music

Backyard

by James McNally on January 31, 2012

Backyard (Director: Árni Sveinsson): While it’s true that I’ve long been a fan of Icelandic cinema, I have been a fan of Icelandic music for even longer. In the late 1980s, a band called The Sugarcubes and their elfin singer Björk introduced me to the unique sounds of this tiny country, and since then, I’ve come to love dozens of bands from Iceland. Someone in another recent documentary about Iceland’s seemingly boundless creativity said that the fear of failure is almost nonexistent, so people take risks. They also help each other out, which is exactly how Backyard came to be.

Each August the city of Reykjavik celebrates Menningarnótt (Reykjavik Culture Night), a daylong celebration of the creative spirit of its citizens. There are all kinds of official and unofficial events, and in 2009, Árni Rúnar Hlöðversson (of FM Belfast) decided to hold a concert in his backyard and invite his friends to play. He wanted to record the audio, but he also invited his friend Árni Sveinsson to shoot video. None of the bands (or even the two Árnis) thought they were making a “real” movie, so the whole thing is incredibly loose. Based on my own experiences in Iceland, most things organized are “incredibly loose.” Icelanders like to fly by the seat of their pants, to be honest, but it gives the film a real energy, too.

Though we get the background around the planning (which seems to happen in a matter of days), the majority of the film’s brisk 73-minute running time is given over to the performances, and what a treat. The lineup is incredibly diverse, from the lo-fi stylings of Borko and Sin Fang Bous to the raucous assault of Reykjavik! to the feel-good party sounds of Retro Stefson and FM Belfast (whose finale “Underwear” is guaranteed have you bouncing around your living room grinning like an idiot). And though the musical styles change, it’s great to see how many bands actually share members. In a small place like Iceland, this might be a necessity but it also allows for some very interesting musical cross-pollination. It’s fitting that the film ends with many of the musicians soaking together in one of Reykjavik’s thermal swimming pools.

Some of these bands (múm, Hjaltalín) were known to me, but most were new discoveries, and luckily the DVD package (buy it here!) comes with an audio CD of the songs as well. It’s been on constant rotation over the past few months for me, reinforcing my sincere belief that Iceland is pound-for-pound the most creative place on the planet.

Official site of the film

Tagged as: iceland, music

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From the Sky Down

by Drew Kerr on October 19, 2011

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,TIFF

From the Sky Down (Director: Davis Guggenheim): When asked to choose the best two albums in U2’s catalogue, most fans and music critics will pick 1987’s The Joshua Tree and 1991’s Achtung Baby. That the band’s strongest work is on albums that sound so radically different from one another is, even two decades later, fairly astounding, and points emphatically to the group’s renowned disdain for creative passivity. As frontman Bono has famously said, Achtung Baby was “the sound of four men cutting down The Joshua Tree”, as U2 struggled to cope with superstardom and needed to “go away and dream it all up again.” That hard-fought musical and personal journey for the band forms the foundation of From the Sky Down, directed by Davis Guggenheim (best known for An Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for Superman). Guggenheim, who had previously directed U2 guitarist The Edge in his underseen 2008 film It Might Get Loud, was approached by the band to put together some sort of visual document to tie in with the upcoming 20th anniversary reissue of Achtung Baby.

From the Sky Down takes a surprisingly brief glimpse at the band’s overall history and I was also somewhat taken aback by the complete absence of any mention of what they might have up their sleeve for the future. No, the focus here is almost entirely on the late 80s-early 90s era of the group, a refreshing approach from a rock documentary format that traditionally only offers a quickly moving biographical summary, with little allowance for a truly in-depth examination of particular periods or albums. Perhaps the band was inspired by The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town, another high profile doc that deconstructed the making of a classic album from their friend and peer, Bruce Springsteen. From the Sky Down features extensive one-on-one interviews with each member of the band (they’re rounded out by drummer Larry Mullen Jr. and bassist Adam Clayton) that provide a comprehensive revisiting of a period that began just after the band’s explosion in popularity with the release of The Joshua Tree, through to the beginning of their landmark Zoo TV Tour in 1992. Not surprisingly, the interviews with the sharp-witted Bono are the most revelatory and entertaining. Special attention is paid to 1988’s Rattle and Hum, the much-derided and misunderstood documentary (with a companion album) that chronicled U2’s burgeoning interest in American roots music. Personally, I’m a huge fan of the film, but the band admits their message was misinterpreted and only reinforced many people’s opinion of the Irish quartet as self-important and insufferable personalities. Guggenheim makes good use of some previously unseen Rattle and Hum outtakes, including one that shows an irate Bono ripping on some incompetent stage workers.

Achtung Baby’s difficult recording sessions form the heart of the film, with additional perspective provided by the album’s producers (Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno), engineer (Flood), and longtime photographer (Anton Corbijn). Guggenheim reconvenes the group at Berlin’s Hansa Studios, where recording began, but where little results were produced due to creative friction and roadblocks. Bono and The Edge wanted to take U2’s sound in a more electronic, experimental direction, with which Mullen Jr. and Clayton couldn’t come to terms. The occasional animation sequences that Guggenheim employs (accompanied by band member voiceovers taken from their interviews) are used to best effect here, with one sequence showing metaphorical walls being erected between the four bandmates. The visual takes on even more symbolic meaning, considering they were in the city during the fall of the Berlin Wall. The band digs out and reflects on old demos, and talks about their songwriting process, which frequently features Bono using gibberish (dubbed “Bongolese”) in place of unwritten lyrics. Two songs get the most attention: “Mysterious Ways” and “One.” The former, originally titled “Sick Puppy,” helped the band turn a corner from their creative difficulties and eventually led to the creation of “One,” which sprang from an idea used in the original bridge in “Mysterious Ways.” The two tracks were the only ones from the album that were completed in Berlin, with the rest finished back home in Dublin.

Guggenheim’s decision to bookend the film with scenes from the group’s much-hyped appearance at this past summer’s Glastonbury Festival is only moderately effective, but he captures some great footage of the band rehearsing various Achtung Baby songs in preparation for the big gig (one of the filming locations is Winnipeg’s Burton Cummings Theatre, during a tour stop in the city this past spring). The standouts include a rough run-through of “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses,” which really jumped out of the speakers of the Ryerson Theatre’s sound system, and a rare solo vocal performance from The Edge of the album’s haunting closing song, “Love Is Blindness.” U2 has always been a band that has been quite protective of their creative process, and judging by the looseness and candour demonstrated by the band as we see them revisit old songs and experiment with arrangements (we see Bono yelling out upcoming chord changes to the rest of the group), it’s clear that Guggenheim was able to cultivate an intimate level of trust with his subjects.

Shot over the course of six months earlier this year and completed just a week before its world premiere last month at TIFF, Guggenheim’s documentary digs deep down into the inner workings of a band at a pivotal and tumultuous phase in their career. My only complaint about From the Sky Down would be that the director doesn’t quite dig deep enough when it comes to looking at the whole of Achtung Baby, an album that Bono says in the film “is the reason we’re still here now.” An inordinate amount of attention is paid to the creation of “Mysterious Ways” and “One” (which are important songs, to be sure), while other notable tracks such as “The Fly,” “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses,” and “Until the End of the World” are included only as performances or over the soundtrack, with little or no detail or insight into their origins. One of the album’s best songs, “Ultraviolet (Light My Way),” isn’t mentioned at all, nor can I recall even hearing a snippet of it in the film. Despite this relatively minor negative, From the Sky Down is loaded with positives that make it essential viewing for any U2 fan.

Tagged as: music, U2

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Pearl Jam Twenty

by Drew Kerr on September 21, 2011

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,TIFF

Pearl Jam Twenty (Director: Cameron Crowe): Director Cameron Crowe revisits his rock journalist past with Pearl Jam Twenty, a retrospective of the Seattle band’s career and the first film that was accepted at this year’s festival. The screening I attended came a couple of days after the film’s world premiere and was sandwiched in between a couple of concerts in town for the band, so the numerous hardcore fans in attendance were exuberant and clearly in the midst of a Toronto Pearl Jam love-in. More casual or “lapsed fans” (such as myself), who lost touch with the group following their first decade of megastardom, might find themselves struggling to maintain a heightened level of interest as the story unfolds, however.

That story begins with a pre-grunge band called Mother Love Bone that featured future Pearl Jam members Jeff Ament (bass) and Stone Gossard (guitar), who go on to form Pearl Jam after the drug overdose death of Mother Love Bone singer Andrew Wood. Crowe appropriately handles the material on Wood with delicacy, but the reverence afforded the marginally talented singer’s unmemorable work by his peers is overstated and completely failed to connect with me. Ament and Gossard are left to start over, adding guitarist Mike McCready and vocalist Eddie Vedder, who collectively form the core of the new group. All four members have stayed together since, with somewhat of a revolving door procession of drummers that the film humorously addresses in a short segment (the position is eventually stabilized with the addition of former Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron). The standard rock doc/Behind The Music fare is covered: the band grappling with the effects of their meteoric rise to fame, group power struggles, striving to stay musically relevant, and significant moments from their career, notably their noble attempt at taking on Ticketmaster, and the 2000 Roskilde Festival tragedy in Denmark, where nine fans were crushed to death during the band’s set.

Crowe was the beneficiary of a band that was very forward thinking in documenting their career, allowing him the luxury of having approximately 1200 hours of archival footage at his disposal. Much of it is rare or previously unseen, such as the clip (long rumoured to exist among Pearl Jam and Nirvana fans) of Vedder meeting supposed rival Kurt Cobain at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards. As Vedder explains it, the two bickered with each other in the press, although the media blew their dislike for one another far out of proportion. Other memorable clips include one where Vedder barely manages to contain his rage toward an overly aggressive security guard during one of their Vancouver shows, plus numerous video examples demonstrating Vedder’s dangerous propensity for scaling to the upper levels of various venues while performing and launching himself into the audience. Scattered throughout the film are Crowe-shot live performances, including a version of “Alive” that only served to remind me that if I never hear that, or any of the other singles off their overplayed debut album again, it’ll be too soon. Band interviews reveal individuals who come across a little less serious than is probably their public perception, which is probably because Vedder, who appears to have mellowed with age, was more than insufferable enough for the entire band.

I probably expected more out of Pearl Jam Twenty, just because a big-name director like Crowe was at the helm. He does a thorough, competent job in presenting the band’s colourful story, an integral part of which has been their desire to diverge from the status quo career path that rock bands are supposed to take, but the film fails to stand out in the rock documentary sub-genre.

Pearl Jam Twenty received a worldwide one-time only theatrical screening on September 20th. It will be broadcast on the PBS American Masters series on October 21st, followed by a DVD and Blu-Ray release on October 25th.

Tagged as: #tiff11, music

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Trigger

by Monika Bartyzel on August 25, 2011

in Actors,DVD

This post comes courtesy of Monika Bartyzel, freelance writer and junkie of Canadian cinema, frequently seen at Movies.com and previously sites such as Cinematical and Moviefone.ca. I’m hoping to convince her to contribute more of her insightful writing in the future.

Trigger (Director: Bruce McDonald): Trigger is a love letter – a love letter to Toronto, to growing old, to memories, to music, and – most importantly – to the late Tracy Wright. It’s a film with dual meanings – the story as it lives out in the film, and the real world in subtext. Luckily, it’s not one where reality trumps fiction or fiction obscures reality. Instead, coincidental circumstance merges both in a way that works beautifully as a tale of weathered friendship as well as a showcase for the many talents of Wright.

For the uninitiated: In 2008, Canadian filmmaker Bruce McDonald re-watched My Dinner with Andre, and was itching to do a barebones piece using the same discussion-over-dinner style. He lured scribe Daniel MacIvor with the idea, who in turn convinced the filmmaker that it should break out of one location and become the story of two men out in Toronto. It became two women, Tracy Wright was invited to participate, and when she learned that she had six months to live, the film was fast-tracked and shot with astonishing indie speed, becoming one of her last films.

The world of Trigger is simple. Two women (Wright’s Vic and Molly Parker’s Kat), who haven’t seen each other for years, meet for dinner. Vic is the aging rocker who has kept the bare-bones lifestyle, and struggles to balance her own cynicism with her quest for spiritual relief. Kat is the rocker-gone-mainstream-success, the woman who puts on a show but yearns for the honesty of her previous life. Within moments, their inner dams are broken and skeletons start climbing out of their psyches – addiction, pain, betrayal, feelings of uselessness… Each woman is the knowing face of the other’s past, both the only person who can really understand them and the exact person who is too dangerous to see. It’s impossible for either to maintain false civility as their inner demons are released, teasing both danger and catharsis.

The Andre-ish start quickly bubbles into a Before Sunset structure as the women step outside and traverse the city over the course of one night. Each locale – restaurant, home, club – seems to bring out a new revelation, many of which have an eerie similarity to Wright’s real world outside of the film. (A similarity that MacIvor assures is a coincidence.) The pair discuss addiction, friendship, families, work, life, mortality, and all of the minutiae and drama that clutch onto our lives.

These moments seems incredibly intimate to real life while also being perfectly contained in the film, existing as a natural form of method acting rather than moments where real life rips attention away from the fictional film. They are much like the scenes in Before Sunset when Ethan Hawke’s Jesse talks about his marital discontent, soon after his own real-life marriage dissolved. While the stories aren’t the same, the emotional truth is, and unleashing just that little amount of real-life pain gives the fictional journey all the more weight – the presence of real, never-to-be-released tears trumping carefully planned crying. In fact, that slight blending of fiction and reality allow us to feel the wall the actresses built between themselves and the material, which in the context of Trigger, feels like the characters’ own safety mechanisms.

Bruce McDonald’s straightforward filmmaking is an apt companion to their interpersonal exploration. There are no stunning visuals or slick camerawork to make this feel like a big production. The camera just lurks, almost voyeuristically capturing the experience, and rather than controlling our attention, it’s all up to the actresses – particularly Wright. When the cinematic moments are closest to real life and Wright speaks, the camera is content to stay on her, lovingly but also quietly mesmerized, just like those times when we get so caught up in a moment or piece of beauty that the rest of the world, the screen, or the film fades away. Instead of a slick package dictating our reaction with angles, light, and swelling music, it’s up to Wright and Parker to make us feel, which makes each moment that much more real – there’s little between the performance and the audience.

It helps that everything seems to be a reflection of the other. There is Vic and Tracy Wright – two separate stories that coincidentally come together into a whole, and the glue is the time and place – Toronto. Each location reflects an aspect of the story, from the crispness of a classy restaurant reflecting the initial false civility of the affair, to a school emphasizing the fact that you can long for the past, though your current self can never fit into it. Wright was an important piece of the indie film and theatre scene in the city, and Trigger manages to express her moments in time as well as her talents – not the glitz and glam but the hands-on, dirty, creative energy.

Each piece intermingles with the rest and continues to flow back and forth between all these aspects in a way that could only work as well in that time, place, and circumstance. When Vic says “I don’t care about the destination; I’m more concerned about the velocity,” it speaks as much to real life as it does to the plot’s experience and the nature of nostalgia in both the city and beyond. It speaks to growing old, to struggling to find a place, to settling, to convincing yourself that the false is good, to trying to find faith, and most certainly to let an actress thrive in a role she wasn’t usually awarded, while giving her a vehicle to express some of her final moments in time.

As a DVD treatment, however, one can’t help but wonder (or hope) if this release is the placeholder before a special edition. The film is packaged with two all-too-brief “extras” – a few short clips of the table read the actors did before the film, and a trailer for TO in 24, the latter of which isn’t clearly explained to be a trailer (it’s titled “One Breath”), and seems like a random short film slapped on to fill space.

Obviously, this film is minimalist and there likely wasn’t the budget for special features like a making-of, a retrospective of Wright’s work, a look at the Toronto musical talent featured in the film, or other highly produced goodies. That said, there are a myriad of options that could have bolstered the release that would have taken much less effort – a brief blip from the filmmakers/collaborators about Wright, her filmography and biography, the TIFF Q&A’s, or even Don McKellar’s letter to friends upon her death, which was subsequently published for the fans who mourned her. As a production that came together in a shockingly brief amount of time, Trigger is at least begging for a commentary or two, to talk about how all of this came together, and how they pulled it off so fast and so well.

Perhaps in the future. For now, however, I urge you to watch the film, and use the links below as your special features.

eOne released Trigger on DVD in Canada on July 26, 2011. Help support Toronto Screen Shots by buying it on Amazon.ca.

Earlier Work:

The Letter Don McKellar Wrote to Friends After Her Death:

http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/07/08/thankful-to-the-very-end/

Q&A from TIFF 2010 Premiere

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ghznrbk_v_8&feature=player_embedded

Daniel MacIvor Writes about Tracy:

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/tiff/tiffnews/article/857145–what-tracy-wright-left-behind

In Memoriam:

Notes on Her Memorial:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/theatre/nestruck-on-theatre/notes-from-a-memorial-for-tracy-wright/article1699971/

Tagged as: addiction, alcoholism, friendship, music

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Love Shines

by Drew Kerr on May 30, 2011

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,Hot Docs

Love Shines (Director: Doug Arrowsmith): Love Shines is a first-rate, in-depth portrait of acclaimed Toronto singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith. Director Arrowsmith, a hardcore Sexsmith devotee, avoids turning his film into a fanboy gushfest; instead, he unabashedly presents the singer with all of his flaws nakedly on display. Sexsmith is a painfully insecure and introverted individual – your classic “tortured artist”, as it were – and it’s surprising how much access into his life he gives Arrowsmith, in whom he clearly put a great deal of trust. Shot over the course of seven years, the documentary was originally conceived to stop filming after Sexsmith’s then career high of headlining at Toronto’s famed Massey Hall, back in 2006. Instead, Arrowsmith kept shooting, which presented the opportunity to chronicle the recording of Sexsmith’s twelfth album, Long Player Late Bloomer. Those recording sessions, which provide some intriguing insight into Sexsmith’s creative process, are the centrepiece of Love Shines, and the film is significantly better because of it.

Sexsmith, for those unfamiliar with his career (and I counted myself in that group before watching the documentary), has been a perennial critics’ favourite since his debut solo album came out in 1995 (he released an album four years prior as a member of Toronto indie band The Uncool). Peers such as Elvis Costello, Steve Earle, Leslie Feist, and Daniel Lanois have been singing his praises for years and do so throughout the film. In fact, Costello, one of Sexsmith’s biggest champions, equates his skill for creating melodies to that of Paul McCartney. Despite the accolades, Sexsmith still sells a paltry number of albums, which is a constant source of angst for him. The ongoing struggle with maintaining artistic integrity while seeking mainstream success informs much of the narrative in Love Shines, leading to the enlistment of mega-producer Bob Rock to oversee the recording of Long Player Late Bloomer. Rock is primarily known as a hard rock/metal producer, based on his earlier work on a number of hugely successful albums from the likes of Bon Jovi, Motley Crue, and The Cult. Most notably, he was Metallica’s exclusive producer for 12 years and is more than used to working with an artist and having their every move filmed, as was the case for the fantastic doc on the band, Some Kind Of Monster. In recent years, he’s diversified his scope to include acts such as Nina Gordon, The Tragically Hip, and Michael Bublé. Sexsmith hopes the pairing will raise his profile via the pure name recognition that the producer brings, as well as increase album sales by way of the more commercially palatable and highly polished sound that Rock gets from the artists he works with. A stellar group of veteran musicians is brought on board to play on the album, including drummer Josh Freese (Nine Inch Nails, A Perfect Circle), guitarist Rusty Anderson (Paul McCartney), bassist Paul Bushnell (Elton John, Sugarland), and keyboardist Jamie Edwards (Aimee Mann).

Periodic and introspective glimpses back into Sexsmith’s upbringing reveal a shy youngster who struggled with his confidence and endured abuse from bullies while growing up in St. Catharines, Ontario, eventually becoming a father at age 19 after getting his girlfriend pregnant at the same moment he lost his virginity. Certain milestones from Sexsmith’s career are shown, including a home movie scene where we see his parents, watching the 2002 Juno Awards on their home television, become ecstatic over his win for Songwriter of the Year. In it, his mother is seen excitedly taking pictures of the TV screen as her son wins the award, apparently unclear of how a VCR works. It’s one of the funniest (and sweetest) moments in the film. “Funny” is not exactly a word anyone would associate with Sexsmith himself. In his interviews with Arrowsmith, he comes across as a fragile, depressed, and lacking confidence, which reminded me of a line from Bruce Springsteen’s “Better Days”: “It’s a sad man, my friend, who’s livin’ in his own skin and can’t stand the company.” Most of the theatre audience stuck around for the post-screening Q&A session with Sexsmith and Arrowsmith, and I must say I felt downright horrible that I had to leave about halfway through to catch my last Hot Docs screening uptown. As I conspicuously descended the stairs and walked across the front of the theatre, past the singer to the exit, I couldn’t help but worry that Sexsmith was tapping into his ever-present insecurities and wondering why someone wasn’t interested in hearing what he had to say. Does that make me narcissistic or empathetic?

Early indications (it came out in March) indicate that Long Player Late Bloomer won’t propel Sexsmith to significantly new heights of commercial success. The album actually turned out to be a hard sell to prospective music labels, with some ironically rejecting it as being too mainstream. Still, it should improve on the sales numbers from his last several albums and this film (which is now airing on HBO Canada) should help him find a new audience. Whether it’s the excellent music, financial struggles that one wouldn’t expect a “name” musician to face, the strange dichotomy of a guy who hates the spotlight but performs in it for a living, or just the fact that Sexsmith makes for a great underdog story, non-fans will find plenty in Love Shines to hold their interest.