Hot Docs

Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage

Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage (Directors: Sam Dunn and Scot McFadyen): Toronto dir­ectors Dunn and McFadyen’s pre­vious efforts Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey, Global Metal, and Iron Maiden: Flight 666 were solid, if unspec­tac­ular, exam­in­a­tions of various aspects of the world of heavy music. With Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage, they’ve taken their game to a new level, presenting a fas­cin­ating por­trait of the Canadian rock icons that will please fans and non-fans alike.

Fresh off win­ning the audi­ence appre­ci­ation award at the pre­vious week’s Tribeca Film Festival, Rush: BTLS made its Canadian debut at Hot Docs, which only seemed appro­priate con­sid­ering the number of Toronto and Southern Ontario ref­er­ences and amounts of local footage used in the film. Dunn and McFadyen were granted unpre­ced­ented access to the band and their archives, unearthing pre­vi­ously unseen pictorial gems and old video­taped per­form­ances of some of the band’s earliest per­form­ances, including one showing them playing a high school gig with ori­ginal drummer John Rutsey.

Extensive inter­views with bassist/lead vocalist Geddy Lee, gui­tarist Alex Lifeson, and notori­ously press-shy drummer Neil Peart (pro­nounced “peert”, not the com­monly mis­pro­nounced “pert”) are spread throughout the film, providing a revealing glimpse into what makes the band tick and how they’ve man­aged to stay together for more than 40 years and achieve a level of suc­cess that places them third behind The Beatles and The Rolling Stones for the most con­sec­utive number of gold or plat­inum albums. Chew on that fact for a few seconds. The early his­tory of the band is nicely chron­icled, laying out how Lee and Lifeson, child­hood friends, bonded over their misfit status and love of music, which even­tu­ally made Peart a per­fect fit for the duo. Interviews with the band mem­bers’ par­ents add addi­tional insight, including one par­tic­u­larly for­tu­itous clip taken from Allan King’s 1973 doc­u­mentary Come On Children, where Lifeson (then in his late teens and known as Alex Zivojinovich) is shown arguing with his par­ents over the point­less­ness of fin­ishing high school, which he asserts will have no impact on his career goal of being a musi­cian. It’s a com­pel­ling moment in the film, not for its unique view­point (how many times have we heard some vari­ation of this story from artists?), but for the fact it was actu­ally cap­tured indir­ectly by one of these artists for posterity.

Mid to later periods of the band’s his­tory are also given impress­ively in-depth explor­a­tion, with spe­cific sub­jects and time periods fit­ting neatly into the thir­teen chapters the film employs to tell its story. Two of the more not­able ones look back at the band’s 80s devi­ation into more of a synth-heavy sound, which ali­en­ated many fans and led to cre­ative ten­sion between Lee and Lifeson, as well as the dark years that nearly saw the band pack it in, brought on by the dual tra­gedies that befell Peart in 1997 and 1998 (Peart’s daughter died in a car acci­dent and his wife suc­cumbed to cancer just ten months later). Peart’s will­ing­ness to address the period and even just his par­ti­cip­a­tion in the film is a test­a­ment to the dir­ectors’ ability to put their sub­jects at ease, given his reluct­ance to do inter­views, espe­cially on-camera sit-downs. The drummer, easily among the most legendary in the annals of rock and roll his­tory, comes across as pleasant, shy, and a little guarded. He dis­cusses his his­tory of walking softly and car­rying a big stick (or two), which, along with addi­tional enlight­ening input from Lifeson and Lee on the sub­ject, turns out is the result of being extremely intro­verted and having a major aver­sion to the concept of fan wor­ship. An inter­esting aside: for someone so reluctant to be in the spot­light it’s fas­cin­ating to me that Peart has put so much of him­self out there via his lyrics (he writes all of the band’s words) and numerous books, including Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road, which was a remark­ably honest chron­icle of his struggles fol­lowing the deaths of his wife and daughter.

Lee and Lifeson sim­il­arly come across as very humble, nice people. The film also does a good job at showing the close­ness of the band, which is as much attrib­ut­able to their fiercely loyal friend­ships as it is their com­fort level on a musical level. One doesn’t get the sense that there’s any trace of the jeal­ousies and griev­ances that plague many long-time band mem­bers, which often res­ults in sep­arate plane or bus jour­neys and zero verbal con­tact until the moment they hit the stage. Another quality of the trio that might sur­prise non-fans is their sense of humour, which cer­tainly doesn’t come across in their music. For anyone who has seen or read any number of inter­views with Lee or Lifeson over the years this won’t be a sur­prise, though. Don’t forget that Lee sang with Bob and Doug McKenzie, and appeared on SCTV almost 30 years ago. Some of the more ques­tion­able fashion styles the band has adopted over the years (par­tic­u­larly the unfor­tu­nate kimono period) become comic fodder for the group to have a laugh at their own expense.

Fan testi­mo­nials get a sur­pris­ingly spare amount of screen time, which was a wise decision by the film­makers. Too many band docs that include such con­tent rarely deviate from the unin­ter­esting “man, this is my 79th time seeing them!” variety, although the con­ser­vative usage of it here still didn’t dis­ap­point someone a few rows in front of me, who let out a huge “whoo!” when either him­self or a Rush fan he knew was inter­viewed on screen. What elev­ates the film even more are the wealth of enter­taining testi­mo­nials from the band’s peers and celebrity fans. Jack Black gets the biggest laugh with his descrip­tion of Rush as “a band with a deep reser­voir of rocket sauce.” Sebastian Bach also delivers some comic relief with recol­lec­tions of how, as a 13-year-old metal­head, he felt oblig­ated to read the work of Ayn Rand because it was a large influ­ence on Rush’s 2112 album, and how he was fur­ther con­fused by what the hell this band was doing when they released some songs in French. Gene Simmons weighs in with his bewil­der­ment at the band’s lack of interest in groupies when KISS took them out on an early tour. Some of the other not­able names who talk about Rush’s influ­ence on their careers are Metallica’s Kirk Hammett, Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, and Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan, who staunchly praises the band’s influ­ence on music and their place in its his­tory and bristles at their lack of respect from the music estab­lish­ment. The inclu­sion of CNN anchor John Roberts, con­nected to the band through his Toronto music journ­alist past as “J.D.” Roberts, is a nice touch.

Dunn and McFadyen con­tinue to demon­strate an admir­able talent for taking a sub­ject they’re clearly pas­sionate about and skirting around the mar­gins of fanboy adu­la­tion to deliver a sub­stantive, insightful work that also man­ages to enter­tain. In this case they’ve shown clear growth in their craft, pro­du­cing an engrossing bio­graphy of Canada’s biggest musical export.

Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage will receive a lim­ited the­at­rical release on June 10th, make its tele­vi­sion premiere on VH1 on June 26th, and receive a DVD release on June 29th

Official site of the film

9/10(9/10)

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Life With Murder

Life With Murder (Director: John Kastner): 20-year-old Mason Jenkins murdered his 18-year-old sister with mul­tiple shotgun blasts to the head on January 6, 1998. The crime occurred in the home he resided in with his only sib­ling and par­ents, in the small town of Chatham, Ontario, and Mason was con­victed of first-degree-murder after his shaky alibi was deemed not cred­ible. Mason main­tained his inno­cence until 2007, when he finally relented and provided a strange, irra­tional reason for having shot his sister, with whom he’d appar­ently always been close. Despite the hell their son put them through, the par­ents, Leslie and Brian, still choose to keep him in their lives, making reg­ular visits to Mason at Warkworth Institution, a medium-security cor­rec­tional facility.

Director/writer/producer John Kastner, a three-time Emmy winner, has a ver­it­able gold­mine of bizarre, intriguing details to work with in Life With Murder, with a fairly equal bal­ance given to both a dis­sec­tion of the crime, and its con­sequences and after­math. Neither side is easy to watch, espe­cially the latter. Kastner presents a thor­ough probing of the case, having gained access to police inter­rog­a­tion videos, the 911 call, crime scene doc­u­ment­a­tion, and inter­views with detect­ives from the case. The inter­rog­a­tion videos are quite fas­cin­ating to watch, but the inter­views with the grieving par­ents, some from just mere hours after the murder occurred, are dis­turbing and uncom­fort­able viewing. The fact that the mother her­self made repeated requests to the Chatham police to release the tapes for inclu­sion in the film doesn’t make the exper­i­ence of watching them feel any less invasive or wrong.

Credit Kastner with dig­ging deep to uncover pre­vi­ously unheard details about the case, including an explor­a­tion of Mason’s belated con­fes­sion, not to men­tion a blind­siding bomb­shell about the crime that ratchets up the creep factor by sev­eral notches. Despite the rich ingredi­ents with which it has to work, Kastner’s movie left me feeling unful­filled and empty, like it should have had much more of an impact. Leslie’s state­ment that “you don’t throw a kid away” and the uncon­di­tional love she and Brian have for Mason, even after what he did (and espe­cially after that bomb­shell, which I won’t spoil) just seem totally at odds with logic and reason, and only added to my frus­tra­tion with the movie. Another mys­tery: the par­ents never moved out of the home where the murder took place. The film also ends up playing as some­thing less cine­matic and more suited to tele­vi­sion, like an extended ver­sion of the CBC’s “The Fifth Estate” (which isn’t a knock on that pro­gram, as they do a lot of excel­lent work).

Official site of the film

5/10(5/10)

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Shadow Play: The Making of Anton Corbijn

Shadow Play: The Making of Anton Corbijn (Director: Josh Whiteman): “Having your pic­ture taken is like intimacy, it’s like having sex…I’ve been having sex with Anton for nearly 20 years now, since I was a boy.”

That pro­voc­ative line comes cour­tesy of Bono, who has worked with famed Dutch visu­alist Anton Corbijn numerous times over the years and is fea­tured prom­in­ently in Shadow Play: The Making Of Anton Corbijn. Aside from providing some voi­ceovers, the U2 vocalist also gives sev­eral inter­views and is fea­tured in a clever riff on Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” video. The doc­u­mentary flips the camera around 180 degrees to present a por­trait of the photographer/film director/music video dir­ector and his work, motiv­a­tion, inspir­a­tion, and back­ground. Director Josh Whiteman has assembled an impressive roster of celebrities to sing Corbijn’s praises — along with Bono, we also get testi­mo­nials from Michael Stipe, Kurt Cobain, Dave Gahan (Depeche Mode), Brandon Flowers (The Killers), Chris Martin (Coldplay), writer William Gibson, act­ress Samantha Morton, and model Helena Christensen. These names rep­resent only a frac­tion of the talent Corbijn has col­lab­or­ated with over his career, though. Others include Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie, Johnny Cash, Tom Waits, Miles Davis, Metallica, Stephen Hawking, Robert De Niro, and The Rolling Stones.

Much of the acclaim in Shadow Play from Corbijn’s sub­jects centres on his ability to “go to that dark area that most other lensers can’t reach”, or that “he truly cap­tures one’s soul” with his work, to para­phrase their words. Such plat­it­udes get repet­itive and over­stated if, like me, you feel Corbijn’s still pho­to­graphy work is highly over­rated. I’ve seen more than enough of it over the years, espe­cially as a devout U2 fan, and the accol­ades and crit­ical rein­force­ment he receives have always eluded me. The common cri­ti­cism, with which I concur, is a propensity for dark, murky shots that suc­ceed in ali­en­ating the viewer as much as cap­tiv­ating them. Flowers talks about this very issue, in an inter­esting anec­dote about his record company’s reluct­ance to have Corbijn work with the band. Stipe men­tions the fact that Metallica employed Corbijn to assist in their image rebranding after a lengthy hiatus (in 1996 to shoot the CD and pro­mo­tional photos for their Load album). What Stipe fails to men­tion is that the rebranding was not received well at all by the media and, espe­cially, by their fans.

Corbijn’s work, expec­tedly, gets the bulk of the screen time in Shadow Play; what Whiteman fails to uncover, how­ever, are the layers to him that exist out­side of that work. Several inter­views with him reveal little about his upbringing and make vir­tu­ally no men­tion of his private life. Corbijn isn’t exactly a dynamic inter­view sub­ject, either. Whiteman also errs in spending so much time focusing on Corbijn’s fea­ture film debut Control (review), a biopic of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis. Control dis­tract­ingly becomes a run­ning nar­rative throughout Shadow Play, with seem­ingly little rhyme or reason as to why we’re get­ting yet another look at an inter­view with the cast, behind-the-scenes footage, or cov­erage of the Cannes film fest­ival premiere, none of which would even stand out as note­worthy DVD extras.

If Corbijn’s sup­posed stock-in-trade is visu­ally get­ting to the soul of his sub­jects then this film, iron­ic­ally, fails to do just that.

Official site of the film

6/10(6/10)

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Thunder Soul

Thunder Soul (Director: Mark Landsman): Winner of the Audience Award at this year’s Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival, Landsman’s pro­file of the Kashmere Stage Band and its iconic leader Conrad O. “Prof” Johnson wisely keeps the music front and centre. In the early 1970s, Kashmere High School in Houston, Texas was the home of a unique musical exper­i­ment. Music teacher “Prof” Johnson began to incor­porate the funk and R&B music his stu­dents were listening to into the school band’s rep­er­toire in the late 1960s, and a few years later, the all-black band were win­ning com­pet­i­tions all over the United States against other school bands who played mostly “soft jazz” or “big band” music.

About ten years ago, record label owner and funk arch­ivist Eothen “Egon” Alapatt dis­covered some old vinyl LPs the band self-produced strictly for his­tor­ical pur­poses. Working with “Prof” he was able to put out the com­pil­a­tion Texas Thunder Soul 1968–1974 which went on to become a hit, espe­cially among DJs who eagerly sampled the band’s music in their own work.

The film­maker came along just as some mem­bers of the old band were plan­ning a reunion to honour “Prof,” now 92 and in ill health. More than two dozen mem­bers from the band’s most acclaimed period reunited, des­pite the fact that some of them hadn’t played any musical instru­ment in more than 30 years. But as “Prof” boasts in the film, he taught them so well that it would all come back to them, and the climax of the film is the reunited band’s per­form­ance, still fresh and funky after all these years. It’s a tribute to “Prof” but it’s also a powerful doc­u­ment about what arts edu­ca­tion can mean to stu­dents. During the period of the band’s suc­cess, other pro­grams and teams at the school also excelled, and the gradu­ation rate soared.

Sadly, the school’s band now struggles along with just 8 stu­dents and a crim­in­ally small budget. Landsman’s hope for the film is not only to honour mentors like “Prof” but to advocate for better funding of arts edu­ca­tion in the public schools. His job is made easier by the sheer joy and bounce of the music and of the people playing it.

Official site of the film

Here is the Q&A with dir­ector Mark Landsman from after the screening, con­ducted by Hot Docs asso­ciate pro­grammer Dannielle Dyson:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Duration: 12:13

8/10(8/10)

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Autumn Gold (Herbstgold)

Autumn Gold (Herbstgold) (Director: Jan Tenhaven): The very defin­i­tion of a crowd-pleaser, Autumn Gold was greeted with a standing ova­tion and thun­derous applause at its world premiere screening. It’s a can’t-miss for­mula. Follow five ath­letes, all over 80 years of age, as they pre­pare for the World Masters Athletics Championships, held in 2009 in Lahti, Finland. Though it com­bines two very shop­worn doc­u­mentary ele­ments (eld­erly sub­jects, a big com­pet­i­tion), the film man­ages to tran­scend the for­mula by keeping its focus very much on the par­ti­cipants in the present and not delving too deeply into their past lives.

Our first intro­duc­tion to each of the five ath­letes is to join them as they train. The first thing we realize is that these are all ser­ious ath­letes, and that these games are not just about par­ti­cip­a­tion. There is real com­pet­i­tion, and our sub­jects are seeking not only gold medals but world records. And most of these folks have been ath­letes for a very long time.

Youngest is Jiri Soukup, an 82-year-old high jumper from the Czech Republic. His ambi­tion is to clear a height of 1 metre. Watching the scenes with his wife was charming. The best part of Jiri’s workouts is when he comes home after­wards to a soothing mas­sage from his sweet­heart. Though she wor­ries about him injuring him­self, she knows that he’s an ath­lete and that he won’t stop competing.

85-year-old Ilse Pleuger, from Germany, is a world-class shot putter, hoping to break the 6 metre bar­rier and win gold. The death of her beloved hus­band motiv­ated her to train and com­pete even harder.

The age­less Italian Gabre Gabric, still glam­ourous and flex­ible, refuses to reveal her age. “What’s an old woman? Who’s sup­posed to be an old woman? Not me!” she says. She’s a vet­eran of the discus, and hoping to break 13 metres.

With a twinkle in his eye, 93-year-old sprinter Herbert Liedtke tells you he still has an eye for the ladies. And more than just an eye. Although the Stockholm native is training hard for the 100m dash, he’s still looking for a girl­friend, too.

Most mira­cu­lous of all is 100-year-old Austrian Alfred Proksch, still throwing the discus; that is, when he’s not painting nude women in his studio.

And though he’s not fea­tured in the film, you will be awed by the incred­ible Italian Ugo Sansonetti. His appear­ance at the com­pet­i­tion was nothing short of jaw-dropping for a variety of reasons.

Each of these char­ac­ters could have car­ried a film by them­selves. What they have in common is that they are all both lit­er­ally and fig­ur­at­ively com­fort­able in their skins. They recog­nize that they are slowing down, that their bodies are no longer as effi­cient as they used to be. But they also recog­nize that what’s most important is their drive to com­pete, and by com­peting with ath­letes their own age, they can still win medals and achieve world records. Recognizing that they may only have a few years left has helped these ath­letes focus more intently on their short-term goals. It’s both touching and inspiring to see how each of them has lived and con­tinues to live their life to the fullest.

Official site of the film

Here is the Q&A with dir­ector Jan Tenhaven from after the screening, con­ducted by Hot Docs pro­grammer Myrocia Watamaniuk:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Duration: 12:45


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ox4I36wkvk8

8/10(8/10)

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