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It Might Get Loud (2008, Director: Davis Guggenheim): There has never been a proper documentary film made about the guitar. Director Davis Guggenheim thought it would be interesting to examine the unique guitar sound of three guitar legends — Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White. To watch the film with all three musicians in the audience was an incredible experience. To have the The Edge and Jimmy Page sit two rows directly in front of me was surreal.
Okay, fanboy comments aside, this was an interesting film from beginning to end. Jack White starts off the film by making a simple guitar with a Coke bottle, some wire and a few pieces of wood. Awesome!
I’m not a huge fan of Jack White but Guggenheim’s film gave me a new appreciation for White’s talent. I’m a big fan of the Edge and love the music of Jimmy Page so to find out how each musician developed their unique sound is a fascinating history lesson.
The production values of this film are quite slick. Guggenheim uses some incredible archival footage to show us where these three musicians got their start.
Each guitarist was interviewed separately and I found these segments to be the strongest and most interesting parts of the film.
Guggenheim ends the film by bringing all three musicians to Los Angeles so they can play together and discuss their musical style. It makes for an interesting jam session but it turns out to be the weakest part of the film in my opinion. I found out that Page can’t really sing but I enjoyed watching them play each other’s music and have a good time.
Official site of the film
(7/10)
Tagged as:
music
Waltz with Bashir (2008, Director: Ari Folman): I think calling this an animated documentary might be stretching it a bit, but director Ari Folman has created something really interesting. He’s used animation to go where documentary filmmaking hasn’t been able to take us before, into the memories, dreams and nightmares of its subjects. The film starts when Ari (looking uncannily like Italian film diarist Nanni Morretti) shares a drink with an old army buddy who describes his recurring nightmare of being chased by 28 dogs. After finding out that this relates to specific incidents from the 1982 Lebanon war, we discover that Ari Folman has little recollection of his participation in that conflict. But after this meeting, he begins having a strange recurring dream and after consulting a psychologist friend, he decides he needs to try to figure out why his memory seems blocked.
As he interviews other participants in the war, he begins to piece together his part in a larger narrative, that of Israeli compliance in the massacre of thousands of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut. “Christian” Phalangist militias entered the camps and massacred men, women and children for three horrific days, killing more than 3,000. Despite the militias’ stated aim of rooting out Palestinian fighters, the vast majority of these fighters had been evacuated weeks before. The bloodbath was widely seen as revenge for the assassination of the Phalangists’ leader, the recently-elected President Bashir Gemayel. Although Folman’s memory is never completely reliable, he seems to remember his army unit firing flares so that the militias could carry out their work at night.
The most shocking moment of the film comes right at the end, when the animation suddenly snaps into real-life video footage of the carnage, leaving a dramatic impression. Despite the unreliability of memory, and the nature of guilt (both survivor guilt and that of someone who killed other human beings) and its effect on the mind, this footage is evidence of a real atrocity, and Folman and his comrades have had to live with their part in this tragedy for more than twenty years. It’s no wonder that he used animation; it’s the perfect way to recreate nightmares.
Unfortunately, the director flew home after the film’s opening screening and wasn’t present for a Q&A.
Official site of the film
Trailer
(8/10)
Tagged as:
guilt,
israel,
lebanon,
memory,
palestine,
war
Examined Life (2008, Director: Astra Taylor): This documentary takes philosophy to the streets as filmmaker Astra Taylor conducts interviews with nine prominent thinkers in decidedly non-academic settings. Most entertaining is Cornel West, perhaps America’s best-known public intellectual, who rhapsodizes about jazz, blues and the life of the mind in the back of a New York City taxicab. Almost as interesting is Slovenian cultural critic Slavoj Zizek (the subject of Taylor’s first film, simply called Zizek!) who holds forth on the environmental crisis in the middle of a dump. His provocative suggestion is that humanity should become even more artificial and separate from the natural world. Martha Nussbaum provides a clear historical overview of political philosophy and discusses why the field is in dire need of new enquiry. The other segments were less successful for me, mostly because ideas were either insufficiently unpacked, or else huge assumptions were left undefended. Though that’s unavoidable in a film potpourri like this one, I think I would rather have had more time with the above three thinkers. As a film, it was only moderately successful. Though some of the subjects seemed happy to be in new settings, others seemed distracted by their surroundings or by their chosen method of locomotion (Michael Hardt struggling to steer his rowboat clear of obstacles rather took away from what he was actually saying).
I’m glad that Taylor is making the effort to bring the work of these thinkers to a mass audience, but given the enormity of the issues they’re discussing, it seems a little unfair to limit them to ten minutes each. Since this was partially funded by TVO and the National Film Board, I’d be interested to know whether there were any talks about a series for television broadcast. I’d certainly tune that in.
The NFB’s web site for the film, including a trailer
(7/10)
Tagged as:
culture,
disability,
ethics,
gender,
philosophy,
politics,
theory
The Last Pogo (1978, Director: Colin Brunton): In 1978, I was too young to get into bars, but I was a huge fan of punk rock. Of course, at that young age, I thought it all came from England. It wasn’t until a year or two later that I got into a punk/rockabilly band from Hamilton called Teenage Head. But in 1978, they headlined a rather infamous gig at The Legendary Horseshoe Tavern on Queen Street West in Toronto. Concert promoters Gary Topp and Gary Cormier (“The Two Garys”) were well-known for promoting the best new music, and were booking punk bands into the Horseshoe from the beginning. But by December 1978, they’d lost the lease and were set to move to a new venue, the Edge. They decided to stage a going-away bash with all their favourite local bands, and The Last Pogo is the visual record of that wild night. Featuring The Scenics, The Cardboard Brains, The Mods, The Ugly, The Viletones, and Teenage Head, it was a legendary show which ended with the cops breaking up a near-riot. The film had not been screened theatrically in 30 years, so I was really looking forward to the screening (part of the annual North by Northeast Music and Film Festival), and Brunton had promised that several special guests would be in attendance.
On my way to the screening, I had to pass by the Much Music studios, which for some unknown reason were surrounded by screaming teenage girls. Queen Street was closed off and there was a stage set up as well. Before long, some band of scantily-clad women jumped onstage and sang some forgettable ditty while shaking their junk in perfectly choreographed time. It was ironic that on my way to see some punk history, I had to be subjected to some of the unspeakable horrors of popular music.
I took my seat at the NFB cinema behind a group of rowdy fifty-something punk ladies, who proceeded to hoot and howl all through the film itself. It was rather disturbing. The special guests included Dave Quinton who drummed for The Scenics and later for the Dead Boys, Vince Carlucci from The Cardboard Brains, and a few others, but alas, no one from Teenage Head. And the film itself, though a treasured document of the event, proved to be slightly disappointing. The reason is that as the concert wore on, the club reached and then exceeded its capacity, and just before Hamilton’s finest took the stage, they were notified that they were only permitted to play one song and then the police would be shutting the place down. Understandably, the place went nuts, and so the footage from their performance isn’t the greatest. I even think the audio is out of sync.
Interestingly enough, Teenage Head would be at the centre of another riot a few years later, and for the same reasons. When they played the Ontario Place Forum, hundreds of fans were locked out after the venue reached capacity, and the resulting riot caused the management of Ontario Place to ban rock concerts for many years. Luckily, I was prepared and had arrived early. It was one of only two times I saw the band live. The other was at my high school, and was forgettable because in my excitement, I’d consumed an entire mickey of rye, became separated from my friends, and peed my pants. I was so mortified that I ran home, missing most of the show.
In happier news, director Brunton has spent the past two years filming and editing an expanded version of the film, to be called The Last Pogo Jumps Again. He’s revisited many of the players from that night and I’m eagerly looking forward to the film’s release, tentatively planned for Hot Docs 2009. It was also through him that I found out that writer Liz Worth has written what looks to be the definitive history of punk in Toronto. Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond, 1976-1981 should be released this year. I’ve been wanting to write this book since reading Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s incredible Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, but at least now I’ll be able to read it.
After the screening, I was hoping there would be a Q&A with the director and maybe some of the participants, but no such luck. I was able to speak briefly with both Colin Brunton and Liz Worth, and hope to conduct some short email interviews with them in the next several months.
P.S. It seems strange that it was at this very time and place last year that I was seeing Nightclubbing, another document of those years which is being made into a longer retrospective documentary.
Official site of the film
(7/10)
Tagged as:
music,
nxne,
punk,
toronto
Screaming Masterpiece (Gargandi snilld) (2005, Director: Ari Alexander Ergis Magnússon): Iceland is a nation of just 300,000 and yet over the past twenty years, it has produced a huge number of brilliant musicians, including such globally-known artists as Björk and Sigur Rós. This film vaguely tries to figure out what makes Iceland so special, but wisely keeps the talking heads to a minimum, instead treating us to lots of performances. This allows us to get an overview of just how diverse the music scene is, with everything from feedback-drenched rock to orchestral to electronic to metal to folk. And yes, even hip-hop. My wife and I are travelling to Iceland in late September for the Reykjavik International Film Festival and I wanted to discover a few more bands to seek out while we’re there. Happily, this documentary has added a few new names to my list (Bang Gang, Múm, Apparat Organ Quartet) as well as reinforcing my love for stuff I’ve already heard (Mugison, Amiina, Singapore Sling, Slowblow, Quarashi, and of course, Björk and Sigur Rós).
There is a bit of historical perspective, tying in some of the very old chants and songs created by Iceland’s first inhabitants, but more interesting to me was footage from Fridrik Thor Fridiksson’s 1982 documentary Rokk í Reykjavík, which showed a very young Björk performing with a band called Tappi Tíkarrass, and documented the popularity of punk rock and the rise of the modern music scene there. I think I’ll need to track that down next. Here she is on the cover of the VHS tape:
Overall, this wasn’t groundbreaking filmmaking, but it did a good job of surveying the scene and giving viewers a taste of what makes Icelandic music so special. Special thanks to Thora Gunnarsdottir from the Icelandic Film Centre for hooking me up with a copy of the film. And check back in the fall for coverage of the Reykjavik International Film Festival, where hopefully we’ll be able to see a number of new Icelandic films. If you think the music scene is good, consider that almost every creative person in Iceland expresses himself in more than one medium. Slowblow’s Dagur Kári Petursson, for instance, also directed Nói albínói (2003) (review). So we’re excited to be spending some time in this creative hotbed, and will have plenty to report, I’m certain.
Official site for the film
Purchase the DVD from Amazon.com
Purchase the DVD from Amazon.ca
(7/10)
Tagged as:
iceland,
music
