The Screengrab : neil young

Precursors: Dead Man (1995)

Nick Schager — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Given its inevitable mention in countless forthcoming reviews of Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control – including mine, appearing here at The Screengrab later this morning – Dead Man is this week’s required viewing, not only as preparation for Jarmusch’s latest but also as a welcome antidote. Though the two share a formal exquisiteness, dissonant score, dreamlike atmosphere and stoic protagonist traversing a foreign locale, Dead Man exhibits little of the ponderous obliqueness and self-satisfied self-consciousness of Limits of Control, coasting on a mood of existentialist dread as it tracks Cleveland accountant William Blake (Johnny Depp) to the town of Machine where he kills a man in self-defense and, after being hit by a bullet that can’t be extracted, is forced to flee west. His flight, aided by a Native American guide named Nobody (Gary Farmer) and set to the hauntingly dissonant sounds of Neil Young’s electric guitar, is one with obvious historical overtones. Yet although Jarmusch clearly intends his tale to resonate as a nightmarishly lyrical saga of American expansion and white male hegemony, he never unduly strains such concerns by resorting to dull exposition or indulgent allegorical gestures. Instead, Dead Man’s cultural-political concerns are left to naturally spring forth from Blake’s odyssey, which – thanks to Depp’s beautifully deadpan performance – also functions as an evocative portrait of an alienated man learning to understand himself and the world around him during the course of a journey into hell.

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 20:30:00 GMT

ALMOST FAMOUS (2000)

Some people knock Cameron Crowe's fictionalized cinematic memoir for viewing the '70s through rose-colored granny glasses...but, hey, it IS told from the point-of-view of a very, very happy 15-year-old kid who not only gets to write for Rolling Stone, but also loses his virginity to a trio of sexy groupies! For me, the hero's starry-eyed wonder was the whole point: it's a rare movie that can honestly make me remember how exciting, innocent and mysterious life (and, for that matter, show biz) seemed before I became such a cranky old man. And I've always gotta give props to any Hollywood movie made with such heartfelt emotion, humanity and attention to detail...PLUS it’s got Philip Seymour Hoffman as cool-nerd Jedi Master Lester Bangs, Fairuza Balk in a well-deserved good role for a change, Kate Hudson (in her ONLY good role to date) as the embodiment of the Great Unattainable and Zooey Deschanel in a cool-ass stewardess uniform. It’s all happening!

THE COMMITMENTS (2001)

Alan Parker's once-a-decade good movie -- and now that I mention it, Alan, you're almost twenty years overdue for another one -- has a solid grounding in one of Roddy Doyle's exuberant novels about Irish life. Because Parker was able to get the milieu down right, he and his screenwriters -- Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais, and Doyle -- were able to fiddle with the book's cast of characters in order to accommodate the cast they assembled from the extensive audition process (for instance, changing the book's lead singer from a young George Michael type to a beefy lout after meeting Andrew Strong, a heavyset 16-year-old with a powerful voice) without losing its flavor. The cast also included Glen Hansard, who took to turning down subsequent offers of acting jobs so as not to distract from his music career, which would eventually yield its greatest success when he returned to the movies for 1996's Once.

GREENDALE (2003)

Neil Young has been dabbling with filmmaking since at least 1974's Journey Through the Past, but this companion piece to his album of the same name is his best work as a director. Like many artists who basically play around at making movies when they're taking a break from their real work, Young's work in film is amateurish, but the amateurism here is playful and lively, and it expands on the story and ideas of the ten-song cycle of the album, which is perfectly achieved but also a little cut and dried. The story involves three generations of Greens: Grandpa, who sits on the porch all day thinking sadly about how the world has gone to hell; his used-up son Earl, who winds up in a jail cell; and young Sun Green, who preaches rebellion and freaks out the military-industrial complex armed with a megaphone and some killer tats. Even after all the changes Young has been through, the hippie dream dies hard.

AMERICAN HOT WAX (1978)

When rock and roll was young and frisky, exploitation filmmakers threw together movies in which kids celebrated the new music with the help of actual music stars who stopped by to perform a number for a quick buck. This movie, directed by Floyd Mutrux, functions simultaneously as a parody of those movies and a fantasy of what it would have been like if someone had gotten one of them right. The terrific, late character actor Tim McIntire greased back his thinning hair and donned a succession of eye-abrasive sports coats to play the legendary disc jockey Alan Freed, who popularized rock and roll until he was destroyed in the payola scandal. (Freed himself was a mainstay of early rock movies, like Rock Around the Clock and Mr. Rock and Roll.) McIntire plays him as sweaty, medium-rung show business hustler who plays the role of Prometheus to the kids and comes to love it so much that he turns into a real hero in spite of himself. The cast also includes Laraine Newman as a character based on the young Carole King, the still-human Jay Leno and Fran Drescher, the child actor Moosie Drier as the head of the Buddy Holly Fan Club, and as themselves, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, and Frankie Ford. The whole thing builds to the big rock show, where the forces of repression, horrified at the sight of interracial dancing in the aisles, orders the house lights turned on while Jerry Lee Lewis is onstage pumping out "Great Balls of Fire", inspiring the indignant Killer to complain, "Folks, it's mighty hard to do a rock and roll show with the lights on. Can't do it! Now, the police are over there doin' their job, Alan Freed's doin' his job, let Jerry Lee Lewis do his job and turn the damn lights off!" It is said that Abraham Lincoln sometimes reached comparable peaks of oratory, but there is no filmed record to confirm this.

PRIVILEGE (1967)

Filmmaker and media critic Peter Watkins trained his camera on rock'n'roll culture with the 1967 film Privilege, which examined the circus that sprung up around the (fictional) pop star Steven Shorter. Shorter is a worldwide musical phenomenon, and so rabid is his fan base that when Shorter stages a musical number in which he gets beaten and thrown into jail by police, an actual riot breaks out. In short, Steven's fans will follow him anywhere -- he endorses dozens of products Oprah-style, and when British farmers experience a surplus of apples, guess who they get for an advertising spot? As played by then-Manfred Mann lead singer Paul Jones (excellent in his big-screen debut), Shorter is a magnetic performer, but in the end, Watkins is more interested in him as a media commodity. The Steven Shorter we see in Privilege is less a three-dimensional person than a commodity, and indeed he seems to have little discernible personality when he's not onstage -- how ironic that Shorter's fans claim to love their idol "because he gives so freely of himself." In the end, Shorter is little more than a pure media image, as easily manipulated as any other, to the point where the establishment powers of the government and the Church of England can put Steven in front of a stadium full of fans and motivate them to chant "We will conform!" Privilege is the polar opposite of a rockin' good time -- it's a stark head trip in which even the most ruggedly individualistic of art forms can be co-opted and corrupted by the powers that be, and in which the populist media don't so much create stars as consume them and crap them back out when they're no longer needed.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark

OST: "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

If you've been following the "OST" feature here at the Screengrab for a while, or even if you're just familiar with the kind of chicanery that goes on in the music business under the guise of protecting intellectual property, you'll know that an astonishingly large number of movie soundtracks present you with a product that's wildly -- even borderline fraudulently -- different from what you encountered in the movie. The difficulty and cost of obtaining clearance rights to music, especially for small, cash-poor independent films, and the greed and short-sightedness of record companies (or just their willingness to butt heads with equally greedy movie companies over the size of their slice of the pie) has sunk many a soundtrack. Jim Jarmusch's inventive, compelling Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai ran afoul of this very problem, but with a curious endgame: there are, in fact, two available records affiliated with the movie -- one best described as a soundtrack, and the other a score. Both are extremely worthwhile, but neither is completely successful on its own; both are very different in character, although they were written by the same person; and both feature material from the film as well as material that never appeared in it, though only one is available in the United States.

It should come as no surprise that Jarmusch's 1999 pseudo-remake of Jean-Pierre Melville's fantastic Le Samourai features a terrific soundtrack. As befits his image as a New York hipster filmmaker, Jim Jarmusch's movies have always placed music in a prominent position; from the haunting, unnerving guitar wails of Neil Young that formed the basis of the soundtrack to Dead Man to the exotic, emotionally powerful jazz-funk of Ethiopian composer Mulatu Astaque that was featured in Broken Flowers, Jarmusch is one of a handful of directors -- others include Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, and Sofia Coppola -- who can be counted on to take as much care with the soundtrack as they do with the film itself. After reading that Italian-American mafiosi were fond of gangsta rap, and consulting with his star Forest Whitaker, Jarmusch decided to bring in the RZA, producer and mastermind behind the hugely influential Wu-Tang Clan, to write both the score and the soundtrack to Ghost Dog. This began a collaboration between the two that became deeper and more profound than either had anticipated; the RZA ended up consulting with Jarmusch on some of the language of the street hustlers in the film, helped out with the design and costuming, and even appears briefly in the film (as do Timbo King and a handful of the Wu-Tang Killa Bees auxiliary). The movie and the music are gorgeously integrated on every level, reflecting a realness that couldn't have come about if any other director and any other musician had been behind it: scenes are perfectly broken up by the intrusion of killer hip-hop tracks (all of which the RZA wrote, produced, or both); the scenes themselves feature gorgeous nighttime driving shots of Whitaker's lethal but loyal assassin, accompanied by evocative, skeletal beats also made by the RZA.

Unfortunately, things went awry, as things often do. Epic, which then had a stranglehold of a contract on the RZA's work, saw the release of the film -- which they couldn't have cared less about -- as nothing more than an opportunity to release new RZA-penned singles to the hip-hop market. They saw no value whatsoever in the instrumental score he'd worked so hard on, and which so perfectly complemented the film. As a result, when the licensing deal was penned with Razor Sharp, the company that released the soundtrack, Epic gave them permission only to use the hip-hop songs the RZA produced, and none of the instrumental score. Eventually, an alternate version of the soundtrack -- this time featuring a number of excellent selections from the score -- was released, but only in Japan. The result is the unsatisfying split alluded to above: here in America, the only version of the soundtrack you're likely to find is the one featuring the rap songs -- which, make no mistake, are almost uniformly excellent, but suffer from a lack of completeness. If you're lucky enough to live in Japan, or shell out extra money to import the version available there, you'll get parts of the score -- at the cost of the great rap singles. So, in the end, the Ghost Dog soundtracks remain two imperfect halves of an incredible whole, and are likely to remain so as long as greed gets in the way. Or, to put it another way, forever.

BEST TRACKS: Assuming you're either unable or unwilling to get hold of the Japanese version of the soundtrack to Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, we'll assume that you're listening to the American version, illustrated above. (The score segments are replaced by rather useless "samurai code quotes" from the movie.) Don't despair, though; while you aren't hearing the whole picture, you're still getting some amazing RZA-penned hip-hop. Some of the best tracks here include the Wu-Tang's featured track, "Fast Shadow", a raw-sounding, desperate slice of urban paranoia; "Strange Eyes", a groovy, expressive effort by the Wu spinoff group Sunz of Man; and, especially, "Don't Test/Wu Stallion", an evocative, insinuating dub groove by underrated Jamaican toaster Suga Bang Bang, which slithers from one pole to another over a killer minimalist beat by the RZA, which suggests the score that you're missing.

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OST: Krush Groove

OST: He Got Game

Michael Moore’s Slacker Uprising

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Certain people around Screengrab headquarters will say it’s still overpriced, but nonetheless, Michael Moore’s latest documentary will be released on the internets free of charge. Taking inspiration from Radiohead (the band that put their “pay what you want” album In Rainbows online) and Neil Young (who streamed Living with War for free on his website), Moore will make Slacker Uprising available as a free download for three weeks beginning September 23rd.

"I thought it'd be a nice way to celebrate my 20th year of doing this," Moore says in the AP story announcing the decision. "And also help get out the vote for November. I've been thinking about what I want to do to help with the election this year." Well, it beats supporting Nader again. At 97 minutes, the film (which follows Moore on a 2004 get-out-the-vote tour) is the first full-length feature released directly online. (Although the AP helpfully reports, “Last December, Jackass 2.5 was streamed online and for free, but that was only a collection of left over material from Jackass 2.” )

You can sign up to receive your copy at the official Slacker Uprising site, but you must be a US or Canadian resident. Or at least claim you are.

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Doc Around the Clock

Rock of Ages: Neil Young's New CSNY Documentary

Phil Nugent — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:00:00 GMT

A lot of rock stars who started out in the 1960s futzed around with moviemaking at some point in their careers, but few if any of them have proven as stubbornly devoted to it as Neil Young. Although his early efforts betrayed little evidence that he had filmmaking in his veins, Young, whose picture can be found in the dictionary next to the definition for the word "ornery", stuck at it, and in the last few years he's scored a couple of triumphs: the strange, handmade-looking feature that he made to illustrate his concept album Greendale (2003) was his proudest achievement as a director, and he starred in a fine, autumnal concert movie directed by Jonathan Demme, Heart of Gold (2006). Around that same time, he once again went on tour as part of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, but with a difference this time. Young had just released an angrily political album, Living with War--it features his singalong ditty "Let's Impeach the President"--and he played it for his bandmates and informed them that "This is all I want to do." Apparently this was not meant as an invitation to put it to a vote. When CSNY was formed back in the late 1960s, they amounted to a full-fledged smash hit trio augmented by some guy from Stills's old band who'd just started releasing solo records, but now they're a worn-out oldies act who are occasionally touched by lightning in the form of a collaborator who remains a vital and compelling force in contemporary pop music. (As David Crosby once put it in one of the great on-the-nose statements of all time, "Neil needs us like he needs three assholes.") Not that they rebelled, mind you: the CSN fellows were thrilled to have a chance to sing about politics and be all relevant and stuff. The reactions from some of their fans, who look like Edward Koren cartoons and were eagerly looking forward to their thousandth chance to hear "Our House", was more mixed.

Perhaps concerned that he might not always have enough reasons during the course of the 19-city tour to tell Stephen Stills "I'm busy", Young decided to direct a film recording the adventure: CSNY: Deja Vu, which opens in theaters this weekend. Discussing some of the audience reaction that he and his three sidekicks got, Young told the New York Times' Ben Sisario, “The Living With War album got such a varied reaction. Extreme negative and personal attacks, all kinds of things I had never had before from any kind of record. But that’s what made it so interesting, and such a great subject for a film. We didn’t know what was going happen, but we knew something was going to happen.” Young included scenes of riled fans, and also scenes that might seem humiliating to the stars, in which they look unglamorously old and out of it, "Because it was harsh. It’s content. This is a documentary.” Although Young takes the directing credit (under his preferred filmmaking pseudonym, "Bernard Shakey"), he did employ a major collaborator: Mike Cerre, a former network news correspondent who worked in Iraq and Afghanistan, whose job it was to record the chaos that his boss was creating from his command center on stage. (Says Cerre, “I called my wife and cameraman and told them I was going to be embedded in a rock tour. They thought I said Iraq. There was a long silence at the other end of the phone.”) The dramatic high point of Greendale comes when its youngest character, Sun Green, pulls off a media event that Young approvingly describes as "a golden moment in the history of TV news," and Young, whose sprawling film-and-audio archive documenting his life and career is as legendary s anything he's managed to make generally available to the public, sees the new documentary as "journalism." It exists--it doesn't matter that much to him if not many people see it, which is a healthy sentiment coming from the director of Human Highway. "“My films are pretty wacky,” says the auteur of Tonight's the Night and Rust Never Sleeps, choosing for the moment to sound as if he were Frank Tashlin or somebody. “They definitely don’t have much of a commercial appeal."

Scorsese Passes the Baton to Demme on Bob Marley Documentary

Phil Nugent — Fri, 23 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In what might just be a propitious turn of events, Martin Scorsese has dropped out of what was intended to be his next film--a documentary about Bob Marley that he was working on with Steve Bing's Shangri-La Entertainment and Fortissimo Films, the same team with whom he made the Rolling Stones concert movie Shine a Light--and Jonathan Demme has stepped in. The movie, which everyone wants finished for a release date of February 6, 2010--the late, Jamaican reggae legend's 65th birthday--would have been Scorsese's fourth music documentary of this decade, counting the Bob Dylan film No Direction Home and Scorsese's episode of the PBS series The Blues. (It also would have taken him out of his comfort zone of music and musicians associated with the 1960s, unlike another project that's still reportedly on his plate, a documentary about George Harrison.) Apparently Scorsese was forced to bow to scheduling reality. Besides the Harrison doc, he's also preparing The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt with Leonardo Di Caprio and an adaptation of the Shusako Endo novel Silence from a script by Jay Cocks, even as he's already begun shooting Shutter Island, also with DiCaprio, and based on a novel by Dennis Lehane.

Scorsese was working on the Marley movie with the blessing of the singer's family. When he signed on, Marley's son Ziggy Marley, who's serving as executive producer, was quoted as saying, "I am thrilled that the Marley family will finally have the opportunity to document our father's legacy and are truly honored to have Mr. Scorsese guide the journey." Now Ziggy's gone back to the well and said of Demme, "His empathy with my father's body of work and his unique understanding of the musical documentary form makes me confident that this film will be the ultimate celebration of my father's life." Even if it's intended as spin control--Marley would probably do his best to sound upbeat if he woke up tomorrow morning to find that Demme had been replaced by Uwe Boll--the sentiment computes. Not only has Demme made his own string of superior rock movies (Stop Making Sense, the more recent Neil Young picture Heart of Gold), but some of his other films, notably the documentaries Haiti--Dreams of Democracy and The Agronomist reveal a passionate feel for the Caribbean culture and the mixture of pop and politics that informed Marley's career. Warming up to his assignment, Demme has referred to Bob Marley as "one of the greatest human beings of modern times".

When Good Directors Go Bad: Year of the Horse (1997, Jim Jarmusch)

Paul Clark — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

For almost three decades now, Jim Jarmusch has been one of the heroes of American independent cinema. The deadpan humor and multicultural vibe of his best works have influenced directors worldwide, and his maverick sensibility has practically defined the term “independent filmmaker.” While this sensibility hasn’t endeared him to the Hollywood bigwigs (his insistence that he retain the rights to the negatives of all his films would be a dealbreaker for most studios) it’s made him something of a hero to followers of indie-film, because he’s a director who gets away with making whatever he damn pleases.

Jarmusch’s 1995 masterpiece Dead Man marked his first collaboration with legendary rocker Neil Young, of whom Jarmusch was a longtime fan. Young’s mindbending score was divisive- Roger Ebert famously likened the sound to Young dropping his guitar over and over- but the film cemented a friendship between the two artists. So for his next film Jarmusch decided to go on the road with Neil Young and Crazy Horse, with the goal of making the concert film Year of the Horse. It was Jarmusch’s first documentary.

A few weeks ago I spotlighted in this column The Dark Wind, the sole fiction feature from master documentarian Errol Morris. For Jarmusch, Year of the Horse is no less misbegotten. Now, I don’t begrudge filmmakers- least of all gifted, independent-minded ones like Jarmusch- their attempts to break out of their filmmaking comfort zones. However, with Year of the Horse, Jarmusch shows almost no affinity for the documentary form.

In its opening credits, Year of the Horse proclaims that it was “proudly made in Super-8,” and the film is suffused with a lo-fi aesthetic that’s similar to most of Young’s best work. However, in such films as Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law, and Dead Man, Jarmusch’s style is tight and deliberate, with little room for the kinds of accidents that one normally finds in a documentary of this sort. As a result, the film feels less like a charmingly hardscrabble Young work than a sloppy, amateurish mess.

Part of the problem is the music in the film. While I prefer Young’s rootsy albums like Harvest to his Crazy Horse work, the songs in the film are pretty solid. However, their concert performances have a tendency to drag on (and on and on), with lots of onstage improvisation between Young and his bandmates. While jamming can make for a great concert experience, it’s tough to make it interesting to those who aren’t actually in attendance, and Jarmusch never figures out how to make it work. Rather than focusing on the audience’s reaction to the music or really zeroing in on the musical chemistry between the band, Jarmusch too often cuts away from the concert to often random and usually uncompelling images.

Some of these images are merely distracting, as when Jarmusch intercuts footage of clouds or a passing train into the songs. But others are downright puzzling, as when the film cuts away from an onstage performance of “Fuckin’ Up” to show some decades-old footage of Crazy Horse bassist Billy Talbot shoplifting and getting arrested, a hamfisted attempt on Jarmusch’s part to turn the song into a music video, another form he isn’t particularly good at. Either way, the cutaways don’t help. Whereas Jarmusch seems to intend them to add interest to the stage performance, they merely serve to remind us of how the song is dragging on well past its logical end (one number finishes with the band playing the same chord nearly two dozen times). The only time the cutaways actually serve their intended purpose is when Jarmusch juxtaposes the 1996 concert performance of “Like a Hurricane” with footage of the same song taken from their 1986 tour. In this footage, in which Young already looks haggard, Jarmusch comes closest to illustrating the idea of how long Neil Young and Crazy Horse have been in the game.

At several times during the (mostly superfluous) band interviews in Year of the Horse, Crazy Horse guitarist Frank “Pancho” Sampedro remarks that Jarmusch will never be able to compress three decades of Crazy Horse history into a documentary. However, based on the evidence on display in the film, two hours seems far too long. I’m sure there were plenty of vivid experiences in the history of the band, but few of them appear to have been “proudly filmed on Super-8.” Seeing as how the most memorable thing that happens offstage in Year of the Horse is a floral centerpiece catching on fire, perhaps Jarmusch would have been better off sticking to the music itself.

But as I said, he’s always marched to his own drummer, and fortunately for his fans his next film was 1999’s fascinating Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, that wonderful one-of-a-kind combination of aging wiseguys and Hagakure-reading lone gunmen. In other words, definitely a step in the right direction. Jarmusch’s next film, The Limits of Control, is currently on track for a 2009 premiere.

Video of the Day: "Little Murders"

Peter Smith — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

In the first flush of his stardom, Donald Sutherland was a counterculture hero: the original Hawkeye Pierce in Robert Altman's M*A*S*H, a key participant in the anti-Vietnam "F.T.A." shows, and the movies' only stoned-hippie-World-War-II-tank-commander in Kelly's Heroes. It must say something about the culture, though God knows what, that he now plays a white-maned capitalist lion in the TV series Dirty Sexy Money. The show is pure cheese, but Sutherland is terrific in it. (We don't know what ABC is paying him, but whatever it is, he deserves twice as much just for continuing to report to work, knowing that every week Peter Krause is going to refer to him, in the explanatory voice-over that precedes each episode, as "Tripp, the empire builder.") In the most recent one, he walked his much-divorced, sexy-airhead daughter (played by the peerlessly glassy-eyed Natalie Zea) down the aisle yet again, a chore that he prepared for by getting and staying good and plowed the whole day and night, the better to dull the pain when she made her inevitable announcement that this marriage, too, just wasn't working out. It was hard not to watch the wedding scenes without remembering one of the funniest moments from the blazing youth of everybody's second-favorite lanky, now-elderly Canadian hippie. (A.: Neil Young, dummy.) We refer of course to his cameo in the 1971 Alan Arkin-Jules Feiffer film Little Murders, where he presides over the nuptials of his M*A*S*H co-star, Elliott Gould. It made us laugh the first time we saw it, and it's still all right. Everything is all right! — Phil Nugent