The key moment in Baz Luhrmann’s latest cinematic maximalist bacchanal – about the one and only King of Rock and Roll, Elvis Presley – comes within the picture’s first five or ten minutes. The internet meme culture overlords got it immediately. It’s the scene, which became a viral sensation, of Tom Hanks’s Colonel Tom Parker being informed that the voice he’s hearing on the radio, Elvis singing That’s All Right, belongs to a white man. “He’s white…,” Hanks’s Parker says as if in a trance; it’s half-question, half-stunned-declarative-statement.
Col. Tom – who represented Presley from 1956 until the singer’s tragic death in 1977 and helped himself to over half of everything Elvis earned – is our (not so) humble narrator. He acknowledges that some will consider him “the villain of this here story.” Luhrmann let’s Col. Tom have his say, but he also uses his strong directorial hand to make sure we see the one-time carnie’s legacy of selfish and cruel behavior and the role it played in Elvis’s descent into addiction, despair, and, ultimately, death.
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Every time I hear one of a select group of pop hits from the last 40 years, I start singing the wrong words. They might be lyrics about the Star Wars character Yoda, when the song is actually about a woman named Lola. They might be lyrics about making prank phone calls when the song is really about chasing waterfalls. Every time this happens – and I mean every. single. time. – my wife rolls her eyes and threatens to divorce me.
I will never stop, though, because I am a lifelong "Weird Al" Yankovic fan. My music collection contains every album from the most successful and famous parody-song artist of all time, save two. (The last one I obtained was 2006’s Straight Outta Lynwood, so I’m missing 2011’s Alpocalypse and 2014’s Mandatory Fun.)
All that to say I might not be the most impartial judge of a movie about – and co-written by – Yankovic. The new film, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, directed by comedy writer and filmmaker Eric Appel, in his feature debut, is an absolute hoot. Take my opinion with a grain of salt, since I was clearly in the tank for it from frame one, but Weird is the goofiest, most ridiculous, funniest comedy of the year.
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With Moonage Daydream, documentary filmmaker Brett Morgen has reinvented the form, synthesizing a kaleidoscope of images and sounds from the life and work of David Bowie into a vibrant, electrifying experience. Like its subject’s nonconformist, taboo-smashing body of work, Morgen’s 140-minute tone poem meditation on one of the most sui generis artists who has ever lived is breathtaking in its scope and originality. Morgen’s film is one of the best of the year. David Bowie pulses in every frame, reminding us from beyond the grave that we’ll never see his like on this planet again.
Upon reflection, Moonage Daydream is (slightly) more conventional than it at first seems. Beneath the surface of the film’s elliptical, almost phantasmagorical tapestry is a roughly chronological examination of Bowie’s career over the course of about 30 years. This is the first documentary about the glam rock pioneer that is officially authorized by the estate of the artist, who died in 2016 from liver cancer.
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Iconic director Todd Haynes’s first documentary feature is a florid chronicling of an iconic band and larger artistic movement that was responsible for dissolving the line between so-called low-art and high culture. In The Velvet Underground, Haynes uses every tool at his disposal to transform what might have been a fairly conventional narrative arc into an artistic experience that approximates the environment that his subjects conjured in their own work.
The Velvet Underground is the story of a band every bit as influential as The Beatles who also worked in uncharted artistic waters. Revelatory interviews with surviving members John Cale and Maureen "Moe" Tucker, as well as dozens of other artists active in The Velvet Underground’s time and place in history, bring the band’s initial ten-year creative period – the mid-1960s to the mid- ‘70s – to vibrant life.
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The immensely talented musician and writer Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson has righted a historical injustice with his debut directorial film Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised). The documentary, about an, until now, almost completely forgotten music festival that took place during the same summer as Woodstock, is a work of infectious exuberance as well as a contemplative examination of why the festival was forgotten in the first place.
Focusing on the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, Questlove’s picture would be a significant achievement for its restoration and presentation of the festival performances alone. Forty hours of videotape footage of the event sat in a basement for fifty years before producer Robert Fyvolent secured the rights and brought it to Questlove’s attention.
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There’s a tradeoff made when producing an authorized work of art examining the life and career of a famous person. The documentary Zappa, which focuses on the life and times of musician, filmmaker, and iconoclast Frank Zappa, makes that tradeoff with mostly successful results. Director Alex Winter – an actor who moonlights as Bill S. Preston, Esq. in the Bill and Ted movies – had full access to Zappa’s extensive personal archives for his film. The extensive amount of concert video, behind-the-scenes home-movie footage, and interview archives allow Winter to paint a portrait of Zappa – who died from prostate cancer in 1993 – that feels exhaustive and intimate.
The danger with authorized biographies is the risk for them to slip into hagiography. The biographer might smooth over some of the rough edges of a subject in an effort to keep in the good graces of those offering the unfettered access. Zappa doesn’t shy away from some of its subject’s negative qualities. We learn about Zappa’s serial philandering and his tendency to treat his musical collaborators like props who only existed to fulfil his vision. There are darker strains to Zappa’s work, though, that Winter fails to explore. The enfant terrible creative genius, who used satire and comedy in his music to great effect, often incorporated sexist-bordering-on-misogynistic lyrics and racist cultural appropriation into his art. Winter looks the other way from all this, and his film suffers for it.
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In the glut of remakes Disney has released in which they make a cash grab by simply reshooting their animated classics as live-action versions, their 2019 retelling of The Lion King is one I missed. (To be honest, I think 2019’s Aladdin is the only one of these that I’ve seen. To me, they seem like cynical bits of content trading on raw nostalgia. I found Aladdin superfluous at best.) The general impression I got of director Jon Favreau’s remake of The Lion King is that it was a CGI – so, basically animated – shot-for-shot remake of the original; a project lacking in purpose outside of making a huge sum of money.
Inspiration for something truly original can come from anywhere, though, and singer/songwriter/megastar Beyoncé – who played Nala in the Lion King remake – used the Disney property as a jumping-off point for something fresh, stunning, exciting, and unapologetically in praise of blackness. Black is King is a visual companion art piece to Beyoncé’s tie-in album The Lion King: The Gift, in which the artist “reimagines the lessons of The Lion King for today’s young kings and queens in search of their own crowns.”
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Yesterday set itself a pretty low entertainment bar to clear with its premise. “You mean I’ll get to sit and listen to Beatles tunes for two hours? Yeah, where do I sign?” Screenwriter Richard Curtis – he of Love Actually fame – and director Danny Boyle have crafted a movie that feels slight, yes, but one that is also infectiously charming and just a plain damn good time at the movies. It might not contain the deep and meaningful qualities with which we’ve all imbued the music at its center, but it brought a big, fat smile to my face while I was watching it. On this occasion, and in these bleak times, that was more than enough.
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I had to watch the opening sequence of Alex Ross Perry’s Her Smell twice to make sure I hadn’t imagined that the first 30-odd minutes are one long, uninterrupted take. I ended up watching the whole movie twice; that’s how easily it sucks you into its world. Turns out, I had imagined that one unbroken take. My mistaken impression about the opening is a testament to Perry’s serpentine camera movements and the brilliantly controlled chaos of the scene. I was even more surprised when I learned Perry didn’t shoot Her Smell digitally. He shot it on 35mm film, which would have made a sustained shot like the one I invented in my head that much more difficult.
My faulty memory aside, the real take away is that Perry – as well as his star and co-producer, Elisabeth Moss – has displayed virtuoso talent with this ambitious picture.
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Toward the end of A Star is Born, one character describes a favorite bit of wisdom about music from Jackson Maine, one of the two central figures of the movie. Jackson – Jack to his friends – loves to say that there are only 12 notes between any octave. “Twelve notes and then the octave repeats. It’s the same story told over and over. All that the artist can offer the world is how they see those 12 notes.”
It might have been a strategic move to include this observation in the movie considering this is the third remake of the 1937 film of the same name. That’s four versions of A Star is Born – six if you include the 2013 Bollywood film Aashiqui 2, which is also based on the ’37 film, and a 1932 movie called What Price Hollywood?, which is essentially the same story. This version of A Star is Born is how Bradley Cooper sees the notes. He offers a fresh, energetic take. I was in from the very start, when we see Jack play one of his songs in front of a crowd of thousands of cheering fans.
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