Tag Archives: documentary

Daniel Lanois: Here Is What Is

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Here Is What Is movie poster

 

Daniel Lanois is a unique musi­cian, as gifted a singer-songwriter in his own right as he is a col­lab­o­ra­tor and pro­ducer. I orig­i­nally came to rec­og­nize his name after find­ing it listed in the cred­its of many key items in The Dork Report’s for­mi­da­ble music col­lec­tion, includ­ing Peter Gabriel’s So and Us, U2’s The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby, and Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy and Time Out of Mind. His 1993 solo album For the Beauty of Wynona remains an all-time per­sonal favorite.

The fea­ture doc­u­men­tary Here Is What Is pre­miered at the Toronto Film Fes­ti­val in 2007, directed by Lanois, Adam Samuels, and Adam Vol­lick. It cap­tures the record­ing of the album of the same name, but also serves as a kind of ret­ro­spec­tive and mis­sion state­ment. Con­ver­sa­tions between Lanois and early men­tor (now equal) Brian Eno punc­tu­ate the film. Lanois states to Eno his inten­tions for the movie: to cre­ate a film about the beauty of music, not every­thing that sur­rounds it (which I took to mean hagiog­ra­phy, celebrity gos­sip, and the some­times tedious behind-the-sceens doc­u­men­ta­tion typ­i­cal of the genre). Eno sug­gests that his film should try to show peo­ple that art often grows out of noth­ing, or from the sim­plest of seeds in the right sit­u­a­tions, not from what out­siders might assume are the mirac­u­lous inspi­ra­tions of allegedly bril­liant or gifted artistes.

Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno in Here Is What IsDaniel Lanois and Brian Eno record­ing their new ambi­ent mas­ter­work, “Music for Staircases”

Lanois is Cana­dian by birth, but has a spe­cial affin­ity for the Amer­i­can South, espe­cially New Orleans. He cred­its New Orleans for the orig­i­nal sen­sual groove that formed the basis of rock music. Per­haps intended as a visual echo of this the­ory, the stun­ningly beau­ti­ful Car­olina Cerisola often appears danc­ing in her scanties.

Lanois details his long­time, fruit­ful col­lab­o­ra­tion with drum­mer Brian Blade. Leg­endary key­boardist of The Band, Garth Hud­son, also joins them in the stu­dio for some truly awe­some per­for­mances. One of my favorite sequences inter­cuts between “The Maker” per­formed by Lanois’ band live in stu­dio, cov­ered by Willie Nel­son and Emmy­lou Har­ris, and Lanois’ band live on stage. Billy Bob Thorn­ton, still friends from col­lab­o­rat­ing on the score to Sling Blade in 1996, drops in for a visit. We catch excit­ing glimpses of record­ing U2’s forth­com­ing album (since chris­tened No Line on the Hori­zon, to be released in Feb­ru­ary 2009) with Eno and Steve Lillywhite.

Daniel Lanois in Here Is What IsWhich but­ton dials down Bono’s ego?

Lanois names a pri­mar­ily influ­ence to be the Jimi Hen­drix Expe­ri­ence, which he describes as a fairly straight­for­ward rock trio but with ambi­tious, exper­i­men­tal pro­duc­tion. He describes how he him­self approaches pro­duc­tion, in just one word: “feel.” He report­edly had a con­tentious rela­tion­ship with Dylan in the stu­dio, but the resul­tant albums are clas­sics, and Dylan affirmed that “you can’t buy ‘feel.’” Another Lanois apho­rism, “max­i­mize the room,” means to make the most of what you have, rather than invite guest musi­cians or order up more equipment.

Here Is What Is fea­tures full per­for­mances of songs, which is espe­cially wel­come com­pared to two recent music doc­u­men­taries recently screened by The Dork Report: Low in Europe (read The Dork Report review) and You May Need a Mur­derer (read The Dork Report review), which both shy away from actu­ally show­ing Low per­form. Here Is What Is’s visu­als are some­times com­pro­mised with cheesy video effects. The film is at its best when sim­ply fol­low­ing the hyp­notic move­ments of Lanois’ hands on his pedal steel guitar.

Offi­cial movie site: daniellanois.com/hereiswhatis

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Low: You May Need a Murderer

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Low You May Need a Murderer

 

It may seem overkill for the so-called slow­core band Low to be the sub­ject of another doc­u­men­tary fea­ture film only a mere four years after Low in Europe, but it must be because they’re just so inter­est­ing. Film­maker David Kleijwegt’s You May Need a Mur­derer could just as well be titled Low in Amer­ica, as he speaks with found­ing mem­bers Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker at home in Duluth, Min­nesota, and on tour across Amer­ica in sup­port of the Drums & Guns album. The key char­ac­ter­is­tics of that record are what most inform the film: Sparhawk’s mood post-nervous break­down, and Low’s most overtly expressed social and polit­i­cal com­men­tary yet. Low had also just adopted a new bass player, Matt Liv­ingston, after Zak Sally’s long tenure, but he does not par­tic­i­pate (he’s only barely glimpsed, even in live onstage footage).

You May Need a Mur­derer is a much more sat­is­fy­ing film over­all than Low in Europe. Whether by their own desire to open up or by Kleijwegt’s per­sua­sive inter­view skills, Sparhawk and Parker are notably more can­did and direct, espe­cially on the topic of their faith. Which is exactly what one would sin­gle out as the most inter­est­ing thing about Low: Sparhawk and Parker are a mar­ried Mor­mon cou­ple that that tithe a tenth of all their income to the church. I sup­pose Low might belong in that rare cat­e­gory of bands whose music is often char­ac­ter­ized by reli­gious beliefs, like the often overtly Chris­t­ian U2, but would never be filed under “Inspi­ra­tional” in record stores. Unlike U2’s joy­ous hymns and opti­mistic calls to activism, Low’s inspi­ra­tions are con­sid­er­ably more dark and apocalyptic.

Low You May Need a Murderer

When Low gets polit­i­cal they do so with a vengeance. Sparhawk is in despair over America’s econ­omy and pol­i­tics, and has long believed that the world may reach a cri­sis point in his life­time (he stops short of pre­dict­ing it will actu­ally “end”). Sparhawk’s gen­uine beliefs gives him the real author­ity to crit­i­cize George W. Bush’s claim to faith. The title song “You May Need a Mur­derer” is sung from the point of view of one who goes before his god and asks to be used as a war­rior. It becomes clear that the speaker is in effect star­ing into a mir­ror, bring­ing his own bag­gage to an imag­i­nary con­ver­sa­tion, and jus­ti­fy­ing his own dark impulses. Sparhawk is, need­less to say, talk­ing about self-proclaimed men of faith like Bush and Tony Blair. The song is utterly ter­ri­fy­ing, and raises the hairs on the back of my neck every time. It may be the ulti­mate state­ment on the topic, and does not com­pare favor­ably to the similarly-themed song by Bright Eyes, “When the Pres­i­dent Talks to God.”

The most sur­pris­ing per­sonal topic to come up is Sparhawk’s appar­ent ner­vous break­down in 2005. We see Sparhawk appear­ing very ner­vous back­stage before a show, but oth­er­wise func­tional. But he describes him­self as hav­ing been “clin­i­cally delu­sional” at the point of his break­down, and while hav­ing nom­i­nally recov­ered, he also cops to being a drug addict. To him, the biggest con­flict these two aspects of his life have is with his religion.

Must Read: The Speed of Silence review

Must Read: Pop­Mat­ters review

Offi­cial Low site: www.chairkickers.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Purity, Ubiquity & Legibility: Gary Hustwit’s Helvetica

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Helvetica movie poster

 

Hel­vetica (the doc­u­men­tary film) is not about Hel­vetica (the type­face), per se. Rather, it’s about the arts of graphic design and typog­ra­phy, their prac­ti­tion­ers, and how they affect our daily lives.

Each lumi­nary talk­ing head has a dif­fer­ent expla­na­tion of Helvetica’s appeal and longevity: neu­tral­ity, leg­i­bil­ity, per­fec­tion (unlike more ornate type­faces, it is arguably com­prised of the purest state of let­ter­forms and can’t be improved), cleans­ing renewal (tran­si­tion­ing the tacky design of the 1950s to the bold and to-the-point 60s), problem-solving, sooth­ing­ness, and just plain beauty. Its detrac­tors see its ubiq­uity as self-perpetuating, due to design­ers’ momen­tum, habit, and bad taste. The enthu­si­asm of the enthu­si­asts is infec­tious, but the movie doesn’t mock them or hold them up as objects of curios­ity culled from a nerdy sub­cul­ture (as does, arguably, The King of Kong).

A scene from Gary Hustwit's HelveticaThe days when typog­ra­phers had dirty fingers

Thank­fully for its sub­ject mat­ter of graphic design, direc­tor Gary Hus­twit presents a highly pol­ished work full of excel­lent typog­ra­phy, motion graph­ics, and edit­ing. This Dork Reporter bemoans the ten­dency of many doc­u­men­taries (like Spell­bound and Word­play) to use their non-fiction badge as a press pass to excuse grain, sloppy fram­ing, and poor sound.

This Dork Reporter is a self-educated web designer, not prop­erly trailed in the art and/or craft of graphic design. But he knows enough to applaud the film for touch­ing upon two of the biggest aspects of typog­ra­phy that every layper­son should internalize:

  • Know your terms: Type­faces are designs. Fonts are par­tic­u­lar imple­men­ta­tions of those designs. There are mul­ti­ple fonts based on the type­face Helvetica.
  • Arial is a poor Hel­vetica knock-off com­mis­sioned by Microsoft to side-step the expen­sive licens­ing fees. It is an abom­i­na­tion, a blight upon this planet earth, and should be sum­mar­ily deleted from humanity’s hard dri­ves. (q.v. The Scourge of Arial)

A scene from Gary Hustwit's HelveticaWe’d be lost with­out Hel­vetica… literally

Finally, this Dork Reporter must note a major dis­ap­point­ment: I rented Hel­vetica from Net­flix, and the disc arrived embla­zoned with a “Red Enve­lope Enter­tain­ment” label. Bizarrely, there were no signs of the exten­sive bonus fea­tures promised on the movie’s offi­cial web­site. Has Net­flix begun releas­ing “not-so-special” edi­tions of DVDs omit­ting the bonus fea­tures avail­able on retail edi­tions? This Dork Reporter, long a relier on Net­flix to help keep his DVD shelves from groan­ing into a black hole of over­con­sump­tion, stamps his feet in frustration.

Offi­cial movie site: www.helveticafilm.com

Buy any of these fine prod­ucts from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report:

 

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

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The King of Kong movie poster

 

First, full dis­clo­sure: I work for the movie com­pany that dis­trib­uted The King of Kong: A Fist­ful of Quar­ters. My minis­cule role in mar­ket­ing the film was lim­ited to design­ing the offi­cial movie site, and I am under no oblig­a­tion or pro­hi­bi­tion to write this review (which hap­pens to be pos­i­tive, any­way). Any opin­ions expressed here are mine alone. I mostly avoid writ­ing about movies released by my employer. I’m mak­ing a rare excep­tion in this case because The King of Kong has been out of the­aters for some time, and my per­sonal opin­ion on this blog is cer­tainly not going to have any impact on its rev­enue. Hav­ing just seen it again, I have a few thoughts I would like to record here.

I would hate to be an Eng­lish teacher, at any level, for one rea­son: the count­less “it’s a metaphor for life” papers I would have to grade. Prob­a­bly one of the biggest cliches of kids’ essays is to pull out that refrain, e.g. “the light at the end of the dock in The Great Gatsby in a metaphor for life.” After grad­ing a few dozen of those I just might want to start throw­ing things and switch to another career, like, say for exam­ple, web design.

Billy Mitchell in The King of KongBilly Mitchell with the ladies of Namco

That said, I’m about to com­mit that very griev­ous essay sin: if any­thing is a metaphor for life, it’s Don­key Kong. Let’s look at the evidence:

  • Don­key Kong is an intensely dif­fi­cult game.
  • The game’s god/creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, did not sup­ply it with a pre­de­fined ending.
  • The num­ber of lev­els is unde­clared at the outset.
  • Any­one with a quar­ter can play.
  • Most peo­ple die very quickly.
  • A very select few thrive and have their names entered into history.
  • How you play, not just how long you live, deter­mines your score. In other words, you can reach the exact same point in the same level as some­body else but have a higher score.
  • Even the best of the best play­ers can­not “win” the game; every­one will even­tu­ally drop dead with­out warn­ing and through no game­play fault of their own. This point has become known as the game’s “kill screen.”

That list of bul­let points just about cov­ers it; Don­key Kong is so clearly a metaphor for the human expe­ri­ence that the film thank­fully doesn’t even bother to explic­itly state its themes. Kids, let that be a lesson.

The King of KongSteve Wiebe preps for the big game

The King of Kong is a very rous­ing film that works best to an audi­ence; if pos­si­ble, watch the dvd with friends. From what I can gather, view­ers respond to two basic things: the frankly weird sub­cul­ture of pro­fes­sional video gam­ing, and the more uni­ver­sal story of the under­dog vs. an entrenched power net­work. A sus­pi­cion is gain­ing trac­tion that the story is too per­fect, the hero Steve Wieve too all-american, and the vil­lain Billy Mitchell too evil. The movie’s offi­cial mes­sage board fea­tures heated dis­cus­sions includ­ing actual fig­ures fea­tured in the film, and doc­u­men­tar­ian Jason Scott has gone so far as to pub­lish a pas­sion­ate tear­down of The King of Kong’s film­mak­ers’ ethics.

Per­son­ally, I wish the film had been more clear on a few points:

• As you can read on the above links, Billy Mitchell’s well-timed taped sub­mis­sion did seem fishy but turned out to be gen­uine.
• Most view­ers (includ­ing myself) all ask the same ques­tion: how long does it take to play one of these “per­fect” games? The movie finally dis­closes the answer inci­den­tally near the end, as if the film­mak­ers weren’t delib­er­ately with­hold­ing the infor­ma­tion, but rather didn’t real­ize it was some­thing view­ers needed to know.

All in all, the sub­cul­ture fea­tured in the film is a truly unique bunch of peo­ple, and a great find by the film­mak­ers. Some of them may deserve a lit­tle mock­ery, but my favorite moment in the film goes to a Robert Mruczek, who describes how pro­fes­sional sports records are bro­ken once in a life­time, but he sees gam­ing records bro­ken every day. And how excit­ing is that?

Offi­cial movie site: www.billyvssteve.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to me.

For All Mankind

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For All Mankind movie poster

 

It was a weird expe­ri­ence to finally see the orig­i­nal film for the sound­track to which I’ve lis­tened to count­less times. Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois’ Apollo: Atmos­pheres & Sound­tracks is a gor­geous piece of work, and very much col­ored my expec­ta­tions of what the film would be. Hav­ing long pic­tured a largely abstract com­pi­la­tion of oth­er­worldly lunar footage, I was sur­prised to find For All Mankind a more straight­for­ward doc­u­men­tary than what was already in my head. (Bits and pieces from the com­pi­la­tion album Music for Films III also appear.)

Unlike In the Shadow of the Moon, the 2007 fea­ture doc­u­men­tary on the same sub­ject, For All Mankind exclu­sively uses orig­i­nal footage taken dur­ing the Apollo Mis­sions, much of it by the astro­nauts them­selves. The absence of new nar­ra­tion or footage rightly places the empha­sis solely on the achieve­ments of the orig­i­nal par­tic­i­pants. But a draw­back is that the inter­vie­wees on the sound­track are not iden­ti­fied (the Cri­te­rion DVD edi­tion includes an option to dis­play sub­ti­tles iden­ti­fy­ing the speakers).

For All MankindOpen the pod bay doors, HAL

I have lit­tle to add to Matthew Dessem’s excel­lent review on The Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion blog, or to my own thoughts on In the Shadow of the Moon. Three small observations:

  • I was com­pletely igno­rant that NASA first began space­walks dur­ing the Apollo mis­sions. I was under the impres­sion they began dur­ing the space shut­tle mis­sions of my youth. In ret­ro­spect, it makes per­fect sense that NASA would test space­walks in orbit over the Earth before attempt­ing to step out of a cap­sule onto the moon, but: Wow!
  • The astro­nauts were very con­scious of Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Each astro­naut could bring one cas­sette tape to play on a portable deck, and one chose Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathus­tra”. Another describes see­ing the moon sur­face up close as being like some­thing from 2001.
  • Due to the film’s nature of being com­prised of orig­i­nal footage, there’s per­haps too much of the astro­nauts goof­ing off in zero-G, and not enough of the spec­tac­u­lar lunar footage. But it goes to show that even the pilots selected for being the most sane and calm peo­ple in the word still turn to excited kids when play­ing in outer space (with the rare excep­tion to prove the rule).

Cri­te­rion DVD info: http://www.criterion.com/asp/release.asp?id=54

Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion review: http://criterioncollection.blogspot.com/2006/04/54-for-all-mankind.html

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to me.

F for Fake

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F For Fake movie poster

 

F for Fake is Orson Welles’ last com­pleted movie: part doc­u­men­tary, part essay, part prac­ti­cal joke. Welles por­trays him­self much as I would imag­ine him: a robust racon­teur set­tled in for the long haul at a good restau­rant, sur­rounded by edu­ca­ble pretty young things, eat­ing and telling tall tales with great relish.

Kurt & Courtney

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Kurt and Courtney movie poster

 

A doc­u­men­tary by Nick Broom­field about the con­tro­versy sur­round­ing the appar­ent sui­cide of Kurt Cobain.

Not yet know­ing he him­self will become part of the story, Broom­field holds his cards pretty close to his chest through­out. It’s not until fairly late in the film that he begins to describe his own feel­ings. His inter­vie­wees cover an entire spec­trum of responses to the death: all the way from unam­bigu­ous sui­cide to unam­bigu­ous mur­der. Some on each side are cred­i­ble, some are… to say the least, not. The only thing that seems clear is that Love is a mon­ster, and the ques­tion becomes not “did Cobain com­mit sui­cide or was he mur­dered?” but rather “did Love drive him to sui­cide or have him murdered?”

A thick soup of incon­clu­sive opin­ions, rec­ol­lec­tions and pos­si­bly lies leave Broom­field not know­ing what to believe (as he reveals in a despair­ing voiceover). He finally comes across a jour­nal­ist will­ing to go on the record with sev­eral recorded death threats given by Love and, dis­heart­en­ingly given that he was appar­ently a gifted, sweet, and lov­ing per­son, Cobain him­self! At last, some con­crete evi­dence. Even then, Broom­field doesn’t quite reveal his feel­ings. So it comes as quite a sur­prise when he makes a guerilla attack upon Love at an ACLU event. Of course it’s an atroc­ity that she’s even there, given her doc­u­mented behav­ior towards jour­nal­ists (with whom of course Broom­field per­son­ally iden­ti­fies), but his sud­den and very pub­lic attack is pow­er­ful and shock­ing. Even his cam­er­ap­er­son couldn’t hold the cam­era still.

Here’s the con­fes­sional part: I never really liked Nir­vana. An inter­est­ing point about the film: unless I missed some­thing, the word “grunge” is never spo­ken. Instead many indi­vid­u­als con­fi­dently describe Nir­vana as sim­ply “punk.” And you saw this com­ing: I never really liked punk. I think I have an intel­lec­tual under­stand­ing of it: the sig­nif­i­cance of its arrival and the wide-reaching spread of its influ­ence. All true, but I don’t chose to lis­ten to it.

So I came to the film with­out a full knowl­edge of the music and the band’s his­tory, and with­out the pre­con­ceived notions of Cobain and Love fans are likely to have. So for me, the film is not really about any of those things; its larger theme really has to do with how one can lose the big pic­ture (to use a cliché with­out being able to think of a bet­ter term at the moment) the closer you look, and the finer your focus. And not to men­tion the dis­tur­bance your gaze can cause if you press it in too close.