News of Todd Haynes making his first documentary should’ve come as something of a curveball, but it was reported that the “Carol” director is planning a non-fiction project about the Velvet Underground, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Haynes’ “Velvet Goldmine” is such a knowing, textured, and vividly remembered reflection on the glam rock era that it can be easy to forget that its story merely alludes to the likes of Lou Reed.
But the fascination the Velvet Underground holds for Haynes isn’t the only thing that makes this newly announced documentary feel like such a perfect pairing between subject and storyteller. With the landmark “The Velvet Underground & Nico” LP, Reed and his cohorts effectively forged a new language for countercultural expression, synthesizing the subversive pop stylings of Andy Warhol into a rock movement that had already been neutered of its rebellious beginnings. With films like “Poison” and “Safe,...
But the fascination the Velvet Underground holds for Haynes isn’t the only thing that makes this newly announced documentary feel like such a perfect pairing between subject and storyteller. With the landmark “The Velvet Underground & Nico” LP, Reed and his cohorts effectively forged a new language for countercultural expression, synthesizing the subversive pop stylings of Andy Warhol into a rock movement that had already been neutered of its rebellious beginnings. With films like “Poison” and “Safe,...
- 8/8/2017
- by David Ehrlich
- Indiewire
However much you might hate Radiohead, nobody hated Radiohead as much as the band hated itself during the shooting of Grant Gee’s 1998 documentary Meeting People Is Easy. And however much you love, or hate, or even feel indifferent toward the group, it has very little to do with Gee’s film, in which Radiohead’s actual music—quite poignantly—becomes almost entirely beside the point, an afterthought to all the promotional demands that making successful art creates and, ultimately, something that takes on a burdensome and disparate life of its own. Nearly 20 years later, Meeting People Is Easy is still the best document of the band’s uniquely uncomfortable stardom. It may even be the best movie ever made about how shitty it is to be famous.
If your initial response to that is “Oh, boo hoo,” then the members of Radiohead would likely agree with you ...
If your initial response to that is “Oh, boo hoo,” then the members of Radiohead would likely agree with you ...
- 5/19/2017
- by Sean O'Neal
- avclub.com
Radiohead’s weekly sharing of artist-created vignettes has almost come to an end. Since the release of their album, “A Moon Shaped Pool,” the band has shared short films for each of their tracks on Instagram. The last one was for the song “The Numbers,” directed by Grant Gee and filmed in Port Talbot.
Now, to conclude this artistic production, Radiohead is asking fans to help finish the project by giving them a chance to create their own short film for “Daydreaming.” The group shared a new one-minute audio of the song, which features new strings that weren’t included in the original, to download and “complete Radiohead’s series of vignettes.”
“Download the music on the link an submit your video with the hashtag #RHVignette on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. Radiohead will select their favorite and post on Radiohead.com,” states the announcement on their site.
Read More: Radiohead...
Now, to conclude this artistic production, Radiohead is asking fans to help finish the project by giving them a chance to create their own short film for “Daydreaming.” The group shared a new one-minute audio of the song, which features new strings that weren’t included in the original, to download and “complete Radiohead’s series of vignettes.”
“Download the music on the link an submit your video with the hashtag #RHVignette on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. Radiohead will select their favorite and post on Radiohead.com,” states the announcement on their site.
Read More: Radiohead...
- 7/15/2016
- by Liz Calvario
- Indiewire
Asif Kapadia's breathtaking documentary Amy is already wowing critics and fans, so its official release this week makes it a good a time to be reminded of some other great music documentaries.
There's David Byrne's giant suit and Bob Dylan's oversize shades. Two films from Martin Scorsese but just one from Julien Temple. Punk rockers and pop superstars. We count through ten leading music documentaries below.
10. The Filth and The Fury (2000)
Julien Temple's first Sex Pistols film The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle was Malcolm McLaren's make-it-up-as-you-go-along take on things. Twenty years on the same director gave the group the right to reply, including Sid Vicious with some beyond-the-grave archive footage.
9. In Bed with Madonna (1991)
Known as Madonna: Truth or Dare in the Us, this absurdly naughty chronicle of the Queen of Pop's infamous 'Blond Ambition' tour is arguably her greatest on-screen moment. Bitchiness, bottle-fellating...
There's David Byrne's giant suit and Bob Dylan's oversize shades. Two films from Martin Scorsese but just one from Julien Temple. Punk rockers and pop superstars. We count through ten leading music documentaries below.
10. The Filth and The Fury (2000)
Julien Temple's first Sex Pistols film The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle was Malcolm McLaren's make-it-up-as-you-go-along take on things. Twenty years on the same director gave the group the right to reply, including Sid Vicious with some beyond-the-grave archive footage.
9. In Bed with Madonna (1991)
Known as Madonna: Truth or Dare in the Us, this absurdly naughty chronicle of the Queen of Pop's infamous 'Blond Ambition' tour is arguably her greatest on-screen moment. Bitchiness, bottle-fellating...
- 6/30/2015
- Digital Spy
While Jared Leto is being rightfully lauded for his return to acting, and a great turn in "Dallas Buyers Club" that could land him an Oscar nomination, you might have forgotten he already has a recent movie award in his pocket. Last year the Leto-directed documentary "Artifact" nabbed the People's Choice Award For Documentary at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival and as it heads to VOD, a new trailer has emerged. So, what is this doc all about? It finds Leto turning the camera toward his (pretty terrible, but best-selling) band 30 Seconds To Mars, as they battle their record label in making the album This Is War. So is this another "I Am Trying To Break Your Heart," "Some Kind Of Monster" or "Meeting People Is Easy"? Well, it probably depends on how you feel about the band as our Doc NYC review reports that the behind-the-scenes stuff is fascinating,...
- 11/25/2013
- by Kevin Jagernauth
- The Playlist
Few actresses can make a single look speak volumes as much as Michelle Williams can, and those powers have been harnessed for the new video from indie act Wild Nothing and their video for "Paradise." Giving off a "Lost In Translation" meets "Meeting People Is Easy Vibe," the hazy, gauzy spot finds the actress wandering through airports, reading from Iris Murdoch's "Word Child" and hanging at what looks like Niagara Falls. All this while the band's heavily '80s indebted tune makes you long to leave the office and just get out, anywhere possible. Anyway, give it spin below. [Vulture]...
- 10/23/2012
- by Kevin Jagernauth
- The Playlist
Director Emmett Malloy has returned with an excellent follow up to 2009’s “Under Great Northern Lights” with another winning concert documentary titled "Big Easy Express." In a tight 60-odd minutes, the film follows three bands, Mumford and Sons, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes and Old Crow Medicine Show, as they travel from San Francisco to New Orleans, Louisiana, on a sold-out 6-stop tour, aboard the most beautiful-looking train you've ever seen. From the opening tracking shot that follows 'Magnetic Zeroes' singer Jade Castrinos as she walks through the various rustic train cars, past Mumford and Sons playing in one, 'Old Crow' in another and right down the back to Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, Malloy's film is not only beautifully soundtracked, courtesy of all three bands, but is also dreamily captured.
Though essentially a live concert film, Malloy manages to chronicle the more intimate and visually arresting jam sessions happening off stage,...
Though essentially a live concert film, Malloy manages to chronicle the more intimate and visually arresting jam sessions happening off stage,...
- 5/1/2012
- by Samantha Chater
- The Playlist
Wg Sebald's sprawling novel The Rings of Saturn has inspired a movie. The composer of its soundtrack tells Ben Beaumont-Thomas why only mashed-up Schubert would do
"The book is very ghost-like," says Leyland James Kirby. "So the music is ghost-like too. It can be easily ignored." This seems a strange thing for a composer to say of his music, but then Kirby is talking about the soundtrack he has written for a film inspired by a very strange book: Wg Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, a sprawling work based around a walk Sebald took along the East Anglian coast and the thoughts it provoked in him. Taking in everything from the Holocaust to outer space, from Chinese trains to crappy hotels, the 1995 novel so struck film-maker Grant Gee that he retraced the writer's footsteps, talking to people along the way, and turned the results into a film called Patience (After...
"The book is very ghost-like," says Leyland James Kirby. "So the music is ghost-like too. It can be easily ignored." This seems a strange thing for a composer to say of his music, but then Kirby is talking about the soundtrack he has written for a film inspired by a very strange book: Wg Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, a sprawling work based around a walk Sebald took along the East Anglian coast and the thoughts it provoked in him. Taking in everything from the Holocaust to outer space, from Chinese trains to crappy hotels, the 1995 novel so struck film-maker Grant Gee that he retraced the writer's footsteps, talking to people along the way, and turned the results into a film called Patience (After...
- 1/26/2012
- by Ben Beaumont-Thomas
- The Guardian - Film News
If you go into Inni thinking you’ll receive Heima Part 2, you either be sadly disappointed or extremely grateful because it is anything but. Rather than show us Sigur Rós’ atmospherically sumptuous music against the gorgeous expanse of their Icelandic homeland, director Vincent Moriset captures the bombastic energy of one performance in a monochrome, scratchy gray. Shot with intimate compositions of abstract shapes and completely unbalanced framing, we experience the assault of being at the concert hall. Through a show from November 2008 at Alexandra Palace in London, we are transported to a world of raw, unbridled aural chaos—the beauty and awesomeness of the band let loose to travel freely beyond the stage.
Whereas their first documentary infused a lot of interview footage with the artistically controlled performances, Morisset has decided to pair his stripped down visuals with a limited archive displaying the world’s ignorance of their origins. With...
Whereas their first documentary infused a lot of interview footage with the artistically controlled performances, Morisset has decided to pair his stripped down visuals with a limited archive displaying the world’s ignorance of their origins. With...
- 10/8/2011
- by jpraup@gmail.com (thefilmstage.com)
- The Film Stage
As three forthcoming films attest, music biographies are at their most compelling when warring egos are intrinsic to the tale
Who actually watches rock documentaries? It's a persistent question, invited yet again by three prestigious new studies of George Harrison (Martin Scorsese's Living in the Material World), U2 (Davis Guggenheim's From the Sky Down) and Pearl Jam (Cameron Crowe's Pearl Jam Twenty). While not as Pravda-like as the record company-funded featurettes you find on DVD extras or late-night TV, they are all films made by fans for fans. The latter two (Scorsese's epic is more searching) are basically benign propaganda about decent people overcoming obstacles in the name of musical excellence.
The problem lies less with individual film-makers than with the form itself. I've seen a lot of rock documentaries and would recommend maybe a dozen. In the vast majority, the stories are so well-established that all...
Who actually watches rock documentaries? It's a persistent question, invited yet again by three prestigious new studies of George Harrison (Martin Scorsese's Living in the Material World), U2 (Davis Guggenheim's From the Sky Down) and Pearl Jam (Cameron Crowe's Pearl Jam Twenty). While not as Pravda-like as the record company-funded featurettes you find on DVD extras or late-night TV, they are all films made by fans for fans. The latter two (Scorsese's epic is more searching) are basically benign propaganda about decent people overcoming obstacles in the name of musical excellence.
The problem lies less with individual film-makers than with the form itself. I've seen a lot of rock documentaries and would recommend maybe a dozen. In the vast majority, the stories are so well-established that all...
- 10/1/2011
- by Dorian Lynskey
- The Guardian - Film News
Last year in Prague a group of Radiohead fans set out to make a concert film just using flip cameras in the audience, from about 50 different perspectives. It's not a new idea, nor does it sound like a particularly good one (even with vast improvements in the quality of flipcam video), but the final result of all that footage edited together was surprisingly engrossing.
Radiohead thought so too, and in what seems to be one of the greatest rock story wet dreams of all time, they gave the Czech fans-turned-filmmakers the actual sound board recordings to turn the endearing amateur project into a real deal concert film.
Radiohead haven't released a concert film since "Live at the Astoria" in 1995 and you can't count documentaries like "Meeting People Is Easy" which is not at all focused on concert performance, so this new Prague film is kind of a gem. And best,...
Radiohead thought so too, and in what seems to be one of the greatest rock story wet dreams of all time, they gave the Czech fans-turned-filmmakers the actual sound board recordings to turn the endearing amateur project into a real deal concert film.
Radiohead haven't released a concert film since "Live at the Astoria" in 1995 and you can't count documentaries like "Meeting People Is Easy" which is not at all focused on concert performance, so this new Prague film is kind of a gem. And best,...
- 9/2/2010
- by Brandon Kim
- ifc.com
[This article is part of our Radiohead Fanatic Fortnight -- check out our box set giveaway here.]
When Radiohead achieved worldwide fame following the success of "Ok Computer," Grant Gee was there capturing it all with an array of cameras, some fresh ideas and a lot of style. Ten plus years later, that style still looks fresh in his documentary "Meeting People Is Easy," an uncomfortable chronicle of Radiohead's 1998 tour, a portrait of the band as they hit the height of their success as well as their breaking point as a group. A prolific music video director (he also directed the video for Radiohead's "No Surprises"), Gee's since gone on to shoot more feature documentaries, including 2007's "Joy Division," which was critically adored but slightly overshadowed by "Control," Anton Corbijn's narrative biopic of the band's lead singer Ian Curtis that came out the same year.
I caught Gee on the phone while he was clearly on holiday, and found out he was maneuvering on a few potential feature projects.
When Radiohead achieved worldwide fame following the success of "Ok Computer," Grant Gee was there capturing it all with an array of cameras, some fresh ideas and a lot of style. Ten plus years later, that style still looks fresh in his documentary "Meeting People Is Easy," an uncomfortable chronicle of Radiohead's 1998 tour, a portrait of the band as they hit the height of their success as well as their breaking point as a group. A prolific music video director (he also directed the video for Radiohead's "No Surprises"), Gee's since gone on to shoot more feature documentaries, including 2007's "Joy Division," which was critically adored but slightly overshadowed by "Control," Anton Corbijn's narrative biopic of the band's lead singer Ian Curtis that came out the same year.
I caught Gee on the phone while he was clearly on holiday, and found out he was maneuvering on a few potential feature projects.
- 4/9/2009
- by Brandon Kim
- ifc.com
- During the Toronto film fest they called it the perfect compliment film to Anton Corbijn's Control, so it seems only natural that The Weinstein Company picked up the doc entitled Joy Division. Directed by Grant Gee (whose Meeting People Is Easy is one of my fav. the behind the scenes docs on the music scene), this is a chronological account of the influential late 1970s English rock band. Expect some sort of early 2008 release - perhaps a release tie in with Control's eventual DVD release....
- 9/14/2007
- IONCINEMA.com
Toronto International Film Festival
TORONTO -- Arriving at the best possible moment, this doc about groundbreaking postpunk band Joy Division is playing festivals alongside Control, music-video master Anton Corbijn's well-received feature on the group. A solid, well presented history of the band's brief career, Joy Division has appeal for music buffs but could get mileage in theaters from a smart coordination with the feature film's release.
Placing a straightforward, chronological account of the band's existence in the context of Manchester, a city whose re-emergence from post-Industrial gloom is credited to the pop music explosion Joy Division helped start, the doc contains plenty of testimony from all the surviving key musical players. (Singer Ian Curtis killed himself in 1980; producer Martin Hannett, credited with inventing much of the group's distinctive sound, died in 1991.) Happily, TV host-turned-music entrepreneur Tony Wilson, who died last month, is among the interviewees. (Wilson was the colorful subject of Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People, which would make a fan-pleasing triple feature with Joy Division and Control.)
Veteran music critic Jon Savage wrote the film, which makes sure to recount seminal moments like the 1976 Sex Pistols show that inspired so many bands, but it's group member Bernard Sumner who makes the most eloquent cultural observation about the shift from in-your-face Pistols-style punk to the more introspective music Joy Division helped instigate: "Sooner or later somebody was going to want to say more than 'fuck you' ... to say 'I'm fucked.'"
A good assortment of vintage performance clips chart the quick evolution of Joy Division's style, which was not only a matter of sound but of Curtis' spasm-like movements at the microphone, a dance that evoked possession by malevolent spirits and foreshadowed the epilepsy that struck the singer suddenly, near the end of his life. As one who witnessed those shows puts it, the onstage surrender was "like he sacrificed something for you" in order to follow his muse.
Little of this material will be news to devoted followers of the band, though even they may be interested to know that Sumner never liked listening to their debut album Unknown Pleasures and that Peter Saville, who designed that iconic record sleeve, hadn't even listened to the music. For the rest of the audience, just the right amount of narrative detail, archive footage, and analysis is included.
Director Grant Gee, known for the Radiohead film Meeting People Is Easy, does little out of the ordinary here, outside of the appealing way he accompanies audio-only archive material with cleverly stylized waveforms. For a group whose influence had so much to do with the unintuitive manipulation of familiar sounds, that's a knowing touch.
JOY DIVISION
No Distributor
Hudson Prods. Ltd. / Brown Owl Films
Credits:
Director: Grant Gee
Writer: Jon Savage
Producers: Tom Astor, Tom Atencio, Jacqui Edenbrow
Director of photography: Grant Gee
Music: Jerry Chater, Rashad Omar
Editor: Jerry Chater
Running time -- 95 minutes
No MPAA rating...
TORONTO -- Arriving at the best possible moment, this doc about groundbreaking postpunk band Joy Division is playing festivals alongside Control, music-video master Anton Corbijn's well-received feature on the group. A solid, well presented history of the band's brief career, Joy Division has appeal for music buffs but could get mileage in theaters from a smart coordination with the feature film's release.
Placing a straightforward, chronological account of the band's existence in the context of Manchester, a city whose re-emergence from post-Industrial gloom is credited to the pop music explosion Joy Division helped start, the doc contains plenty of testimony from all the surviving key musical players. (Singer Ian Curtis killed himself in 1980; producer Martin Hannett, credited with inventing much of the group's distinctive sound, died in 1991.) Happily, TV host-turned-music entrepreneur Tony Wilson, who died last month, is among the interviewees. (Wilson was the colorful subject of Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People, which would make a fan-pleasing triple feature with Joy Division and Control.)
Veteran music critic Jon Savage wrote the film, which makes sure to recount seminal moments like the 1976 Sex Pistols show that inspired so many bands, but it's group member Bernard Sumner who makes the most eloquent cultural observation about the shift from in-your-face Pistols-style punk to the more introspective music Joy Division helped instigate: "Sooner or later somebody was going to want to say more than 'fuck you' ... to say 'I'm fucked.'"
A good assortment of vintage performance clips chart the quick evolution of Joy Division's style, which was not only a matter of sound but of Curtis' spasm-like movements at the microphone, a dance that evoked possession by malevolent spirits and foreshadowed the epilepsy that struck the singer suddenly, near the end of his life. As one who witnessed those shows puts it, the onstage surrender was "like he sacrificed something for you" in order to follow his muse.
Little of this material will be news to devoted followers of the band, though even they may be interested to know that Sumner never liked listening to their debut album Unknown Pleasures and that Peter Saville, who designed that iconic record sleeve, hadn't even listened to the music. For the rest of the audience, just the right amount of narrative detail, archive footage, and analysis is included.
Director Grant Gee, known for the Radiohead film Meeting People Is Easy, does little out of the ordinary here, outside of the appealing way he accompanies audio-only archive material with cleverly stylized waveforms. For a group whose influence had so much to do with the unintuitive manipulation of familiar sounds, that's a knowing touch.
JOY DIVISION
No Distributor
Hudson Prods. Ltd. / Brown Owl Films
Credits:
Director: Grant Gee
Writer: Jon Savage
Producers: Tom Astor, Tom Atencio, Jacqui Edenbrow
Director of photography: Grant Gee
Music: Jerry Chater, Rashad Omar
Editor: Jerry Chater
Running time -- 95 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 9/11/2007
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
PARK CITY -- Seventh Art Releasing has picked up worldwide distribution rights to Philip Anagnos' debut feature documentary Haack: The King of Techno. The film had its world premiere at the current Slamdance Film Festival. Directed by Anagnos, the film chronicles the life and creations of Bruce Haack, a musician/inventor who is known in some circles as the father of electronic music. "Bruce Haack was a wild artist and brilliant musician," Anagnos said. "And I hope that the documentary acts as a living, breathing, dancing ode to the man himself." The film fits in line with Seventh Art's library of music-related docs. The company hasi handled Better Living Through Circuitry, Pleasure + Pain and Meeting People Is Easy. Seventh Art vp James Eowan negotiated the deal on behalf of his company along with the filmmaker.
- 1/19/2004
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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