The Screengrab : kurt cobain

Screengrab's Favorite Movies About Music: Fiction Edition (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 22:00:00 GMT

HEAD (1968)

I think just about anyone who’s familiar with the Monkees’ sweet, goofy Peter Tork was bummed by the actor/musician’s recent diagnosis with head and neck cancer (although, apparently, the prognosis is currently good). And I think no matter how silly or cynically conceived hippies found the Pre-Fab Four back in the sixties, the songs the TV band had written for them (“I’m a Believer,” “Daydream Believer,” “Steppin’ Stone,” etc.) are a helluva lot better than most of the songs being written for today’s prefabricated music industry shills, most of whom don’t even have the self-awareness to be self-deprecating and more than a little embarrassed by their place in the pop culture firmament. To their credit, Tork and his bandmates Mickey Dolenz (the funny one), Davy Jones (the cute one) and Michael Nesmith (the smart one) tried their best to rebel against their corporate overlords with Head, a big-screen attempt at image-smashing phantasmagoria that plays like an LSD-inspired episode of the group’s small-screen show, i.e. a brainy, mostly well-behaved mind-fuck that’s actually a lot more entertaining and thought-provoking than some of the more “authentic” freak-outs of the era, what with the underwater imagery accompanying the haunting “Porpoise Song,” the burlesque meditations on fame and the peculiar cameos by the likes of Victor Mature, Annette Funicello and Frank Zappa with a cow.

HIGH FIDELITY (2000)

That High Fidelity is playfully self-conscious and yet not overly precious is a testament to both director Stephen Frears, here smoothly segueing between goofy comedy and sobering drama, as well as star (and co-writer) John Cusack, whose turn as romantically challenged record store owner Rob stands as one of his finest performances. Retaining the ragamuffin spirit of Nick Hornby’s source novel, Frears’ funny and incisive adaptation boasts two superb supporting players in Jack Black and Todd Louiso as Rob’s employees, as well as a script that refuses to sentimentalize the stunted-maturity failings of its protagonist. Rob is a man-child whose compulsive habit of concocting lists – about favorite songs and past break-ups – speaks to the vital role music plays in his romantic life, while also serving as his means of engaging in self-analysis through a safe, detached filter. A bit too much of Cusack’s narration and dialogue (taken verbatim from Hornby’s novel) lands with a writerly thud on screen, but the actor’s warts-and-all performance – unafraid to posit his protagonist as a navel-gazing prick, and still capable of making him endearing – is so energized that it overshadows any occasional missteps.

LAST DAYS (2005)

The high point of Gus Van Sant’s Béla Tarr-inspired “death trilogy” (following 2002’s Gerry and 2003’s Elephant), Last Days charts the final, pedestrian events in the life of a Kurt Cobain surrogate (Michael Pitt) in and around his Pacific Northwest estate. A ruminative, melancholy work with little interest in traditional narrative, Van Sant’s evocative gem aims mainly to situate viewers in a particular physical environment and headspace. In this case, that’s the remote residence and fuzzy mind of a shuffling, head-downturned, shaggy-haired rock star who wanders about his property like a ghost burdened by some ill-defined psychological and emotional misery. Rife with ambiguous religious overtones that contribute to an atmosphere of spiritual malaise, obliquely addressing the relationship between image and reality, and depicting its protagonist – constricted by claustrophobic full-frame compositions – as beset by hangers-on and record studio execs who take but don’t give, Last Days operates as a richly textured, arrestingly evocative avant-garde hypothesis about the forces that might have contributed to Cobain’s suicidal demise.

SINGLES (1992)

No one will mistake Singles for a great rom-com, but viewed as a snapshot of a very particular musical era, Cameron Crowe’s 1992 film holds up surprisingly well. The story has to do with two on-again, off-again couples (Campbell Scott and Kyra Sedgwick, Matt Dillon and Bridget Fonda) attempting to navigate choppy romantic waters. However, despite Crowe’s reasonably sturdy dramatization of twentysomethings in search of love and their post-collegiate identities – as well as his inconsistent (but far-from-disastrous) decision to have characters break the fourth wall to deliver commentary – the film’s lasting appeal has as much to do with timing as with storytelling. By setting the action in a Seattle grunge scene on the brink of exploding, Crowe hopelessly dated his film. Yet that turns out to be a good thing, since Singles, bolstered by cameos and performances by various members of the bands (Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains) that would temporarily make Seattle the epicenter of rock, while comfortably rooted in the damp, sleepy, basketball-loving atmosphere of his Pacific Northwest milieu, proves an engaging, enduring time capsule.

GRACE OF MY HEART (1996)

This movie is character actress Illeana Douglas's best role to date. As in Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine and I'm Not There, Grace of My Heart attempts to create a transcendent reality for the stories about Carole King, who some readers may need to be reminded was one of the Brill Building songwriters of the early '60s who later went on to have commercial success as a singer-songwriter with her album Tapestry. Perhaps you saw her on Stephen Colbert's show. In this movie, she is known as Denise Waverly. Denise comes to work in the Brill Building for a Phil Spector-alike played by John Turturro, writing songs for girl groups. She takes up with her co-songwriter, a Gerry Goffin-alike played by Eric Stolz (among the real-life Goffin-King compositions: "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," "The Loco-Motion," "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman"), but their marraige falls apart. Later, she moves to California and takes up with a Brian Wilson-alike played by Matt Dillon. Even though it's not as smart as the Haynes rock fictions, it's quite a lovely little movie with lots of nice touches to people familiar with the characters portrayed. I especially enjoy the faux-Wilson's mental breakdown while working on the movie's version of Smile, the real-life album that broke Brian Wilson's spirit for a time.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Hayden Childs

Screengrab Salutes: The Top Biopics of All Time! (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 23:00:00 GMT

BLAISE PASCAL (1972)

Part of Rossellini's massive trove of biopics done for Italian TV in the last part of his career (and considered the best by J. Hoberman), Blaise Pascal respects the form but not spirit of biopics. Rossellini dutifully covers the 17th-century philosopher's life from infancy to death. There's no hint of a personal life though: it's 130 straight minutes of argumentation and disputation, with Pascal's greatest philosophical hits recited — conversationally, but barely — almost non-stop. Tension comes from an ominous, decidedly anachronistic synth score, whose constant hum reminds the viewer that death is coming for Pascal, and it does. Like Zodiac (albeit at a much lower intensity), Blaise Pascal gains power from tunneling deep into work and pointedly ignoring the outside world. Rossellini only stops to observe the uninflected past in non-dramatic moments: a silent sequence of a nobleman waking up, soaking his feet in water and being dressed by his servants tells us more about 17th-century class behavior than any dialogue could. No stories of how Pascal fell in love with a girl or had problems with his parents; the man's legacy, the film makes it quite clear, is solely an intellectual one, and that's all anyone should care about. It's oddly exhilarating: you're asked to simply step up and think hard for a while, without gratifying your emotions. In this (unsubtitled) clip, Pascal schools Descartes. Coming to DVD in January.

PATTON (1970)

The rare movie equally beloved by hardcore cineastes and testosterone-addled football-loving guys who could care less about movies, Patton is best remembered for the surreal opening monologue (above), a real Patton speech delivered straight to the audience in front of a giant American flag. (Vincent Canby called the effect "almost Rauschenberg.") But Patton is the rare movie whose central ambivalence never seemed to bother the public. He's presented straight-up in the middle of combat scenes presented with elaborately gorgeous clarity; it's a question of perspective whether he's a loon or whether he has a point. It's also frequently hilarious, as in the scene where Patton arrives to take charge of a camp that's in a total state of disarray. He finds a man slumped over in a hallway. "What are you doing?" he barks. "Sleeping, sir" the man answers. "Well keep sleeping! You're the only one who knows what he's doing around here!"

LAST DAYS (2005)

In my experience, people who are die-hard Kurt Cobain/Nirvana fans tend to hate Gus Van Sant's impressionistic take on Cobain's mentally deranged final hours. On the one hand, Van Sant gets some major iconographic images right (Cobain's body in the gardener's shed); on the other hand, there's no Nirvana music and zero attempt to convey anything about Nirvana. If you find Van Sant's long-tracking-shots-and-lighting-experiments aesthetic annoying (and you love Cobain), it looks like total disrespect. It's just Michael Pitt (in a career playing largely the psychotic and the damaged, a stand-out still) stumbling around, mumbling, ineptly preparing Kraft Mac 'n Cheese and — only twice — making music. I love it because it's a gorgeous formal exercise, but there's also plenty of comic scenes in the opening (see above, where a real Yellow Pages salesman steadfastly attempts to sell "Blake" a spot in the book and Blake's too out of it to figure out what he's talking about or tell him he's got the wrong guy). As a biography, the most intriguing bits are hypothetical glosses on impossible but intriguing music geeks what-ifs: what if Rivers Cuomo (Lukas Haas, writing his own dialogue just like everyone else) whined about touring in Japan to Cobain and inadvertently began working out Pinkerton that way? (Does this make Weezer the heir apparent to Nirvana? Discuss.) What if Kim Gordon came to give him a stern talking to? In its own odd way, Last Days finally gets around to nailing some of the most frustrating aspects of how '90s indie-rock spiraled into a mini-parody of mainstream rock, with its very own drugged-out casualties and insular, petty rivalries.

SECRET HONOR (1984)

Some people think this is the best movie about Nixon ever made; pending further evidence, I'll concur. It's mostly a master class in direction: given an impossible source (a one-man stage play), Robert Altman somehow makes the whole thing non-stagy. Finding as many different angles and set-ups as Lumet did for 12 Angry Men, Secret Honor is as much a pleasure for its resourcefulness as for Philip Baker Hall's career high: short on impersonation, long on paranoia. Filmed before Nixon's '80s rehabilitation as an acceptable and even valued foreign policy commenter, Secret Honor is a fuck you to the man (just as the clip above is a fuck you from Nixon to everyone else; be warned, the multiple monitors do not mean this was directed by Altman in De Palma mode). As such, even though its climax is kind of disappointing — Nixon was paranoid, but not enough for the nightmarish caricature the film has him explaining himself through — it's as much a great performance as an index to early-'80s feelings about Nixon.

LAURENCE OF ARABIA (1962)

My most conventional pic for great biopic doesn't follow the rules as we've come to know them. The title's quite literal: this is everything to do with T.E. Lawrence in and around Arabia, and nothing more. No childhood, no steady decline (though Ralph Fiennes gave filling it out a shot with a TV movie, A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia). David Lean comes closer to making a '00s art film than anyone (including he, probably) would like to admit: with its long, contemplative shots of desert and tiny human specks against the sky, Lawrence unsubtly but effectively makes the exterior landscape a reflection of Lawrence's internal turmoil at all times.

Click Here For Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four & Part Six

Contributor: Vadim Rizov

Screengrab Review: Paranoid Park

Peter Smith — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Review by Mike D'Angelo.

Taking a brief and very welcome break from memorial filmmaking — Columbine, Kurt Cobain, a forthcoming Harvey Milk biopic — Gus Van Sant achieves thrilling new heights of lyrical expressionism with Paranoid Park, his fractured adaptation of a young-adult novel by Blake Nelson. Frankly, I was so certain that I never wanted to see this particular director set foot on a high-school campus again that I contemplated a restraining order. But this brilliantly schizoid character study — structured as the letter-cum-journal entry of Alex, a skate punk with a guilty conscience (sensational newcomer Gabe Nevins, found via MySpace) — digs into the teenage mindset with a clarity and eloquence that Elephant, with its distracting (and, to my mind, obscene) echoes of real-world tragedy, couldn't possibly achieve. Ostensibly, the plot concerns Alex's involvement in the accidental death of a security guard. But since this act of involuntary manslaughter (briefly seen in gruesome detail) is wholly fictional, Van Sant and Nelson's appropriation of it as an overarching metaphor for the furtive, free-floating sense of shame that accompanies puberty feels bold and incisive rather than deeply disrespectful.

Meanwhile, Van Sant's formal dexterity just grows more and more astounding. He sometimes rivals Alain Resnais here with his conflation of editing and memory, skipping back and forth in time in a dissociative frenzy that has no use for conventional signposts or explanations. And even when Van Sant flirts with cliché, he does so in a way that's forbidding and strange: You've seen the scene where the distraught protagonist sublimates his/her grief in the shower a hundred times — but never like this, with the contrast cranked up to near-abstraction and the camera intently focused on the rivulets of water that flow from Alex's long hair as he stands silently, head bowed. I could have done with a bit less emphasis on Elliott Smith on the soundtrack, perhaps, but the film's other musical choices, ranging from Billy Swan's "I Can Help" to snatches of Nino Rota's score for Juliet of the Spirits, are magnificently contrapuntal. This is still very much a mood piece, but Van Sant, after two consecutive films centered on sacrificial lambs, has made an overdue and welcome return to recognizable human beings.

Kimya Dawson: "I’m into, like, full-audience group-hug kind of stuff."

Phil Nugent — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Singer-songwriter Kimya Dawson first attracted attention as half of the core (with Adam Green) of the Moldy Peaches, a band whose music stuck many of us as charming but seemed to many others to, at best, define the term "an acquired taste." The group released only one real album of new material, which had the distinctive bad fortune of being released on September 11, 2001, before going "on hiatus." Since then, Dawson, who doesn't have professional management and promotes herself through the Internet, has released a string of low-profile solo albums with such titles as I'm Sorry That Sometimes I'm Mean and My Cute Fiend Sweet Princess. And now, she's part of a smash hit record — the Juno soundtrack, currently number three on the charts. The movie incorporates Dawson's songs — notably "Anyone Else but You", which the stars Ellen Page and Michael Cera perform together at the end of the picture, and which is also heard in the Moldy Peaches' version — and Mateo Messina, who composed the score, tried to take his cues from Dawson's work so that all the music in the movie would have a similar feel. Dawson's music, which isn't on a major label, might seem an odd choice for synergy-minded suits to try to include in a movie, but then that's not how this wasn't their choice; it turns out that Dawson was suggested by Ellen Page, after Juno's director, Jason Reitman, asked her what kind of music she thought her character would listen to.

Thanks to the movie, the quirky, thoughtful Dawson, with her childlike music and DIY aesthetic, is on the verge of breaking through to a much larger audience, and she's smart enough to have mixed feelings about it. "Because of the success of the album," she says, "people have all these expectations of what the next steps are for me." This seems not to be the kind of concern over mainstream success versus punk "authenticity" that caused Kurt Cobain so much angst but an honest concern about the nature of her relationship to the audience changing in ways that may not serve her well. Fans of the movie who are compelled to seek out more of her work may not like what they hear; longtime fans may feel that something special has been lost now that, suddenly, the rest of the world has caught on to their secret good thing. In the meantime, she's just trying to remain herself, albeit in front of more people. Performing recently in Brooklyn, she wrapped up her show by telling the audience, "People who have to leave, leave fast. People who don’t, get in a circle and hold hands."

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance: Part 3

Peter Smith — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 17:15:00 GMT

Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:

So far no good on the Dramatic Competition front — which is a bit of a bummer, since those are the movies I came here to see, for the most part. I must confess that I didn't even last halfway through buzz magnet The Wackness, which expends most of its creative energy in its title, leaving writer-director Jonathan Levine with nothing to do but find jokes predicated on our knowledge that we're no longer living in 1994. ("Does this have anything to do with Kurt Cobain?" asks Ben Kingsley's pothead shrink of a patient.) Apparently, Kingsley makes out with an Olsen twin after I hit the exit; somebody more tuned into the zeitgeist than myself will have to explain why this is a big cultural event. Other Competition titles are such well-intentioned mediocrities that badmouthing them feels like kicking an injured dog, and word on Good Dick, which I was planning to see this afternoon, is so toxic that I'll likely wind up defecting to some obscure foreign film.

On the other hand, this year's documentaries continue to impress, and I say that as someone who much prefers fiction to nonfiction when it comes to cinema. Slingshot Hip Hop, an energetic portrait of the burgeoning Palestinian rap scene, features a bevy of great music and spotlights a truly sobering irony: In a genre that thrives on collaboration — name any significant hip-hop single of the last few years that doesn't include the word "Feat." — it's hard to create and sustain a movement when you're not permitted to travel ten short miles to meet the peers who've inspired you.

Even more politically trenchant is the articulate policy debate called Secrecy, which tackles what is arguably the key question of the information age — namely, how do we reconcile freedom and security? Directors Peter Galison and Robb Moss don't attempt to hide their belief that the U.S.'s government's increasing obsession with classification does more harm than good, and is being used today primarily as a means for the executive branch to avoid accountability. To their credit, however, they also give ample screen time to former CIA and NSA employees, who make a strong case for the opposing viewpoint — so strong, in fact, that I left the movie feeling as if the problem might be inherently insoluble. Like many expository docs, Secrecy sometimes feels more like an animated book than a movie, despite attempts to jazz things up via animated interludes and a propulsive score; you can't help but feel as if the surface of this enormous subject has barely been scratched. But much more than last year's bizarrely overpraised, in-case-you-missed-several-years-worth-of-the-news compendium, No End in Sight, this evenhanded act of advocacy is required viewing for the hundreds of millions of us who have consented to be governed.

Morning Deal Report: Teenage Angst Has Paid Off Well

Peter Smith — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 15:00:00 GMT

In the wake of Gus Van Sant's Last Days and A.J. Schnack's documentary Kurt Cobain: About a Son comes the announcement that Universal will adapt Charles Cross's Cobain biography Heavier Than Heaven. What took 'em so long?

Bruce Dern is directing for the first time, and better yet, Hart's Location will star him and his wife and daughter, Diane Ladd and Laura Dern. That is an all-star family right there. We're psyched.

Naomi Watts will star in the remake of The Birds from Casino Royale director Martin Campbell.

— Peter Smith

Take Five: Rock Stars

Peter Smith — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Hollywood loves a rock star, especially if they have the good grace to die early and provide the scriptwriter with a nice tidy ending that doesn’t involve getting old and boring. With Control, Anton Corbijn’s celebrated directorial debut, opening this weekend, we’ll get to see how the movies do with the compellingly tragic story of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis; his cult status, enigmatic qualities and spectacular suicide would seem to make him an ideal candidate for big-screen immortality. But while we wait for this and Todd Haynes’ Dylan biopic I’m Not There to hit our local screens, we can always immerse ourselves in previous big-screen treatments of rock and rollers — both real and imaginary — that Hollywood has brought us.

THE BUDDY HOLLY STORY (1978)

It wasn’t really until the 1970s that Hollywood came to terms with the idea that rock music wasn’t some passing fad (check out, oh, say, any movie about rock 'n' roll made during the 1960s as evidence), but they figured out quickly enough that the best rock star was a dead rock star. The first truly successful rock biopic wasn’t really the stuff of Hollywood legend — it played awfully fast and loose with the historical facts, and its script set a hokey, faux-spiritual tone that a lot of later movies would follow — but it’s worth watching for a standout lead performance as the chief Cricket by a pre-laughingstock Gary Busey, and excellent supporting roles by Charles Martin Smith and Conrad Janis.

SID AND NANCY (1986)

Very few people were in as good a position to make the quintessential punk-rock biopic than Alex Cox. He’d already proven with Repo Man that he was probably the only director of the 1980s who really understood punk-rock music, and with Sid and Nancy, he managed to strike just the right tone of empathy and tragedy. Gary Oldman, who'd go on to have a stellar career, does a fantastic job playing the born-to-die hellraiser Sid Vicious; Chloe Webb, who wouldn’t, is equally fantastic as the doomed Nancy Spungeon. A depressing but essential rock 'n' roll biography.

WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT? (1993)

Falling into a lot of the same traps as The Buddy Holly Story (and, for that matter, a hundred other rock biographies), this look at the surprising career arc of Tina Turner falls into the trap of beatifying its subject — not surprising, given that it’s based on her own autobiography. It also spends so much time demonizing Ike Turner as an abusive monster (which he was) that it doesn’t really convey the sense of him as a musical genius (which he also was). Still, it’s redeemed by winning performances in the lead roles by Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne. Ike’s own autobiography remains unfilmed.

BACKBEAT (1994)

Possibly due to the notoriously litigious nature of the surviving members of the band, Hollywood has always had a standoffish approach to telling stories about the life and times of the biggest rock band in history. Maybe it’s because of the approach this nearly forgotten independent flick took towards the development of the Beatles that it managed to succeed on its own terms. Telling the story of the early days of the band and focusing on the forgotten Stu Sutcliffe, it’s by turns hokey and transcendent, and manages like few films before or since to make something fresh out of one of the most-told stories in pop music history.

VELVET GOLDMINE (1998)

Todd Haynes’ underappreciated interpretation of the glam rock era doesn’t name any names — it doesn’t have to. We all know that Jonathan Rhys Meyers is playing a veiled version of the chameleonoid David Bowie, and that a magnetically sexy Ewan McGregor is an amalgam of Iggy Pop and Kurt Cobain. And, in a way, the approach couldn’t be more fitting — the glam era was all about radical reinvention, fluctuating identities, and sexual ambiguity, and that’s what Haynes delivers in spades, along with a healthy dose of political paranoia, divine mystery and straight-up rock and roll fun.

— Leonard Pierce

About a Film: AJ Schnack on Kurt Cobain

Peter Smith — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Over at IndieWire, Brian Brooks brings us a short interview with A Tale of Two Johns director AJ Schnack about his upcoming documentary on the life of Kurt Cobain, About a Son. (Read Nerve's interview with Schnack here.) It touches on his relationship with rock journalist Michael Azzerad, his desire to strip away all the legends and conspiracy theories surrounding the subject, and his attempt to make the film reflect the indie qualities of Cobain’s music. — Leonard Pierce