Why Jimmy Page, the Edge and Jack White? If you're going to make a feature film about guitarists, and you seemingly have access to dozens, if not hundreds of players, why would you settle on these three? I raised this question when I first heard about "It Might Get Loud," and by the time the film was under way, I had my answer.

All three are or were innovators. You could argue that Page invented heavy metal (or commercial hard rock or AOR or any number of other formats. The Edge has done as much as anyone to alter the sound of the guitar with electronics and effects, and White has somehow forced the music of 1930s bluesmen onto the radio with an aesthetic that eschews the very things that the Edge advocates. Name three living guitarists who offer as much (and whose commercial success could guarantee that the film would be made. Maybe next time we'll get Thurston Moore, Bill Frisell and Curt Kirkwood).

It's easy to knock the film: the summit among the three is the most contrived part of an otherwise enjoyable film, and what little it yields in interplay among the three is disappointing. It allows these artists to create and nurture their own myths rather than push them to reinterpret themselves. It is laudatory where there is plenty of room for critique. But what it does offer is solid, fascinating and revelatory.

The set-up is simple: These three were brought together for an afternoon in early 2008 to discuss the guitar. Each also is followed in what amount to mini 20-minute career overview/documentaries that are intercut with each other and with footage from the meet-up. These segments are the best part of the movie. The Edge revisits the school where U2 first got together. Page gives a tour of the manor house where Led Zeppelin recorded it's fourth album (clapping to show the reverberations in the foyer that made John Bonham's drums on "When the Levee Breaks" so monstrous) and White shows off his early work when he was still making a living as a reupholsterer.

Each offers revelations. Page chats about the soul-sucking nature of his session work, saying he was essentially creating Muzak before he finally decided to quit and pursue his own music. In an amusing aside, the Edge shows the riff for "Elevation" with and without effects. With, it's a shimmering concoction that sounds like several guitars at once. Without, it's a simple two-chord figure that someone could master in a matter of minutes. White offers the most self-analysis, stating that the black, white and red color scheme and childish ornamentation of his band was a cover that diverted attention from the fact that he wanted to recreate the music of Son House for the masses.

The so-called summit seems promising, but either director Davis Guggenheim didn't want to go in that direction or it yielded so little that he was forced to use other footage. When the three interact, there are interesting exchanges. The Edge asks Page about a chord progression, while Page seems shocked that the Edge plays a certain chord in the seemingly simple intro to "I Will Follow." "So, 'at's a C? You sure about that?" He asks. The three jam a bit on each other's songs, from "I Will Follow" to "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground" from the White Stripes (which could earn a killer solo from Page if offered) and "In My Time of Dying" from Led Zeppelin. Much more of this, as each looks for ways to integrate their own sound into the work of the others, would have been fantastic, as would the discussions of guitar that, in the finished film are fleeting. Perhaps we'll need to wait for an extended DVD package for such outtakes.

The film ends with the three playing "The Weight" from the Band. It's an odd choice, a song that is easily mastered and offers little challenge for players of this skill. But it's charming, too, and shows that these three would probably be sitting around doing just this even if they weren't iconic figures of rock.

Overall, it's a testament to the value of taking time to more fully explore a subject in documentary form. There is no shortage of information about these three -- one could surely make a compelling documentary from extant footage alone -- but by allowing these artists to talk about the thing they love most at length, Guggenheim has created a treasure. A flawed treasure that doesn't fulfill its promise, but a treasure nonetheless.

Labels: movies, music

This week is one that many alternative music fans thought would never come" "Urgh! A Music War" is officially out on DVD. And thanks to a puzzlingly understated launch, some might never realize it is out.

The film, which captures live performances from some of the biggest and most eclectic alternative bands of the early 1980s, is a cult classic. VHS copies are coveted, and the soundtrack LP and CD (long, long out of print) go for $100 or more on online auction and retail sites.

Now, 27 years after its original 1982 release, the film is coming to DVD as part of Warner's Archive Collection. Good luck finding the disc or anything about it. Save for the listing linked above on the WB Shops site, there seems to be no official information about the release.

That fits with the film's strange journey. It long has been thought it would never see DVD release. According to the film's Wikipedia entry, Police manager (and IRS Records head) Miles Copeland, who produced the film, has the rights, but problems that include the vast number of acts and record labels that would be involved in licensing for a new format have kept it on the shelf.

Whatever transpired to allow its release, plenty of people have been waiting for years for this. Fan sites abound (including those that openly purport to sell bootlegged copies) and petitions have made the rounds as well. Perhaps someone was listening.

So what is everyone clamoring to see and hear? The film captures 1980 performances by 34 bands, from acts that already were stars like the Police and UB40 to still virtual unknowns like John Cooper Clarke and Invisible Sex. I know of no one who saw it in a theater, but have plenty of friends who watched, rented or owned the VHS version. Most of us owned the soundtrack on vinyl as well, though that pared things to just 27 tracks. That was later issued for a moment on CD, chopped again to just 21 songs.

In the time since, I've recorded it off of TV (USA's "Night Flight" seemed to be a common home for it, often airing different versions with extra footage), watched clips on YouTube and downloaded many iterations of the soundtrack from file-sharing sites. Each time, I'm amazed at the intensity and quality of the performances. It's a rare chance to catch live clips of early XTC, Pere Ubu and Wall of Voodoo, for example. It works because the music is all there is: No interviews, no clowning around, no backstage hi jinks. The acts live or die by the 3 minutes they get on stage (save for the Police, managed by film producer Miles Copeland, who get two songs). It can't help but open viewers and listeners up to new acts and broaden horizons.

It's interesting, perhaps, that many of the bands are as much artifacts of their time as is the movie itself. If you haven't heard of the Athletico Spizz 80, The Alley Cats or 999, you're far from alone. But for one brief moment in this film, they shine, cementing their place in history like a prehistoric bug caught in amber. I hadn't heard anything about Au Pairs before or since, for example, but I'll always remember their angular, uncomfortable "Come Again" thanks to this film.

It is unclear what exactly this release includes. The original theatrical release was 96 minutes, while the VHS release was 124 minutes. This DVD issue is 116 minutes. It has been speculated that the rights to performances by Gary Numan and others have reverted back to the artists, who have refused to allow their use. That's a pity, and quite boneheaded if so. No one in this film save for the Police, maybe the Go Gos and Oingo Boingo's Danny Elfman (thanks to his soundtrack work) are rich, I'm sure, and any exposure would surely help.

There are no extras on the DVD, so one key question remains unanswered: What's with the title? I suppose the "music war" is sort of battle of the bands aspect of the film. But It's a misnomer, because thanks to canny selection of artists, they all seem to be on the same side (Sting and Co. notwithstanding).

Labels: movies, music, Urgh

I feel like I've been in a cave: Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida wrote a screenplay for a film that was directed by Sam Mendes? That's kind of a big deal.

The film, "Away We Go," is due out June 5. It stars John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph as a longtime couple who are going to have a baby, but whose world is turned on its ear when Krasinski's parents (Jeff Daniels and Catherine O'Hara) reveal that they're moving out of the country, thus taking away the couple's reason for living where they do. This sets the pair off on what looks to be a standard road movie.

Given the film's provenance, it will surely be a big deal. The marketing, complete with cut-and-paste photos and hand-lettered titles, feels like an indie-film greatest hits, conjuring everything from "Rushmore" to "Juno." Who stands to benefit most from all of this? Alexi Murdoch, please stand up.

The Scottish singer's songs make up the bulk of the soundtrack, his pleasant folk-rock clearly a nice way to undergird the story's more heartfelt moments. Most of the songs are drawn from Murdoch's debut, Time Without Consequence, with three previously unreleased tracks sweetening the mix. They are joined by tracks from George Harrison ("What Is Life"), The Stranglers ("Golden Brown"), Bob Dylan ("Meet Me In The Morning") and the Velvet Underground ("Oh! Sweet Nuthin’").

Murdoch's music was heard in the film "Garden State" -- though not on the soundtrack -- one of the best examples of music use in film propelling an act commercially. In that case it was the Shins, another pleasant pop act. Could Murdoch see similar benefits? It's likely. His music seems tailor made for this use, the film will expose hundreds of thousands of people to it and the soundtrack gives them an easy way to sample his wares.

MP3: "All My Days"

Labels: movies, music

Having just finished Lawrence Block's great new memoir, Step by Step, (much more about this later), I'm finally able to crack the spine of Harlan Coben's new thriller, Long Lost. Now comes word that there is more Coben to come, this time on the silver screen.

Much as American Jimi Hendrix had to make it big in Europe before U.S. audiences finally embraced him, Coben will finally make it to U.S. movie theaters thanks to the success of a European adaptation of one of his novels. Miramax and Focus Features announced this week that they have secured English language remake rights to "Ne Le Dis A Personne (Tell No One)," the award-winning adaptation of Coben's wildly successful first stand-alone novel.

According to Variety.com, "no director or cast have been attached although a start date of spring 2010 has been tentatively set for principal photography."

The French version did very well in the U.S. as measured by the foreign film yardstick, grossing $6 million. Variety reports that the film grossed $22 million in France and $2.3 million in the U.K.

The original version of the film hit DVD here in March. See the trailer here.

Labels: books, crime fiction, movies

London Boulevard, one ofKen Bruen's early non-series crime novels, is moving toward the silver screen. Variety reported Friday that Colin Farrell and and Keira Knightley have signed on to star in the film. It will be the directing debut for William Monaghan, who wrote the screenplay for Martin Scorsese's "The Departed," for which he won an Oscar.

The book tells the story of Mitchell, an ex-con who tries to go straight and stay clear of some nefarious friends by taking a job in the mansion of Lillian Palmer, a fading movie actress. One assumes that Farrell signed on as Mitchell and Knightley as Palmer, though some rewriting by Monaghan was in order. No matter how talented, it's hard to see the 23-year-old Knightley pulling off "fading movie actress." Instead, she's billed as a "reclusive young actress."

It's among the first of Bruen's novels to make it this far on the path toward the screen, though it won't be the last. The author took a moment to answer a few quick questions about the news:

Are you involved with "London Boulevard" at all, or did you simply sell the rights and move on?

I get to talk to Bill Monaghan and that's pretty fine with me.

Any thoughts about it moving to the movie screen, or about Keira Knightley and Colin Farrell?.

It begins shooting in London in May and I think the cast are terrific.

What is the status of any other movie projects in the pipeline?

The Guards due soon and Blitz with Jude Law.

Those last two are parts of his Jack Taylor and Sgt. Brant series, respectively.

According to the Internet Movie Database, "London Boulevard" is scheduled for a 2010 release in the UK. Few other details are available.

Labels: crime fiction, Ken Bruen, movies

Having just gone through a move, I haven't had the chance to write here much or watch or listen to much. The result is that I have been stewing over things long since digested, drawing parallels and such. The most persistent of these is "I'm Not There," Todd Haynes' anti-biopic about Bob Dylan.

I wrote fairly recently about the film, lauding the way it captures the singer's protean nature. I've since gone back to watch Martin Scorsese's "No Direction Home," the three-hour-plus documentary assemblage that seeks to present Dylan roughly from his arrival in New York until his motorcycle crash just a few years later. Having not seen "No Direction Home" very recently when I saw "I'm Not There," I didn't realize how many of Haynes' scenes are direct recreations of documentary footage used in Scorsese's film. This isn't exactly deep, but it's clear that Haynes film can be seen, from the title on down, as a direct refutation of the earlier film.

Sure, he portrays Dylan with a handful of disparate actors to drive the point home that no one trope can capture the artist. But by recreating scenes from Dylan's earliest days, he points up the theatricality of Dylan's performances during seemingly spontaneous events, and, in speaking for Dylan, says, "you may think you have me inside your little box constructed of film, quotes, photos and narrative, but I'm Not There." Not only is Haynes' deliberate as he points out that Dylan is too shape-shifting to accurately portray, but he also seems to comment directly on Scorsese's film by saying that no matter the source material, at best you are only highlighting a facet of your subject.

That makes Scorsese's film no less entertaining -- though his decision to stop long before some of the most fascinating aspects of Dylan's life and career (the accident and subsequent sabbatical, the Basement Tapes, his conversion, etc.) -- or illuminating for what it is, but it does call into question the notion that a film can adequately express a person's essence.

Taken together, the two films do as much to obscure as they do to illuminate.

Labels: Bob Dylan, movies, music

For some foolish reason, I decided that Dan Bern wasn't my cup of tea without actually hearing his music. Maybe it was the "new Dylan" tag he was saddled with, or the Ani DiFranco connection or the strange album covers or... well, who knows? Regardless, it was my loss.

I finally had the chance to hear Bern (or rather, was forced to do so) when I was writing about arts and entertainment for his hometown paper in Cedar Rapids. He was coming to CSPS (another late discovery, that) for a show, and I got a CD in the mail with the hope I'd do something to preview the show. I listened to New American Language, his fourth album, and was hooked. Here was an artist who mixed witty wordplay with an international political awareness, all with a rollicking sound that blended folk, power pop, pub rock, blues and r'n'b. I picked up everything before and since, and count myself a solid fan.

I hadn't heard much out of the usually prolific Bern in a while when flooding hit our area. I remember wondering if he would come to town to perform a benefit, only to learn a couple of days later that he was already in town and planned to perform several times in flood-related events. We hooked up to do an interview to preview those shows, and I later followed up to ask him more general questions for the long-awaited return of the Monday Interview.

I learned that Bern had been as prolific as ever; if I had been more alert I would have known. He wrote and/or co-wrote many of the songs in the film "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story" (in fact, his contributions are among the highlights of this otherwise uneven film), and released three albums on online music stores -- The Burbank Tapes, Divine & Conquer and Macaroni Cola. He also wrote and recorded the song "The Ballad of Jimmy Carter/Man from Plains" for the Jonathan Demme documentary about Jimmy Carter, "Man From Plains."

TIRBD: Your work on “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story” seemed to open a door for you careerwise. How would you like to see that evolve and, if it became exactly what you wanted, how would you balance that with writing, recording and touring as a solo artist?

DB: I would love to do more projects along those lines. I love collaborating, and writing for characters, and just sitting around making stuff up! Ideally, I guess there'd be more projects than I'd know what to do with. I was on the road playing, part of the time I was writing “Dewey” songs. So there's not necessarily a conflict. But, at least for the time being, I’m probably more interested in doing movies and theatrical projects than "another record, another tour."

You worked with Mike Viola on that soundtrack. He's another artist once tabbed to be the next great (insert name here) but who now releases his own music and does various things to make a living. Is that a growing niche that you see yourself joining as the music business continues to change?

Well... we'll see. I guess everyone has to find their own way. Mike's a really skilled guy in a lot of different ways. In the past all I wanted to do was make records and bomb around playing every night. Seeing what a bunch of talented people can do when they pool together kind of opened my eyes.

Your deal with Messenger is done and you've released a few projects on the web for download. Do you want to work with a label again? Do you have more projects like The Burbank Tapes that might see the light of day online?

I did a short tour out east recently, just about three weeks, and I found myself playing all these songs I've never released, about 75 songs probably. Old & new. They felt good. I feel like I've got some great albums still to come. Just figuring out how to do it. These days, a label can be a help or a hindrance. I'll figure it out, I guess.

Which do you enjoy most: writing, performing or recording? With respect to the one you like least, would you stop doing it if that meant you could concentrate more on the other two and still make ends meet?

Well, really, I've always felt like they were three parts of the same thing. If I wasn't gonna perform anymore, would I write? If I didn't record anymore, would I eventually stop performing? I guess if I lost my voice and couldn't physically get out of bed, I might still write. But maybe I’d just do crossword puzzles... with “Dewey,” even though we were just writing songs, we were also recording and "performing" the songs, even if it was just for the demos. But John Reilly heard the demos, and it all helped shape his character I think. So even with that, it's hard to separate writing from performing and recording.

I think that maybe at this moment, I still love to perform, and I think I always will, and all that. but I like doing projects the most. And I can envision (and kinda want) my own notion of "performing" to cover a wider range of things. I loved writing the "Dewey" songs, I loved writing the song that was in the Jimmy Carter movie, I loved writing the songs for (the Cedar Rapids flood play) "Moving Home" and singing them in the context of the show. I really like that in all of those things, it's more than about just me singing songs. They're part of a larger context. It's the greatest thing to be able to write a song or a batch of songs for something, something bigger, and meaningful in a different way, than just me singing some songs, nice as that might be sometimes. and if I can contribute to it in a performance aspect, in a way to make it just a little better, then I'm pretty happy.

How has the economic downturn – high gas prices, less disposable income spent on the arts, etc. – affected you as an artist?

I guess at the end of a tour, there's less in the wallet after paying $4 a gallon. It's amazing how you start being aware of every danged mile. Take one wrong turn and you start calculating how much gas you're spilling. Obviously, the problems with energy and fuel are bigger than that. We could've had a good light rail system in every medium-sized city in the country by now, for what we've spent in Iraq the last few years. Tragic. Not to mention how the cupboard's bare when a real emergency comes up, like these floods. Does it take environmental disaster to rebuild green? Anyway... I don't know, maybe musicians will go back to hitch-hiking and hopping freights.

You were among a handful of artists four years ago who wrote and sang songs against President Bush. He won despite those and many other efforts, but has clearly been damaged by the past four years. Is there vindication for you there? Or perhaps frustration that your message didn't get through until it was too late?

More the latter. That the country's been damaged and the future made a little bleaker is the tragedy. Those guys'll be floating on their islands while we'll be left to clean up the mess. The most frustrating thing for me was that I couldn't reach more people, doing my lone troubadour thing. I guess that's partly why I'm now more interested in collaboration, being a part of something larger than just me railing into the wind.

You wrote 10 songs for a Cedar Rapids theater project that dealt with the impact of devastating floods here in Iowa. While those might be recorded and released, it struck me that you must have dozens, if not hundreds of songs written for specific occasions or events that haven't been properly recorded. Do you remember them all? Do you have documentation of them? If not, does that bother you?

Some of them probably deserve to go the way of newspapers at 11 p.m.! In the past, most songs didn't get recorded, or even written down. They just got sung, and passed around, until they didn't anymore. It's the rare song that sticks around, really. But, unless I die tomorrow, I'll probably get to some of them, sometime.

Labels: Monday Interview, movies, music

Day 3 of Larry Brown Week.

The one film related to Larry Brown that probably best sums up the man and his work is one that I have yet to see, and that seems as fitting a metaphor for Brown’s relationship with cinema -- and perhaps the cultural world at large -- as any.

The Rough South of Larry Brown is a 2002 documentary/drama made by director Gary Hawkins. The film mixes interviews with Brown and other documentary elements with narrative adaptations of three of Brown’s short stories – “Samaritans” and “Wild Thing” from Facing the Music, and “Wild Thing” from Big Bad Love. It follow’s Hawkins’ previous “Rough South” entry, the 1991 TV documentary The Rough South of Harry Crews.

The film has yet to be released on video, so infrequent screenings at festivals seems to be the only way to catch this one for now.

The one Brown-related film that is readily available is Arliss Howard’s 2001 adaptation of Big Bad Love. The film, which carries that same name, tells of Leon Barlow (Howard), a Vietnam veteran and struggling writer who still isn’t over the breakup of his marriage. His ex-wife, Marilyn (Debra Winger) doesn’t make things easy for him, though there are moments of quiet grace that make it clear why the two married in the first place. While it is not without its flaws, the film is highly watchable, if for no other reason than to see Howard fully inhabit Barlow.

Last up, for now, is a planned adaptation of Brown’s comic novel The Rabbit Factory. It was reported last summer that actor and director Vondie Curtis-Hall (Waist Deep) will direct the film for Ithaka Entertainment. Surprisingly – and intriguingly – short story writer Thom Jones is reported to have written the screenplay. There is little new information about the production, but some listings report a planned 2008 release.

As for Brown’s other novels, it was reported in 2000 that Billy Bob Thornton had optioned Joe, a match made in heaven if ever there was one, but a search finds no recent mentions of the project.

Labels: Larry Brown Week, movies