting choice: Entre les murs, the latest film by celebrated filmmaker Laurent Cantet, whose previous works included the 2000 film Time Out. Another American film was added today as well- Two Lovers, the latest from We Own the Night's James Gray, a Cannes favorite. Two Lovers, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow, is said to be a romance, making it something of a change of pace for Gray, who has to date specialized in crime stories.

But the big news today was the announcement of this year's opening-night film, Fernando Meirelles' Blindness. The film, which stars Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo, will screen in competition, with its pedigree the hope is that it improves on the dicey precedent set by recent Cannes openers such as Fanfan la Tulipe and The Da Vinci Code.

Added out of competition was the opener of the festival's Un Certain Regard sidebar, Hunger, directed by Steve McQueen (no, not that one). Finally, the closing film of the festival was officially announced as being Barry Levinson's What Just Happened?. Sadly, this star-studded film (the cast includes Robert DeNiro, Bruce Willis, and Robin Wright Penn) is a Hollywood satire, not a big-screen adaptation of the long-forgotten sitcom Wha'Happened?. So all you Mike LaFontaine fans in the audience will be sorely disappointed.

But wait, there's more! Two more names were added to the Official Competition Jury (also announced last week), which brings the jury up to nine members. The additions were French actress Jeanne Balibar (who worked with fellow jury member Sergio Castellitto in Va Savoir)...

... and Iranian writer/director Marjane Satrapi, who directed last year's Jury Prize-winner Persepolis and collaborated with jury prez Sean Penn on the English-language version of the film.

The Cannes Film Festival will be held from May 14 through the 25th.

The Ten Best Deleted Scenes of All Time, Part 2

Peter Smith — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

THE CHIP REMOVAL SCENE, TERMINATOR 2

The premise of Terminator 2 is that Arnold Schwarzenegger's character, a cyborg who spent the whole first film trying to assassinate future revolutionary Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), has now been reprogrammed to protect her family. In other words, he's the same soulless killing machine, but on a humane mission instead of a lethal one. So how does he acquire emotions, attachments and embarrassing slang words over the course of the film? That mystery is explained in this deleted scene, in which Sarah removes an inhibitor chip from the Terminator's head. (Fun fact: given the limits of special effects in 1991, the mirror effect was achieved by having Linda Hamilton perform surgery on a dummy head, while Hamilton's twin sister — seriously — stood on the other side of the mirror with actual Arnold.) The scene also includes a confrontation between Connor and her son which fundamentally changes the dynamic of their relationship, allowing him to take over as leader. (In the director's commentary, Cameron says he "agonized" over cutting this scene.)

"THIS BULGING RIVER", WAITING FOR GUFFMAN

We'd kill to spend a day sifting through Christopher Guest's cutting room floor. Guest films hours and hours of documentary-style footage for his improvised comedies, only a fraction of which end up in the final film. The DVD versions of This is Spinal Tap (which he co-wrote but didn't direct), Best in Show and A Mighty Wind are loaded with hilarious (and sometimes shockingly dark) deleted scenes. But our favorite is this giddy extended climax from Waiting for Guffman. Guffman follows a small-town community theater troupe as they cast, rehearse and perform an original musical, all the while increasingly convinced that they're heading to Broadway. This deleted musical number is an ingenious musical theater parody — with production values that are comparable to actual Broadway.

THE HOTEL CONFESSION SCENE, SUPERMAN II

Director Richard Donner had filmed more than half of Superman II when the producers removed him from the project, replacing him with Richard Lester. The theatrical version of the film is a hybrid of Lester and Donner scenes, and for years after its release, rumors swirled that a better film — the Donner cut — was buried in the Warner Brothers vaults. When the Donner cut finally came to DVD in 2006, it was a mixed blessing: on one hand, it's very clearly an unfinished film. On the other hand, it contains some marked improvements over the theatrical release. This scene, in which Lois cleverly forces Clark to reveal his identity as Superman, is one of those improvements. It packs far more of a dramatic wallop than the "oops-i-dropped-my-glasses-in-the-fire" reveal from the Lester version. Perhaps the ultimate deleted scene, this one was never actually filmed; it was edited together from Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder's separate screen tests.

DAVID DUNN AND THE PRIEST, UNBREAKABLE

Unbreakable, M. Night Shyamalan's hushed, atmospheric follow-up to The Sixth Sense, tells the story of David Dunn (Bruce Willis), a stressed-out family man who survives a horrific train crash. When David realizes that he was the only survivor — and no one can offer him an adequate explanation — he begins to explore the possibility that he may be something other than an ordinary human being. It's a clever premise, and Unbreakable is an underrated film, but there are some serious gaps in logic — i.e., how has David passed his fortieth birthday without ever realizing he's invulnerable? This deleted scene offers some much-needed insight. It also toys nicely with the stock character of the cinematic priest; we expect him to talk about fate and God's plan, which he does, but not in the way you're thinking.

THE PUMPKIN CARVING SCENE, DONNIE DARKO

The Donnie Darko DVD contains miles of deleted footage, much of which made it into Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut — and most of which, frankly, makes the film overly complicated and heavy-handed. The original theatrical release has a pervasive sense of mystery, and the film's unanswered questions are part of its appeal. That said, every new scene between Donnie and his family deepens the impact of the film's time-twisting climax. This one is our favorite. It's an ordinary moment between Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his sister Elizabeth (real-life sibling Maggie Gyllenhaal), that reveals the affection in their relationship yet hints of ominous things to come.

— Gwynne Watkins