The country only recently pardoned him for criminal charges of homosexuality, for which he was chemically castrated.
Decades after his chemical castration by the British government and subsequent suicide, Alan Turing, the wartime codebreaker, pioneering computer scientist, and founder…
Neural networks can be good at naming things, I’ve discovered. Recently I’ve been experimenting with a neural network called GPT-2, which OpenAI trained on a huge chunk of the internet. Thanks to a colab notebook implementation by Max Woolf, I’m able to fine-tune it on specific lists of data - cat names, for example. Drawing on its prior knowledge of how words tend to be used, GPT-2 can sometimes suggest new words and phrases that it thinks it’s seen in similar context to the words from my fine-tuning dataset. (It’ll also sometimes launch into Harry Potter fan fiction or conspiracy theories, since it saw a LOT of those online.)
One thing I’ve noticed GPT-2 doing is coming up with names that sound strangely like the names of self-aware AI spaceships in Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels. In the science fiction series, the ships choose their own names according to a sort of quirky sense of humor. The humans in the books may not appreciate the names, but there’s nothing they can do about them:
Hand Me The Gun And Ask Me Again Zero Credibility Fixed Grin Charming But Irrational So Much For Subtlety Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall
Now compare some of the effects pedals GPT-2 came up with:
Dangerous But Not Unbearably So Disastrously Varied Mental Model Dazzling So Beautiful Yet So Terrifying Am I really that Transhuman Love and Sex Are A Mercy Clause
Give Me A Reason Thou Shalt Warning Signs Kill All Humans
Did GPT-2 somehow have a built-in tendency to produce names that sounded like self-aware spaceships? How would it do if it was actually trained specifically on Culture ships?
A reader named Kelly sent me a list of 236 of Iain M. Banks’s Culture ship names from Wikipedia, and I trained the 345 million-parameter version of GPT-2 on them. As it turns out, I had to stop the training after just a few seconds (6 iterations) because GPT-2 was already beginning to memorize the entire list (can’t blame it; as far as it was concerned, memorizing the entire list was a perfect solution to the task I was asking for).
And yes. The answer is yes, naming science fiction AIs is something this real-life AI can do astonishingly well. I’ve selected some of the best to show you. First, there are the names that are clearly warship AIs:
Not Disquieting At All Surprise Surprise And That’s That! New Arrangement I Told You So Spoiler Alert Bonus Points! Collateral Damage Friendly Head Crusher Scruffy And Determined Race To The Bottom
And there are the sassy AIs:
Absently Tilting To One Side ASS FEDERATION A Small Note Of Disrespect Third Letter of The Week Well Done and Thank You Just As Bad As Your Florist What Exactly Is It With You? Let Me Just Post This Protip: Don’t Ask Beyond Despair Way Too Personal Sobering Reality Check Charming (Except For The Dogs)
The names of these AIs are even more inscrutable than usual. To me, this makes them much scarier than the warships.
Hot Pie Lightly Curled Round The Wrist Color Gold Normally Comes With Silence 8 Angry Doughnut Feelings Mini Cactus Cake Fight Happy to Groom Any Animals You Want Stuffy Waffles With Egg On Top Pickles And Harpsichord Just As Likely To Still Be Intergalactic Jellyfish Someone Did Save Your Best Cookie By Post-Apocalyptic Means LGRPllvmkiqquubkhakqqtdfayyyjjmnkkgalagi'qvqvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
At least it does sound like some of these AIs will be appeased by snacks.
Bonus content: more AI names, including a few anachronisms (“Leonard Nimoy for President” for example)
"Clarity unquestionably will hit the spot for pop fans seeking that next rush" yupppp
The rush that comes with a perfect pop song is elusive but unmistakable. "Pop music" can mean many things, but there's a certain kind of monster jam that scans as POP MUSIC in neon lights, the kind that sends euphoria coursing through your nervous system and launches your body onto the dance floor. More »
I mean, I would do that - just to have anything besides Avatar
Avengers: Endgame Heads Back to Theaters to Crush Avatar’s Record. Is This How We Live Now? Disney’s “Bring Back Event” aims to break James Cameron’s $2.78 billion box office record, and it just might work. So is this the new norm for studio films?
he's amazing in Always be my Maybe. I think the line is: "It's like truth or dare but more...apocalyptic"
With recent works like Toy Story 4, John Wick Chapter 3, and Always Be My Maybe, Keanu Reeves is having a resurgence that attests to his unique blend of attributes as a star.
Booksmart joined my short list of movies I've seen twice in the theater
Booksmart screenwriter Katie Silberman punctuates sentences with phrases like “holy smokes.” She’s the kind of person you want to be your best friend right now, immediately and forever. She talks us through writing the ending of “Booksmart.”
Sleater-Kinney officially announced their new album The Center Won't Hold last night, and today the first interview promoting the project has gone online. A profile at The Fader contains several intriguing details about the new record -- Sleater-Kinney's first since 2015 comeback No Cities To Love -- and it also includes … More »
gosh I still haven't listened, I'm so close to wanting to start but I'm trying to wait it out
Bill Callahan, the veteran indie singer-songwriter who used to record under the name Smog, is about to release his first album since 2013's Dream River. The upcoming Shepherd In A Sheepskin Vest, which comes out next Friday, is a massive 20-song undertaking. And instead of the usual advance singles, he's been … More »
Taylor Swift rarely gets political. But ahead of the midterm elections last year, she came out in support of two Democratic candidates in Tennessee. And early today, just as Pride Month officially kicked off, the pop star shared an open letter to her Senator urging him to defend LGBTQ rights and support the … More »
The film was taken by British magician turned pioneering filmmaker Nevil Maskelyne on an expedition by the British Astronomical Association to North Carolina on 28 May, 1900. This was Maskelyne’s second attempt to capture a solar eclipse. In 1898 he travelled to India to photograph an eclipse where succeeded but the film can was stolen on his return journey home. It was not an easy feat to film. Maskelyne had to make a special telescopic adapter for his camera to capture the event. This is the only film by Maskelyne that we know to have survived.
The Royal Astronomy Society will be showing the film tomorrow May 31 at their HQ in London as part of their celebration of the centenary of the 1919 eclipse; free tickets available here.
Carly Rae Jepsen's new album, Dedicated, is out now -- read our Premature Evaluation review of it. Last night, she appeared on The Late Late Show With James Corden to perform its latest proper single, "Too Much." She looks like she's having a good time! Fun performance for one of the … More »
There is obviously nothing in this world more punk rock than a Netflix exec getting $1.6 million from tech investors for his canned-water company. This is some serious motherfucking hardcore shit. Liquid Death, a new company that sells bottled water in tallboy cans, is about to open this pit up. That seems to be the … More »
A Chinese company called C-Space has built a simulation of a Mars base in the Gobi desert. Currently used for educational purposes, the company plans to open “Mars Base 1” up for tourism to give visitors a glimpse of what living on Mars would be like.
The facility’s unveiling comes as China is making progress in its efforts to catch up to the United States and become a space power, with ambitions of sending humans to the moon someday.
The white-coloured base has a silver dome and nine modules, including living quarters, a control room, a greenhouse and an airlock.
the childishness of the 11 hour episode brings me such joy
A roundup of our favorite comedy podcast episodes of the week, featuring Hollywood Handbook, The Jeselnik and Rosenthal Vanity Project, Sooo Many White Guys, My First Time, Hampton High, and Minor Adventures With Topher Grace.
Tonight, Taylor Swift releases the project she's been teasing via mural and cryptic Instagram post. She's just shared her new song "ME!" featuring Panic! At The Disco's Brendon Urie, along with an accompanying music video. The song was produced and co-written by Joel Little, who co-wrote, produced, … More »
"West seems refreshed and cogent and excited about music. We want him to be those things."
Everyone should've known what was happening when they saw the socks. Everyone should've taken one look at the socks, turned right around, and tromped back into the Coachella campgrounds. Maybe they could've found someone selling coke. Maybe they could've happened upon a hungover massage circle, or a phone-charging station. Maybe they could've seen a horse. More »
We still have 19 grueling days to go until Detective Pikachupremieres to wake us from our collective national nightmare of living in a world without Detective Pikachu. If you’re like me (a person who has May 10 feverishly circled in red pen on a wall calendar that they bought for the sole purpose of feverishly circling May 10), then the trailers and targeted ads and official music video aren’t enough to hold you over anymore.
This sounds like a case for “True Detective Pikachu,” the brilliant parody mash-up video that nobody asked for, but for which we’re pretty grateful, by Sam Heft and Tommy Kang of Bad Duck Media. It would have been enough to coast on title concept alone, but Kang and team Exeggcute a note-perfect parody of True Detective, centered on a genius Matthew McConaughey impersonation and some deeply upsetting Pikachu makeup. The details are what make this short notable, with moments like the team of Officer Jennys and the introduction of Meowth as “the Yellow Cat” played completely straight. Also — and it’s wild to point this out for a web video — be sure to stick around for the post-credits scene.
Live performance and Music Documentary are two very different genres
This story was originally published in 2015 and has been updated to reflect recent releases, including Beyoncé’s Homecoming on Netflix.
The past few years have been something of a golden age for music documentaries, with the Oscar-winning success of Searching for Sugar Man and 20 Feet From Stardom opening up the field for films about less obvious stars. Lately there have been a flood of movies about cult bands, forgotten local acts, and background players — and even a few docs, like Amy and Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, that have found new ways to approach some of the most popular musicians of the past half-century. Netflix has done so well with music-themed films that it commissioned some of its own, such as What Happened, Miss Simone?and this week’s big Beyoncé drop; and thanks in part to art-house patrons, Blu-ray buyers, and premium-cable subscribers, the market for movies about musicians has become lucrative enough that even long-shelved projects like The Wrecking Crew and the arty Leon Russell sketch A Poem Is a Naked Person have seen the light of day. It’s a marvelous time to be a music buff.
The list of 50 documentaries below features old classics, new favorites, and a few films that deserve a wider audience. It touches on pop, hip-hop, rock, punk, R&B, jazz, country, and folk; collectively, it tells a story of art forms, cultures, and business models in transition. Most important, these documentaries (and exceptional concert films, in case you were wondering) contain performances that are as essential to understanding these artists as any of their records. Think of these 50 titles as a time capsule, ready to be opened today, next year, or decades from now.
50. It Might Get Loud (2008) Director Davis Guggenheim starts with a simple but profound idea for It Might Get Loud: assembling three guitarists from different backgrounds and generations, and getting them to talk about their influences, philosophies, and techniques. Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, U2’s the Edge, and the White Stripes’ Jack White chat with each other and to Guggenheim, usually while holding tight to their instruments and stopping every so often for a little demonstration. There’s an element of demystification here, as these three gentlemen lay bare their habits and styles, making their work sound almost mundane. But gradually it becomes clearer that Page, Edge, and White are all perpetually chasing something ineffable. They’ve spent their careers trying to create the perfect conditions to get what they’re after; it just so happens that they also have the kind of training and know-how to exact an impressive range of sounds from an electric guitar, whenever inspiration strikes.
49. Sign o’ the Times (1987) Prince’s rise to fame in the late ’70s and early ’80s had a lot to do with his live act, which impressed crowds and critics alike with its eclecticism, relentless energy, and subversive sexuality. Yet until Prince made the concert film Sign o’ the Times (a nearly track-by-track re-creation of the album of the same name), fans who couldn’t get tickets to his shows could only see fleeting glimpses of what he was like onstage: via music videos and his occasional TV and movie performances. The Artist even tried to make Sign o’ the Times hard to watch, keeping it out of circulation after its initial limited theatrical run and VHS release. Since Prince’s death, the film has finally begun popping up on Showtime occasionally, belatedly boosting its reputation. And it’s a good thing, too: This is an invaluable document of a revolutionary American musician in his heyday, inviting audiences into his intense, at-times-surreal world of funk, rock, gospel, and bump-and-grind.
Around the same time that Robert Altman spoofed the slick, celebrity side of Music City U.S.A. in his masterpiece Nashville, James Szalapski was also hanging around the town — and in Austin, Texas, too — filming the new breed of politicized, rootsy singer-songwriters who’d come to be known as the backbone of the “outlaw country” movement. In semi-free-form, verité style, Heartworn Highways presents the casual jams and bull-sessions that bound together Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, David Allan Coe, Charlie Daniels, and the very young Steve Earle and Rodney Crowell. These artists were working outside the established country-music star factory, but writing songs so pure and true that Nashville had to pay attention. Heartworn Highways catches the offhand magic that they conjured, alone and together.
47. Louie Bluie (1985) Terry Zwigoff had never handled a motion-picture camera before his first day of shooting this documentary about obscure blues musician Howard “Louie Bluie” Armstrong. But because Zwigoff felt like his subject deserved to be seen and heard, he abandoned his original plan to write a magazine article, and burned through his life savings to make a film. It was the right choice. In addition to launching the career of a director who’d go on to helm Crumb, Ghost World, and Bad Santa, Louie Bluie preserves the stories and music of a man who otherwise might’ve been forgotten by all but the most committed of roots-music scholars.
Recording engineer Tom Dowd started at Atlantic Records in the 1950s, and gained a reputation within the music business as a technical wizard, who could solve the logistical challenges of miking-up artists as disparate as John Coltrane and Ray Charles. Mark Moormann’s documentarycovers the heights of Dowd’s career, which means it’s really a mini-history of popular music between 1950 and 1980. But the film is also an introduction the art of recording, portrayed more spectacularly in a show-stopping scene of Dowd walking Moormann through each isolated track of Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla” — with his own dexterity on display as much as Eric Clapton and Duane Allman’s.
45. Who Is Harry Nilsson (and Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him)? (2012) A party animal and a musical genius — with an angelic voice and a devilish nature — Harry Nilsson was viewed by the music industry and by many critics as someone who rarely realized his potential. And while John Scheinfeld’s documentary Who Is Harry Nilsson buys too much into that phony “isn’t a pity?” narrative (especially in the way it downplays Nilsson’s more experimental, frequently brilliant mid-1970s albums), for the most part the director has enough convincing eyewitness interviews and archival footage to argue that Nilsson was more than just a guy with a couple of fluke hits and a reputation for dragging his famous friends into the boozy muck. If nothing else, Who Is Harry Nilsson makes its subject look like a true original: a pop craftsman who was too impish to cruise through life.
The title is the first indication that this documentary about LCD Soundsystem’s last-ever show isn’t strictly a concert film. Nor did directors Dylan Southern and William Lovelace try to make a comprehensive bio-doc about witty, wise dance-music hero James Murphy and his band. Instead, they cut between that final gig and Murphy’s daily life — both immediately before and immediately after the farewell — and add an extended interview with Chuck Klosterman to fill in some background details, along with calm, quiet footage of the LCD front man coming to grips with the party being over. But the real reason to see Shut Up and Play the Hits is the live material, which is energetic on the stage and readily transcendent to the thousands of devotees who gathered at Madison Square Garden in 2011. This film is an important rebuke to anyone who says that modern music is too synthesized and soulless to touch people in the same way that rock and roll did in the Woodstock era.
43. Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage (2010) During Rush’s heyday, the Canadian trio was fiercely beloved by their fans and largely dismissed by rock critics; and while adoring Rush long ago ceased to be a guilty pleasure, the band still has a bit of a chip on their collective shoulder in Sam Dunn and Scot Mcfadyen’s Beyond the Lighted Stage. But that works to the doc’s advantage, because Geddy Lee, Neil Peart, and Alex Lifeson don’t just tell their own story in the film — they defend it, dismissing charges that they started out too pretentious, then became too political, then turned too soft. They come across as intelligent, honest, decent guys, who’ve always headed off in whatever direction seemed most fruitful and exciting, whether or not any of their followers wanted to come along. It’s that kind of artistic integrity onscreen that could make even non-fans into Rush lifers.
42. Dig! (2004) As fans of any music scene know, it’s not always easy to predict — or even to understand — why some acts cross over to the mainstream while others languish. Ondi Timoner’s Dig! examines this phenomenon via the diverging fortunes of two 1990s West Coast alt-rock groups: The Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre. Members of both bands have said that Timoner exaggerated conflicts to make a more dramatic documentary, but there’s still a lot of truth to what Dig! has to say about commercial compromises and prickly personalities. Overblown or not, the warts-and-all clips help illustrate why the artists who endure are often the ones who’ve figured out how to satisfy their backers and their muse.
41. The Punk Singer: A Film About Kathleen Hanna (2013) Riot grrrl leader Kathleen Hanna has led such an interesting life that it would be possible to make a film just about her as an activist, as a musician, or as someone whose career has been sidetracked by hard-to-classify health problems. Sini Anderson’s The Punk Singer tackles it all, showing the little-known health struggles behind a living icon who craves constant creation, while also peppering in some of the debate over whether Hanna’s marriage to Beastie Boy Adam Horowitz has undercut her feminism. Anderson also cuts frequently to fantastic footage of Bikini Kill, Le Tigre, and the Julie Ruin in action, making the case that however the audience feels about Hanna’s politics, her contributions to modern music have been undervalued.
40. Buena Vista Social Club (1999) When the United States cut off most of its cultural and economic exchange with Cuba in the early 1960s, many Cuban entertainers lost the international audience they’d enjoyed during the heyday of Havana nightlife. American guitarist and roots-music aficionado Ry Cooder brought some of those musicians into the studio to record an album, and then over to Europe and the United States for a few concerts — all caught on film by accomplished German director Wim Wenders. The resulting Oscar-nominated documentary reveals a lot about life in Cuba under Castro, showing how being isolated from the global community led these artists to hone their craft while remaining beguilingly stuck in time.
39. Jimi Hendrix (1973) Hendrix had only been dead for a few years when a trio of filmmakers (including legendary folk producer Joe Boyd and future Saturday Night Live contributor Gary Weis) gave the guitarist a proper eulogy, via this collection of memories and key live performances. After a while the stories and songs start to complement each other, until a long anecdote about Hendrix doing a show in Harlem becomes just as exciting as him playing a 12-minute version of “Machine Gun.” Jimi Hendrix doesn’t often get its due as one of the great rock docs, because it emerged in an era when the genre was still nascent. But anyone who wants to know who Hendrix was and why he mattered is better off starting here than with any of the biopics about him that have come out lately.
The Beatles have inspired a number of documentaries and fictionalized feature films, but none with the sweetness and insight of Ryan White’s look at the life of Freda Kelly, the band’s secretary. While the rest of the world got to know John, Paul, George, and Ringo as musical geniuses and style icons, Freda was the one who helped take care of their ordinary daily business, and made sure that their fan mail got answered. She was the Rosencrantz (or perhaps Guildenstern) to their Hamlet, watching them go through creative and personal changes from her little desk, back at an office that kept humming until the boys somewhat callously shut the party down.
37. Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival 1970 (1997) Because Murray Lerner had to sit on his film of the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival for 27 years (due to financial and legal issues), the movie ended up becoming like the lost bridge between the sunshine of Woodstock and the storms of Gimme Shelter. Beyond the outstanding performances by Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Free, Jethro Tull, the Doors, and others, Message to Love documents the gradual breakdown of order over the course of the fest, as young radicals pushed back against the organizers’ attempts to make money. What emerges is a movie about a generation turning petulant, demanding entitlements they hadn’t earned, while their favorite musicians did their best to entertain them and to demand their own right to make a living. It’s an at-times-tense and riveting documentary, peppered with scenes of stars like Leonard Cohen using their sets to steer the energy of the crowd in a more positive direction.
36. The Target Shoots First (2000) Though it’s not about any particular band, Chris Wilcha’s video diary of his time working for Columbia House in the 1990s is an essential document of how big media companies grapple with selling to the mercurial younger generation. Wilcha was in the marketing department at the venerable “eight CDs for a penny” record club during the time when alternative rock was ascendant, and he saw firsthand how his older bosses basically shrugged their shoulders and let the twentysomethings in the office figure out what their generation might want to buy. The Target Shoots First is a rough-looking movie (since most of it was shot casually with a camcorder, with no particular end product in mind), but one that’s unusually honest about the small victories and huge frustrations of trying to make money off great music.
At one point in Doug Pray’s documentary about the early 1990s Seattle grunge scene, a local journalist sums up the movie’s entire thesis, saying, “When you see a pop-culture revolution from the inside, you realize how stupid the whole thing is.” Because the alt-rock boom of 25 years ago coincided with the rise of the irony-attuned Generation X, the participants had a hard time taking their own success seriously — which may be why the truly creative artists of that time only had brief moments at the top before corporate copycats came for their sound. Hype! gets all of that on film, explaining how Seattle’s cultural guardians built up international excitement for what was going on in their city, and then quickly regretted all the attention that they themselves had demanded. Hype! also has plenty of great rock and roll, proving that bands like Mudhoney, Pearl Jam, and Nirvana were the real deal.
34. Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015) Brett Morgen borrows a little of the Kids Are Alright approach to the rock doc to construct his portrait of Cobain, drawing on every rare archival source he can find to piece together how the grunge stalwart came of age as an angry romantic in the Pacific Northwest and then translated those feelings of teen angst into platinum-selling songs. The twist here is that along with Cobain’s old public appearances, Morgen has access to his personal journals, drawings, audio recordings (spoken-word and demos alike), and home movies, which he lets fill in the spaces where narration might ordinarily go. This is a film meant to surprise even hard-core Nirvana fans with personal insights that they haven’t heard before. And for non-fans? Montage of Heck might just give them a better sense of Cobain’s progression from pissy young punk to superstar than any of the countless other homages to the man.
33. Scott Walker: 30th Century Man (2008) There are few musicians who’ve had stranger careers than Scott Walker: an Ohio-born one-time teen idol who moved to the U.K., became a phenomenon in the 1960s fronting the moody pop act the Walker Brothers, drifted into country-rock in the early 1970s, and has leaned toward ever-more avant-garde music from the late 1970s to now. Stephen Kijak’s 30th Century Man shifts between archival footage and new clips of Walker at work, painting a portrait of a man who can’t even explain himself why he’s done everything he’s done, but who is still driven to realize the grand sounds inside his head.
32. A Band Called Death (2012) Proving once again that sometimes it’s the relative unknowns who make the best subjects for a music doc, A Band Called Death is a satisfying, almost epic saga, recounting what happened when three African-American brothers started a proto-punk band in early 1970s Detroit. The film covers the various kinds of discrimination that Bobby, Dannis, and David Hackney faced — both from people who expected black musicians to play R&B and from industry types who found their sound too raw — and gets into the personal problems that ensued after Death died. There’s even a redemptive third act, as the Hackneys’ records are rediscovered by the new generation of musical archivists who go looking for the unjustly forgotten. A Band Called Death should reassure every talented but struggling group that if they’re original and impassioned enough, there’s always a chance that their work will eventually be appreciated; it just may take a few decades.
Gospel music has a subculture all its own, with a performing and recording circuit that largely exists outside the mainstream. George Nierenberg’s Say Amen, Somebody treats these lesser-known histories and personalities with the same seriousness with which other filmmakers have treated the stories of big-time bands or iconic music scenes. More important, Nierenberg revels in the rapturous performances of veteran singers, making it clear why this chapter in American musical history matters. Roger Ebert nailed the spirit of Say Amen, Somebody when he called it “one of the most joyful movies I’ve ever seen.”
30. A Poem Is a Naked Person (1974) It took 40 years for Les Blank’s documentary about Leon Russell to get a theatrical release, reportedly because the subject initially hated what the director did with the footage he’d compiled over two years of shooting. As much an impressionistic study of life in Oklahoma and Nashville as it is a film about the roots-rock cult favorite, A Poem Is a Naked Person paints Russell as a somewhat obnoxious, materialistic embodiment of the music business. But the movie also contains some smoking-hot performances by Russell and some of his peers, and overall it’s a sensitive and artful sketch of America in the early 1970s. Thank goodness Russell eventually decided to allow it to be seen — even if he did wait until after Blank’s death.
29. Elvis: That’s the Way It Is (1970) After languishing in bad movies throughout most of the 1960s — during an era when rock music as a whole was becoming the sound of the times — Elvis Presley had a commercial and critical comeback at the end of the decade, and then immediately cashed in by becoming one of the highest-paid performers in Las Vegas. The reputation of Vegas Elvis isn’t the highest, so the fly-on-the-wall doc That’s the Way It Is makes for a necessary corrective to the conventional wisdom, showing that the “back to basics” country-rock sound that Presley started pursuing circa 1968 continued when settled in Nevada. This is a winning portrait of the more down-to-earth King of Rock ’n’ Roll who emerged in the 1970s: one who was looser, funnier, and more flawed, but still capable of raising hell with some of the fiercest backing musicians ever assembled.
28. 20 Feet From Stardom (2013) There’s a lot going on in director Morgan Neville’s salute to backup singers. 20 Feet From Stardom is a history lesson, putting names to the voices who enlivened the likes of the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” and David Bowie’s “Young Americans.” It’s also a slice of life, showing what it’s like to make a living on the side of the stage. Along the way, the movie asks questions about whether the music industry marginalizes talented women — and black women especially — using them for their “soul” and sex appeal but not letting them graduate to solo careers. 20 Feet From Stardom is feisty and insightful, and filled with classic songs. It’s no wonder that it became the rare music doc to win an Oscar.
27. I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (2002) It’s not often that a documentarian embeds with a band that’s going through as much turmoil as Wilco did circa 2001, when front man Jeff Tweedy fired one of his chief creative partners, Jay Bennett, at the same time that his major label, Reprise, him cut him loose for making so-called unmarketable music. Sam Jones’s visually striking black-and-white film features both the seeds and the flowering of all these various crises, while maintaining a nonjudgmental distance from the band and its process. The film’s satisfying relief comes when the band lands fourth LP Yankee Hotel Foxtrot at new label Nonesuch, one of Warner Music’s many subsidiaries including Reprise — which means Wilco was paid twice by the same company for the album, a masterpiece that cemented them as indie-rock royalty. But I Am Trying to Break Your Heart finds Tweedy & Co. at a time of great uncertainty, torn apart by too many potential musical directions and not enough support from the folks writing the checks.
26. Long Strange Trip (2017) Accomplished documentarian Amir Bar-Lev gives the Grateful Dead the four-hour, career-spanning treatment, but makes the larger story easier to digest by breaking it in smaller pieces, each of which has its own winding narrative flow. In a way, Long Strange Trip is a movie about minutiae, with segments on seemingly minor details like the Dead’s massive amplifiers, the fans’ bootleg-trading community, and the competitive culture within the band’s road crew. Again and again, Long Strange Trip starts with what seems to be just some fun, fascinating aside, which Bar-Lev and his team of editors then gradually and gracefully plug back into the mythology of a hardworking band that tried — sometimes recklessly — to live up to its legend.
If nothing else, fashion photographer Bruce Weber’s documentary about troubled jazz great Chet Baker looks fantastic, with stark, stunningly composed shots of a desiccated Baker at the end of his life providing a contrast to the young, handsome fellow he once was. Let’s Get Lost is equally admiring and despairing, offering a fairly thorough overview of Baker’s spiky career — with friends and jazzophiles explaining the significance of his recordings of songs like “My Funny Valentine” and “But Not for Me” — while also exposing what heroin addiction and a lingering inferiority complex did to the man. This is a rich, layered film, both in love with the image of the melancholy wastrel artist and aware of the reality behind the pretty picture.
24. The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2005) The problem with championing broken, unstable artists as more “authentic” is that fans may be encouraging them to be more destructive than creative. Or at least that’s one of the points made by Jeff Feuerzeig’s complicated film about Daniel Johnston, a mentally ill singer-songwriter who’s created some strange and beautiful music, while also being a burden to his family and a danger to his friends. Without discounting the wondrous songs that Johnston has created — catchy, childlike home recordings, with a crude charm — The Devil and Daniel Johnston considers the real toll that being “a mad genius” takes on those in the immediate vicinity.
23. The Decline of Western Civilization (1981) Even though the sequel’s superior, that’s no knock against the first of Penelope Spheeris’s L.A.-set Decline films. The initial installment sets the tone for the series, balancing rough-hewn performances (by Black Flag, X, Circle Jerks, and Fear, among others) with frank fan interviews and somewhat sad offstage footage of the bands in their daily lives. Spheeris sees the connection between artist and audience, showing them as mutually, almost symbiotically, damaged. Historically speaking, this movie is important as a record of West Coast punk in its initial flowering. Cinematically, it’s a poignant expression of frustration and melancholy.
22. The Wrecking Crew (2008) The best of the recent wave of “the unsung heroes behind the stars” docs, Danny Tedesco’s The Wrecking Crew honors the in-demand Los Angeles studio musicians who helped revolutionize the sound of pop and rock in the 1960s, bridging the gaps between Frank Sinatra and the Byrds. As the son of one of those grinders (Tommy), Tedesco has known these men (and one woman, bassist Carol Kaye) his entire life, and is able to get nearly everyone who matters to go on the record, from the unknown day-players who quietly made millions, to the artists like Leon Russell and Glen Campbell who soon moved toward center stage. Filled with great music and anecdotes — including some remarkable origin stories for songs like “A Taste of Honey,” “Wichita Lineman,” and “Good Vibrations ”— The Wrecking Crew is also a welcome reminder that even in an era when singer-songwriter-producer-genius was becoming a more common job title, music remained a collaborative art form.
21. A Great Day in Harlem (1994) In 1958, Esquire photographer Art Kane gathered 57 of the era’s best-known jazz musicians in front of a Harlem brownstone for a photograph that encapsulated the past and future of a great American art form. Jean Bach’s Oscar-nominated documentary A Great Day in Harlem uses home-movie footage and interviews to tell the story of how the picture came together, and to convey both the sense of community and the complex personalities that bound the jazz community. Mostly, the movie lets its audience take a good long look at the likes of Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Gene Krupa, and Marian McPartland, all dressed up in their finest and representing decades of phenomenal music.
Julien Temple atoned for his messy, myth-shredding 1980 Sex Pistols film The Great Rock and Roll Swindle by revisiting the band’s story with a greater sense of perspective and awe 20 years later. The Filth and the Fury still acknowledges the central contradiction of the Pistols — bomb-throwing nihilists who knew they’d invalidate everything they stood for if they lasted long enough to leave a real legacy — but Temple’s second stab at telling the group’s story says more about the dystopian Britain that nurtured them, and is more generally admiring of both their flipping off of the Establishment and their actual music. There’s no way to trace the evolution of rock in the 1970s (and beyond) without understanding the Sex Pistols; The Filth and the Fury is a fine way to get that education.
19. Amy (2015) Amy Winehouse died way too soon, leaving behind one of the best albums of the 2000s (Back to Black) and lingering questions about what might’ve been. Asia Kapadia’s documentary celebrates Winehouse’s chops and her ability to make old-school R&B relevant today; but more than anything, Amy is an inquiry. By examining the singer’s drug abuse — coupled with the intense demands that the media and the music business make on young stars — the film asks whether this particular tragedy was the result of a perfect storm of sickness, on both sides of the microphone. What’s most heartbreaking about Amy is that all its previously unseen footage shows a complex young woman that the public never really got to know, because it was easier both for the singer and the tabloids to sell a simpler story of reckless self-indulgence.
It’s Madonna Louise Ciccone’s sublime self-awareness that makes Truth or Dare such a kick. Knowing that everything she’d do in front of director Alek Keshishian’s cameras would be scrutinized by fans and critics alike, Madonna put on a show, obliterating the line between her private life and her public persona. She does a provocative bump-and-grind onstage, and then backstage fellates an Evian bottle in between explicit conversations about sex with her gay backup dancers. She lets Keshishian keep in her guarded boyfriend Warren Beatty’s criticism of her exhibitionism, and her own snide remarks about Kevin Costner and Oprah Winfrey. She has awkward encounters with old friends and family who remember her as a working-class kid from Detroit. The entire movie seems designed — by Madonna herself — to force the audience to question who “Madonna” is. The line between performance art and brand-building has never been so thin.
17. The Clash: Westway to the World (2000) There have been several good documentaries about “the only band that mattered,” including The Rise and Fall of the Clash and Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten. But the best of the bunch is also the most concise. Don Letts’s Westway to the World rockets through the quartet’s brief history, beginning with their origins in the working-class, politicized wing of 1970s British punk, then showing how the eclectic, musically ambitious Strummer and the pop-savvy Mick Jones quickly expanded the Clash’s sound to encompass their own distinctive combination of reggae, world beat, rockabilly, and U.K. pub rowdiness. In addition to telling the tale of punk’s greatest export, Westway to the World captures the sense of regret from all concerned — that they couldn’t step back far enough to see what an amazing thing they had going, and instead let petty personal squabbles and a general exhaustion destroy a fruitful artistic endeavor.
16. Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2009) Because it’s about a briefly semi-popular heavy-metal band hanging on to their rock-star dreams a few years too long, Anvil! has been called “a real-life Spinal Tap.” But while the movie can be funny — and Anvil front man Steve “Lips” Kudlow can come across as comically naive and hopeful — director Sacha Gervasi aims for something a little more thoughtful here. Seen one way, this is a movie about a couple of lifelong friends who’ve talked themselves into delusions of grandeur, and keep throwing their money away on promoters and producers who can’t really do much for them. But spun more positively, Anvil! follows musicians who keep scrounging enough cash to make records and tour the world, playing for a small but devoted group of fans. Their stick-to-itiveness is pathetic — and poignant.
15. Style Wars (1983) The main focus of Tony Silver’s landmark documentary is the rise of graffiti artists in New York City circa 1980, and their ongoing battles with the authorities and with each other. But in order to put the graffiti into a larger perspective, Silver also looks at street-corner break-dancers and the burgeoning hip-hop scene, showing how it all fits together into something positive: young, poor, inner-city New Yorkers using their limited resources to express themselves. When Style Wars started airing on TV in 1983, kids of varying backgrounds around the country were inspired by the dancing and rapping to try it themselves.
Few modern pop stars have been as conscious of what to do with their popularity as Beyoncé, who’s repaid her fans’ faith by delivering inspiring feminist empowerment anthems, intensely personal heartbreak songs, and music that both synthesizes and celebrates diverse aspects of the black experience. Beyoncé’s sublime self-awareness and her understanding of the power of identity reached its peak (so far) with her 2018 Coachella performance, which she spent over a month rehearsing, working with a marching band and dozens of dancers. While running through her formidable lineup of hits, Queen Bey creates an experience akin to halftime at HBCU sporting events, filled with propulsive percussion, dazzling patterned movement, and a sense of community. Homecoming isn’t just a professional recording of the concert; it’s also a look behind the scenes at the massive effort it took to mount this one show. It’s a remarkable testament to the savvy and talent of this era’s greatest R&B idol.
13. Some Kind of Monster(2004) In recent years, Metallica has expressed some regret over letting filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky document the long, torturous process that led to their 2003 album St. Anger. But the band’s openness was a gift to music buffs, who got some insight into how a heavy-metal band with millions of dollars at their disposal spends their time and cash. In Some Kind of Monster at least, a lot of Metallica’s daily agenda seems geared toward just keeping the machinery running, even if that means group-therapy sessions and long, contentious arguments over whether the drum sound on one song feels “stock.” Given the mixed reception to St. Anger, this movie serves as the record’s extended liner notes, explaining how near-impossible it can be to produce inspired work under enormous internal and external pressure.
Jazz pianist Thelonious Monk was deeply admired by his peers in large part because his sophisticated melodic sense and his feel for improvisation seemed inexplicable, given how foggy the man could be when he was away from his instrument. Charlotte Zwerin’s Straight, No Chaser is built around footage shot for a 1967 German TV special about Monk, and it has Monk in all his strange glory, onstage and off. Through the vintage film, old photos, and interviews with the pianist’s family and colleagues, the movie tries to get to the bottom of how someone who seemed so lost so much of the time could make music so on-target. Jazz musicians tend to inspire stories about inspiration, addiction, and eccentricity; but it’s rare to get such an intimate look at a troubled genius.
11. The Last Waltz (1978) Because Martin Scorsese was palling around a lot with Robbie Robertson in the 1970s, he gave the Band’s chief songwriter and spokesman a lot of screen time in The Last Waltz, letting him wax world-weary about how hard it is to be a touring musician. But that’s a minor flaw in a major contribution to the rock-and-roll-documentary form. The Band did a lot of the work for Scorsese by calling up some of the most popular acts of the 1960s and 1970s, including Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Eric Clapton, Neil Young (and, um, Neil Diamond). But this still feels like a personal film for the iconic director, who lovingly shoots some of his musical heroes and positions the San Francisco concert hall (the Winterland Ballroom) where this so-called farewell concert took place as some kind of enchanted wonderland, safeguarding the best of an aging generation.
10. Searching for Sugar Man (2012) The problem with documentaries about the Who or the Stones is that from the grandest legends to the tiniest anecdotes, those acts’ stories are well-known by fans. Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man is a music doc aimed at people who prefer to find a magnificent old album in the dollar bin (and then become desperate to figure out where it came from). It’s about the mystery of Rodriguez, a Detroit-based folk-soul singer-songwriter who couldn’t crack many radio playlists back in the 1970s, but inexplicably became a hero to anti-apartheid activists in South Africa — even though he’d never toured there. Bendjelloul collects the fan rumors about who Rodriguez was and what happened to him, and then he and his collaborators go looking for the truth, unearthing a fascinating, moving tale about pop mythology, the vicissitudes of the recording industry, and how a great tune endures.
9. The Kids Are Alright (1979) For hard-core fans of particular artists, the documentaries made about them can be frustrating, because they’re too heavy on the pontificating and too low on the music. That’s not a problem with The Kids Are Alright, Jeff Stein’s compilation of archival performances by the Who. The interview segments are short and generally amusing (and were later parodied in the mock-doc This Is Spinal Tap), and the variety of material minimizes the monotony that can set in with a straight-up concert film. The film has such a simple, useful structure that it’s surprising that more music-themed nonfiction films don’t copy it. Stein mostly stays out of the way, and lets old footage of the most dynamic, visually oriented band in British rock speak for itself.
8. Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme (2000) There have been several good documentaries made about the early days of hip-hop, and some about the lives and times of particular acts, but Kevin Fitzgerald’s Freestyle takes an interesting approach in that it’s about the raw material of rap: the rhyme itself. In between exciting footage of rap battles, Freestyle hears from dozens of artists (including the Roots, Jurassic 5, and Mos Def) with differing opinions about whether improvisation is essential to their music, or whether it’s more artful — and more respectful to the audience — to write lyrics down and then hone them. Through all the conversations about inspiration and attitude, Fitzgerald opens the genre up even for the non-connoisseur, explicating its nuances.
7. Don’t Look Back (1967) Bob Dylan started out as one of the most stylistically distinctive and culturally plugged-in of the Greenwich Village folkies, but by the time D.A. Pennebaker followed him around Europe for the film Don’t Look Back, he’d become more of a mysterious, inscrutable character. Pennebaker shows him sparring with reporters, mocking his peers, and challenging audiences with his more abstract, poetic new musical direction. Pop and rock stars from Madonna to Bono have followed the lead of Dylan in Don’t Look Back — not with their songs, but with their public personas. This movie is like the blueprint on how to be a modern celebrity: at once arrogant and ironic.
Though it’s famous as the movie that exposed the chaos of Altamont — and the murder that happened just in front of the festival stage — there’s more to Gimme Shelter than just one moment. Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin followed the Rolling Stones across an America that was descending into violence in 1969, and they filmed the surreal spectacle that surrounded a band of rich musicians who loved the music of poor folks. It’s the filmmakers’ meditation on how counterculture heroes were inspired by the madness of their times, but tried — and often failed — to keep it at arm’s length. Gimme Shelter includes some fiery Stones performances, woven into a picture that plays as much like a cinematic essay on the cultural sea change of the late 1960s as it does a rock doc on one of the era’s greats.
5. Amazing Grace (1972/2018) Originally shot in 1972, director Sydney Pollack’s film of Aretha Franklin’s two-night live recording session for her gospel album Amazing Gracesat on a shelf for decades, held up first by technical snafus and then by legal disputes. The finished version premiered three months after Franklin’s death, and is a wondrous, miraculous thing. Though it ostensibly just records about a dozen songs that Franklin belted out in a sweltering Los Angeles church — surrounded by a choir that both supported her and were transported by her — Amazing Grace is also a document of a movie crew scrambling to figure out the best way to capture the magic happening right in front of their eyes, and it’s the story of the crowds that packed into the chapel on the second night once they heard about the electric performances happening inside. At the center of the hubbub is a stoic, silent Franklin, who says nary a word between numbers, even as others are stepping up to the microphone to sing her praises. She’s like a visitation from above, who could at any moment fade right back to from whence she came.
4. Scratch (2001) Anyone who still somehow doubts that a turntable can be a musical instrument should watch Doug Pray’s brilliant deep dive into the culture of spinning and sampling. Beginning with the origins of hip-hop — and the way innovators like GrandMixer DXT, Jam Master Jay, and Double Dee & Steinski used record players as both percussion and hook-generating machines — Scratch proceeds to cover more sophisticated, almost avant-garde modern artists like DJ Shadow and DJ Qbert. The film is both a primer for those who know nothing about terms like “crate-digging,” and a thrilling collection of performances, with Pray’s lingering over scratchers’ hands to show that they’re as nimble and skilled as any guitarist’s. Ultimately, Scratch does what a great music documentary should do: it not only deeply understands the larger culture it’s chronicling, it covers it so well that even someone who knows nothing about it will come away feeling invested.
Jonathan Demme’s concert film is devoid of interviews, and lacks any overt attempts to contextualize the music of Talking Heads, but it’s still a documentary in its way, because it has a narrative, and it frames a reality. Bandleader David Byrne came up with a highly conceptual stage show for the Heads’ 1983 tour, starting with just himself on the stage and then adding one additional member for each song in the first set, and one prop or striking visual element per song for the second set. It was Demme’s job to make those changes noticeable, framing them up nicely to show how modern and innovative Byrne’s ideas and designs were, and keeping track of the effects the performance was having on the musicians. He treats the players like characters in one of his own fiction movies, noticing every time they smile or interject or give the gig a little extra oomph. Through music and movement alone, Stop Making Sense documents what it was like to be a member of Talking Heads — and a patron of cool — in the early 1980s. Stylistically, his techniques forever elevated the concert film genre.
Because heavy metal isn’t as “cool” as punk rock, the second installment of Penelope Spheeris’s Decline trilogy sometimes gets the short shrift from those who prefer the spikier first one. But The Metal Years is the more meaningful film: an at-times-painfully-honest portrait of the superstars and wannabes who shared space on the Sunset Strip in the late 1980s. Spheeris captures rich rockers mired in self-loathing (like W.A.S.P. guitarist Chris Holmes, who spends his scenes getting hammered in his pool), and up-and-comers who refuse to believe they won’t make it big some day. She also talks to the fans who spread their allegiances between both camps. This is a movie about what happens when a materialistic culture meets a genre that promotes power fantasies, combining to create unrealistic expectations. It’s a damning inquiry into the lies that sustain rock culture.
1. Woodstock (1970) It’s sometimes hard to think of Woodstock as anything other than the enshrinement (for better or worse) of the entire 1960s counterculture: its political idealism, its communal spirit, and its electrifying music. But director Michael Wadleigh always meant Woodstock to be a cinema verité report on an event, not a museum piece. As a result, this film looks better with each passing year, as the backlash against the boomer generation fades, and as Wadleigh’s footage ceases to be a lazy way for broadcast journalists and documentarians to sum up an entire decade. Seen as a whole, Woodstock tells a more complete story, weaving epochal performances by Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Sly & the Family Stone, and more into a movie about ridiculously young-looking kids realizing — with both pleasure and paranoia — that they have the power to create their own “Establishment,” taking the best of what their parents taught them and adding casual sex, clouds of pot smoke, and ear-splitting rock and roll.
Today, Lil Nas X, the Atlanta college dropout who made the mega-viral cowboy-rap novelty smash "Old Town Road," turns 20. And today, as we learned last night, is also the day that "Old Town Road" takes its rightful place atop the Billboard Hot 100. There are many, many fascinating things about … More »
If you have good headphones and want to be rumbled for 70 minutes...this is your album
I once walked into a Sunn O))) show with a hangover, and I walked out feeling much better. If you hear the band's ambient drone-metal rumble loud enough -- and if you're going to see them life, you are definitely hearing it loud enough -- it has a measurable physical effect on you. You feel … More »
I enjoy both of these films quite a bit. Really enjoy this, too: critics at the festival called Silver Lake “wonderfully weird,” “the work of a potentially major artist,” and “a wandering fartscape."
“The film is a mystery and there are mysteries inside of that mystery, and some of the characters could be considered mysteries themselves,” says David Robert Mitchell. “Will I explain any of them? No.”
We’re sitting in the cafeteria at L.A.’s Griffith Observatory last May, and the 44-year-old writer-director, unshaven with middle-parted Jesus hair, is politely but not so helpfully answering my questions about Under the Silver Lake, his new, deliberately overcomplicated surrealist neo-noir, which at the time was scheduled to premiere at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival the following week and open in theaters a month later.
If you know who Mitchell is, it’s probably as the filmmaker behind It Follows, the 2015 thriller about a young woman who, after sleeping with a sketchy new boyfriend, is stalked through the Detroit suburbs by a supernatural pedestrian who will kill her unless she passes the curse to another sexual partner. Mining high-end scares from its deceptively low-end premise, It Follows was, at least by Rotten Tomatoes’ measure, the best-reviewed American horror film in nearly three decades and helped light the fuse for the recent boom in well-made scary movies that have grossed hundreds of millions of dollars and even occasionally been described, with a straight face, as prestigious.
This movie is not like that movie, or at least not too much like it. Both operate on similarly demented dream logic, eke miracles out of relatively small budgets, and hide entire subplots in the corners of Mitchell’s fussily composed frames. But while It Follows had mysteries of its own, it tended to please audiences in a single 100-minute sitting. Silver Lake, in contrast, is 140 minutes long, and even its main story has “a lot of hidden layers to it,” according to Mitchell, who adds, “It might be impossible to see all of them on a first viewing or even a second.”
Was Mitchell worried about how Silver Lake would be received at Cannes, where audiences would deliver verdicts after seeing it just the one time? “The goal was to make a bold statement,” he says. “It’s an intentional shot across the bow, a bit of a fuck-you. I’m sure there will be a range of reactions.”
He’s right. Critics at the festival called Silver Lake “wonderfully weird,” “the work of a potentially major artist,” and “a wandering fartscape.” A few thought it was misogynistic, but others saw a biting prosecution of straight white male privilege. It was shut out of awards, and Mitchell was hammered in interviews with questions about the film’s male gaze. But the mixed reaction, plus a stylish trailer that debuted just before Cannes, helped confer on Silver Lake an instant cult status — which only grew when the distributor, A24, pushed back the film’s release to December and then again to this month. For certain types, it might by now be more anticipated than the new Avengers movie it will share theaters with. (Silver Lake will open in New York and L.A. on April 19 and then become available on VOD the following week.)
Silver Lake isn’t for everybody. But if you like meandering, California-based detective stories in the tradition of Kiss Me Deadly through Inherent Vice,and especially if you like watching a director follow a hit with something strange and slightly impossible that probably wouldn’t have been made under any other circumstances, this film might be for you. It’s a stoned paraphrasing of The Long Goodbye and Mulholland Drive starring Andrew Garfield as Sam, an unemployed 33-year-old Angeleno whose crush on his downstairs neighbor, Sarah (Riley Keough), tips over into obsession when she disappears along with her roommates and everything in their apartment. Sam goes searching for her through the city’s gentrified Eastside while finding hidden codes in movies, music, and magazines that lead him into ever-weirder side plots — a naked woman with the head of an owl, an elderly pianist who may have ghostwritten every pop song of the past century — all of which he decides are connected in one big conspiracy.
We realize gradually, or at least we’re supposed to, that Sam is not the most dependable narrator. He beats up two young boys after they egg his car, says mean things about the homeless, and claims Vanna White talks to him through his TV. We keep hearing that somebody’s been killing dogs around L.A., and Sam carries biscuits in his pockets despite not owning any pets. Women find him irresistible — possibly because he looks like Andrew Garfield, as charismatically dazed as ever — even though he ogles them and wears clothes that have been sprayed by a skunk. (“I like your shirt,” says one woman at a party. It’s a pit-stained Hanes undershirt.) Maybe Sam is less an underdog hero than an avatar of toxic male entitlement.
Silver Lake has been called a pre-#MeToo movie, but it may be a perfect fit in the age of QAnon, flat-earth theory, and so many kinds of “truthers.” “Sam could continue reaching for things, but he’s given up,” says Mitchell. “Maybe he’s thinking, What’s the point? When you’re a kid, people tell you that you can be whatever you want, and then you realize that’s not necessarily true. Even being able to buy a house, for our generation, is like a near-impossible task. So how do you process that? Maybe you go looking for meaning in strange places.”
Garfield says he expected Silver Lake to polarize: “It definitely wasn’t a project I went into going, ‘This is gonna be the next Forrest Gump.’ It’s the anti–Forrest Gump or the anti–La La Land. It’s a darker, skewed look at the collective consciousness of a city defined by capitalist, misogynistic, patriarchal, superficial values that have led people astray. It’s fascinating to me that people might miss the clues, and I think that says quite a lot about what they want to see rather than what’s being presented.”
When Garfield took the part, he’d just played a Jesuit priest in Silence and a conscientious objector to WWII in Hacksaw Ridge, so he was eager for the work-related excuse to behave antisocially. “The great thing about being an actor is you get to do terrible things and not actually do them,” he says. “There was a moment when I stick a raw egg in a kid’s face and I had to do it a bunch of times, and one time there was an egg with a pretty thick shell that didn’t break. I was like, Oh God. That probably hurt a little. The kid was having a great time, but it’s a lot of responsibility when you’re fake-beating the shit out of children.”
Mitchell calls me a week after Cannes, describing the premiere as “wonderful and difficult. I always knew the film would be divisive, but you never know quite to what degree,” he says. “But if I have a frustration, it’s that some people have perceived the film to be misogynistic, which is personally very painful. I just so strongly disagree. This character is disconnected from the world and is struggling with feelings of misogyny — that’s a core element of what this movie is about. I assume that most people will see him beating up children and staring at women’s asses as offensive behavior, and I don’t think I need to constantly tell everyone that. For people to imagine that we’re celebrating it is just disappointing.”
Mitchell grew up in Clawson, Michigan, and in the eighth grade wrote his first screenplay, an unauthorized sequel to Ghostbusters.(“It was 90 pages and terrible, but I really thought something was going to happen with it.”) He went to Wayne State University and then Florida State’s graduate film school, where he met collaborators he’d stick with through Silver Lake, including cinematographer Mike Gioulakis and producer Adele Romanski (who also produced Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, by fellow FSU alum Barry Jenkins).
Mitchell’s first movie was 2011’s The Myth of the American Sleepover, a quiet, no-budget coming-of-age drama about suburban high-schoolers pondering their impending grown-up-hood. After that, he wrote a few scripts, one a variation on the same theme: more kids, more suburbs, more dawning awareness of one’s mortality, except this time with a shape-shifting, neck-breaking demon to personify that awareness.
Horror movies were no easy sell in 2012, when Mitchell was pitching Hollywood on It Follows. “Nobody gave a shit,” he says. “Everybody told me, ‘Horror is dead. Maybe if you’d had this idea ten years ago, we could have done something with it.’ ” Eventually, he cut a few expensive scenes and reduced his budget to “a very painful” $1 million, which did the trick. Its release in four theaters was hastily expanded after strong reviews and snowballed into a $23 million worldwide haul — not blockbuster numbers but enough to show the potential of a smart horror movie as well as help Mitchell secure Silver Lake’s $8 million budget.
(In a foreshadowing of the controversy over Silver Lake, a few critics thought the monster from It Follows was an STD meant to slut-shame the protagonist, but any alleged abstinence-only agenda would’ve been lost on viewers who were rooting for the character to lose the curse by any intercourse necessary.)
“I’m proud that It Follows was one of the first horror films that broke through in this era,” Mitchell says. “But I’m also jealous because right now, if you’re an indie director with a horror script, you can probably get that thing made.”
Who knows how long that loophole will stay open, though. He admits the “territory’s not so friendly” nowadays for those looking to do anything idiosyncratic. Take, for example, Under the Silver Lake’s twice-delayed release date. What was that about? “You’d have to ask A24,” he told me a few weeks ago. “If it were up to me, I would’ve loved the film to have come out last summer. But they’re the distributor and this is the time they think is best, so I have to defer to them.” (A24 declined to comment.)
Mitchell says he never considered making changes to the movie after Cannes: “We’re all really proud of it and wouldn’t have showed it at Cannes or anywhere else if it wasn’t the movie we wanted it to be.”
Since then, he has been writing full-time. He did a pass on a sci-fi script called Man Alive, to be made by Hiro Murai, director of TV’s Atlanta. He hopes to be in production on his own next movie by the end of the summer, but he can’t tell me what it is.
Meanwhile, Silver Lake is already streaming in some countries, which means it’s being freeze-framed, dissected, and decrypted. From the looks of the Under the Silver Lake sub-Reddit, a cult movie has found its cult. In one recent post, a user wondered whether the names Sam and Sarah plus the Kurt Cobain poster in Sam’s bedroom are references to the samsara and Nirvana of Buddhism, which could mean the whole movie is Sam’s dying fever dream. Another user converted a wall pattern in one scene into binary code before somebody else pointed out that the scene was filmed in a real location and the pattern had not been put there by the production. Silver Lake’s credits do include a “cryptography consultant,” though, and there are several codes hidden in the movie, one of which seems to translate to coordinates for a real, dangerously inaccessible location in the Sierra Nevadas. (Nobody’s gone there yet, or at least gone there and survived to report back.) “That I don’t know about,” says Mitchell in a tone that implies he does. “But it’s nice to hear people are seeing some of the layers.”
*A version of this article appears in the April 15, 2019, issue of New York Magazine.Subscribe Now!
I also really like The Alps and Killing of a Sacred Deer, though they're a little less accessible than Dogtooth, even, which is already fairly inaccessible. I think Lanthimos my favorite director at the moment. Excited to check out more greek weird wave!
Perhaps you saw The Lobster (stunning and strange dystopian love story starring Rachel Weisz and Colin Farrell) or my recent Oscar favorite The Favourite (cheeky and wicked period drama with the powerhouse trio of Emma Stone, Rachel Weisz, and Olivia Colman) or maybe you’ve been following him since 2009’s Dogtooth. All three are examples of the relatively new “Greek Weird Wave” cinema, from the genre’s godfather himself, Yorgos Lanthimos. It’s hard to find pieces on Weird Wave written in English, but Dazed has a roundup from a few years ago: Greece may be broke, but its film scene is rich. Here’s a more current list of films via IMDB.
Reclusive and isolated social groups, with specific rules and a tendency for confinement are certainly the center of Lanthimos movies. He uses his actors in an innovative way, directing them to play as unrealistically as possible, in a way that reminds us of marionettes or robots who are not yet really aware of the element of speech and thought. Every frame is designed and stylized strictly, to a great extent where the camera stays motionless in space, after being set in a carefully thought-out position, where the only movement comes from the actors playing in the scene. In this unorthodox way Lanthimos is trying to introduce us to his unique utopian environments and isolated social groups.
I’m hoping The Favourite’s ten Oscar nominations were enough to get Lanthimos and Greek Weird Wave more attention so we can see more films from the genre in coming years, especially ones filmed and produced in Greece. They can use the economic boost.
Are there any Korine fans on reader? I'd love to talk to someone about The Beach Bum but I would settle for talking about Spring Breakers
In 2012, Harmony Korine, the patron saint of weird film, defied nearly every expectation of him: He wrote and directed a mainstream movie. Centered around a party-hearty quartet of college students in neon bikinis who fall under the sway of a be-grilled drug dealer named Alien (James Franco), the artsploitation crime romp Spring Breakers rode a wave of word-of-mouth popularity. Reportedly costing just $5 million, the Florida-set thriller grossed $31 million worldwide — a huge score for its then-nascent distributor A24 — spurring a For Your Consideration Oscar campaign for Franco in 2013, and coming to rank in the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century.
Up until then, Korine was known for art-house movies like Julien Donkey-Boy(about a man struggling with untreated schizophrenia), Gummo (an improvisational comedy-fantasy of Rust Belt poverty and moral decay), Trash Humpers (about people who have sexual encounters with garbage), and the legendary lost film Fight Harm (which stars Korine himself, apparently inebriated, successfully attempting to goad passersby into fist-fighting him). After Spring Breakers’ game-changing success, Korine set his sights on The Trap, a gritty Jamie Foxx/Benicio Del Toro project. Tragically, it fell apart after years in development at Annapurna Films. Korine temporarily turned his back on Hollywood as a result, moved to Miami, and started painting abstract canvases full-time.
And that’s when The Beach Bum was born. Korine’s newfound fascination with the houseboat lifestyle of the Florida Keys combined with his love of Cheech & Chong movies and a vision of America he describes as “cosmic.” The filmmaker’s fifth feature as a writer-director (he burst onto the independent movie scene as writer of the incendiary 1995 skater drama Kids) stars Matthew McConaughey as Moondog, a Ferrari-driving stoner poet who marches to the beat of his own bongos, spouting faux profundities under a constant fog of smoke and PBR foam. The episodic comedy-drama is stacked with outlandish performances: Jonah Hill sporting a swamp-thick Cajunish accent as Moondog’s hectoring literary agent; Zac Efron as a hard-vaping, Christian-metal-loving patient at the same rehab facility as Moondog; and Isla Fisher as our protagonist’s fabulously rich but less than faithful wife, Minnie. Snoop Dogg portrays her lover, a slick R&B singer named Lingerie. Oh, and Jimmy Buffett and Martin Lawrence show up, too.
At an upscale West Hollywood hotel, Korine blazed on an inch-long cigar stogie — comically at odds with our posh surroundings — and discussed his surprisingly joyful but unsurprisingly absurd new movie. Here, the director breaks down four of The Beach Bum’s most unhinged scenes:
Korine says watching The Trap fall apart was brutal. Intended to be the polar opposite of TheBeach Bum, he describes the movie-that-never-was as “a very violent revenge film” with an energy that was “so intense that I just couldn’t maintain it. That’s where I was like, ‘I want to make something that’s the opposite. Something that’s more of a Jimmy Buffett ballad gone bad. Like a Jimmy Buffett ballad that’s derailed.’”
Buffett serves as more than just tonal inspiration for TheBeach Bum. The human embodiment of checked-out culture actually appears in the movie as a member of Moondog’s assembly of “really iconic, mythic stoners,” as Korine describes them. “I just love him,” Korine says of Buffett, who ends up playing himself in the film. “He’s a good friend of mine. I love that he’s a guy that’s created an entire world based on some music. He’s created this fantasy, this beautiful fantasy for people … ‘I’m going to enjoy the sunset. I’m here for a microsecond and I’m not going to give in to it. I’m not going to give in to the machine.’”
Among the mythic stoners is another familiar musician: Snoop Dogg. The rapper was originally cast to play himself, but he had other ideas. “I don’t want to play Snoop. I want to play a guy named Lingerie,” Korine recalls Snoop Dogg telling him. “‘You could call me Ray, but I want to be called Lingerie, and I want to be an R&B singer.” “Why?” Korine asked. “Because I’m smooth and silky as a motherfucker,” Snoop Dogg replied.
The friendship between Buffett’s Beach Bum persona (more or less exactly what you’d expect from the mayor of Margaritaville, with a bit more smoking, profanity, and nude women thrown into the mix) and Lingerie (more or less exactly what you’d expect from Snoop Dogg) culminates in one of the movie’s best scenes: a song/rap dedicated to Moondog and performed on the deck of Lingerie’s multimillion-dollar yacht alongside a coterie of mostly naked onlookers. “Lookin’ for the Moondog / Lookin’ through the moon fog,” they alternate crooning to McConaughey’s eternally chill-with-it character.
“In the script, it says they play a song together called ‘Moon Fog,’ and I had probably written like one or two lines or something of the song,” Korine says. “Then when we got there, they had already been working on their own version of it. Before I got there, they had just started riffing together, and really, really kind of just made it. It became their thing.”
When it comes to improvisation in his films, Korine prefers to refer to of-the-moment acting decisions as “riffing.” “It’s like, the script is written up to a certain point,” he says. “You created an environment for the actors where anything can happen within that, and then you encourage it to go into some other place.”
One such place was between Isla Fisher’s toes. While shooting an intimate couch interaction between Moondog and his wife, the fabulously wealthy heiress Minnie, McConaughey opted to use his co-star’s foot as a perch for his joint. Onscreen, the actor situates the doobie between Fisher’s toes, takes a deep drag, and proceeds to sloppily suck her appendages. The choreography wasn’t exactly planned. “I think that was just like … it happened very naturally,” Korine remembers. “We were just filming, and her feet were up in his face. And then he just did what Moondog would do, and he sticks the joint in her toes and starts sucking it. When everyone starts cracking up, you know it’s good.”
“Yeah, I don’t think she was ready for it,” Korine guesses of Fisher’s reaction. Toe joints or not, almost every scene in TheBeach Bum is clouded in some degree of smoke. “The characters in the film, most of them, especially Moon, are high the entire movie,” Korine explains. “Or have to be, to some degree, there. Buzz is on in some way. Obviously [the actors themselves] can’t do that … they would never be able to function, so a lot of it’s acting.”
In other words, Korine’s production team had to order a lot of prop weed. But there were exceptions. “I wasn’t really focused so much on what everyone was smoking,” Korine admits when I ask if Snoop and Jimmy Buffett enjoyed the real deal on set. “I just knew that it was a lot of smoke. There were some scenes when they go in the weed room — the hydroponic room. We were shooting there all night and Snoop was just going at it. At one point I did feel myself like … my soul coming out of my body. I did. I looked at the [cinematographer] and was like, ‘Are you floating?’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, I think I’m floating.’”
How’d Martin Lawrence, whose last movie credit is 2011’s Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son, end up in TheBeach Bum? More precisely, how did he come to play Captain Wack, a dolphin-tour guide and self-proclaimed Vietnam veteran who never saw combat — or went to Vietnam — but still carries shrapnel in his testicles and keeps a cocaine-addicted parrot as a pet?
“I just loved him,” Korine says. “I used to love that show Martin. Loved him in Bad Boys, and I was an even bigger fan of his stand-up. You know, I’d always been thinking over the last couple years, I was like, Where is he? I kind of liked that he had kind of dropped out for a little bit. So it was like a dream. If I could get anyone to play this, who would it be? I really didn’t know him. It was a shot in the dark. We reached out and he read it, and then I got a call: He was down. When I started talking to him on the phone, he was like, ‘The only thing I don’t want to do is have a parrot on my shoulder.’ Originally, he was supposed to have a live parrot on his shoulder the whole time.”
Lawrence’s scene involved zero live parrots on his shoulder and zero live sharks in the water. The fins audiences see circling the comedian after he ventures into open water for a solo swim — which he mistakes for signs of friendly dolphins — are the result of CGI.“Yeah, it was trippy,” Korine says of shooting the scene. “We spent all day — my daughter was in that scene. She was the girl in the boat … Martin would stare out at the ocean, and I could tell he didn’t want to jump in. I knew he wasn’t looking forward to it, but he was so committed to it. He did a bunch for us because obviously that scene has a lot of special effects.”
Korine is so enamored with Lawrence that he’s considering, jokingly or not, spinning off the character for a Captain Wack movie. “That sequence is so amazing and Martin is so great,” Korine says. “I have already thought it up. I have already, like, a movie about the world’s worst dolphin-tour guide. A guy, Captain Wack, a man who lives on a houseboat and has a coke-addicted parrot. It writes itself.”
Without revealing a key plot twist, one of The Beach Bum’s concluding scenes involves a yacht being blown to smithereens in a fiery explosion — certainly a more visually ambitious and technically complicated sequence than anything the filmmaker committed to screen in Gummo or Julien Donkey-Boy.Still, Korine insists he didn’t feel out of his element working with stunt coordinators and second-unit directors or embracing his inner Michael Bay. “I had played around with things. Not like that — but maybe things in it. When I’ve been advertising there are certain things that I’ve done, more like, ‘Ahhh! I feel like I can do this, in a way, incorporated into a film technically.’ Then you just work with good people, effects guys. I storyboard the whole sequence so we kind of like … you know, we knew.”
So you really blew up a boat? I ask. “Blew the shit out of that bitch,” Korine confirms.
In Homecoming, the narrative fiction podcast turned Julia Roberts-starring Amazon TV series, Titanic Rising is a joke. It's a made-up movie, a nonexistent sequel to James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster Titanic. In an elaborate prank, one soldier convinces another that Titanic Rising really exists. But as the show continues, the significance of Titanic Rising … More »
The rush that comes with a perfect pop song is elusive but unmistakable. "Pop music" can mean many things, but there's a certain kind of monster jam that scans as POP MUSIC in neon lights, the kind that sends euphoria coursing through your nervous system and launches your body onto the dance floor. More »
Have you guys watched the new Black Mirror episode where Miley Cyrus sings Nine Inch Nails yet? Trent Reznor has! … More »
Sleater-Kinney officially announced their new album The Center Won't Hold last night, and today the first interview promoting the project has gone online. A profile at The Fader contains several intriguing details about the new record -- Sleater-Kinney's first since 2015 comeback No Cities To Love -- and it also includes … More »
Bill Callahan, the veteran indie singer-songwriter who used to record under the name Smog, is about to release his first album since 2013's Dream River. The upcoming Shepherd In A Sheepskin Vest, which comes out next Friday, is a massive 20-song undertaking. And instead of the usual advance singles, he's been … More »
Taylor Swift rarely gets political. But ahead of the midterm elections last year, she came out in support of two Democratic candidates in Tennessee. And early today, just as Pride Month officially kicked off, the pop star shared an open letter to her Senator urging him to defend LGBTQ rights and support the … More »
Lil Nas X's improbable, inexorable rise to the top of the charts and country-rap stardom continues to be one of the feel-good stories of the year. "Old Town Road," a supremely goofy song with a Nine Inch Nails sample and a Billy Ray Cyrus remix, blew up organically thanks to some TikTok memes … More »
Carly Rae Jepsen's new album, Dedicated, is out now -- read our Premature Evaluation review of it. Last night, she appeared on The Late Late Show With James Corden to perform its latest proper single, "Too Much." She looks like she's having a good time! Fun performance for one of the … More »
There is obviously nothing in this world more punk rock than a Netflix exec getting $1.6 million from tech investors for his canned-water company. This is some serious motherfucking hardcore shit. Liquid Death, a new company that sells bottled water in tallboy cans, is about to open this pit up. That seems to be the … More »
Tonight, Taylor Swift releases the project she's been teasing via mural and cryptic Instagram post. She's just shared her new song "ME!" featuring Panic! At The Disco's Brendon Urie, along with an accompanying music video. The song was produced and co-written by Joel Little, who co-wrote, produced, … More »
Everyone should've known what was happening when they saw the socks. Everyone should've taken one look at the socks, turned right around, and tromped back into the Coachella campgrounds. Maybe they could've found someone selling coke. Maybe they could've happened upon a hungover massage circle, or a phone-charging station. Maybe they could've seen a horse. More »
Today, Lil Nas X, the Atlanta college dropout who made the mega-viral cowboy-rap novelty smash "Old Town Road," turns 20. And today, as we learned last night, is also the day that "Old Town Road" takes its rightful place atop the Billboard Hot 100. There are many, many fascinating things about … More »
I once walked into a Sunn O))) show with a hangover, and I walked out feeling much better. If you hear the band's ambient drone-metal rumble loud enough -- and if you're going to see them life, you are definitely hearing it loud enough -- it has a measurable physical effect on you. You feel … More »
In Homecoming, the narrative fiction podcast turned Julia Roberts-starring Amazon TV series, Titanic Rising is a joke. It's a made-up movie, a nonexistent sequel to James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster Titanic. In an elaborate prank, one soldier convinces another that Titanic Rising really exists. But as the show continues, the significance of Titanic Rising … More »
