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The PopMatters Film Blog
‘Goats’ Constantly Gets In Its Own Way
At this point in the post-modern, cynical dicta, nothing really surprises us about the military. From defense contracts which result in kick-back rich toilet seats to useless wars which tend to foster the power in the purveyors, not the people, a structured citizen soldiery is an unhealthy combination of jingoism and bumbling bureaucracy - and no place is this more obvious than in Grant Heslov’s proposed satire The Men Who Stare at Goats. Based on the “mostly” true tome by UK journalist Jon Ronson, we are told that throughout the ‘70s and early ‘80s, America was developing a kind of “super warrior”, one that would use a priority of peace (and a well-honed psychic ability) to resolve conflicts. But instead of resonating with the kind of comedy we expect from such oddball ideas, Heslov mismanages his narrative, bringing in ancillary elements that derail his attempts at insight.
When we first meet struggling American reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), his wife has just left him and he feels his career going nowhere. So he decides to become a war correspondent, heading to Iraq to cover the country post-“Mission Accomplished”. Stuck in Kuwait and desperate for a way in, he runs into the mysterious Lyn Cassady (George Clooney) who turns out to be a deactivated black ops agent whose recently returned to the game, on a mission deep in the heart of enemy territory.
Turns out, he was once part of a top secret experiment known as Project Jedi, the brainchild of forward-thinking officer Bill Django (Jeff Bridges) who employs New Age philosophies and counterculture ideas to find a way to make enlisted men as lethal in peace as they are in war. Unfortunately, a failed sci-fi writer named Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey) becomes part of the company. Jealous of Lyn’s abilities, including the power to stop a goat’s heart with his mind, the angry author decides to undermine the project - an effort that continues to this very day.
Neither as quirky as it thinks it is nor as witty as it wants to be, The Men Who Stare at Goats is a low grade military send-up. There are moments when Ronson’s true “tall tale” sizzles with a kind of silly authenticity, a jaw-dropping reality that makes Americans wonder just what their men in uniform are up to. Every time the story travels back to the moment when Django and company create their re-imagined model, the movie soars. It provides a clever combination of nostalgia and insanity, Billy Idol’s “Dancing with Myself” chugging along in the background while a long-haired Clooney shakes his booty magnificently. Whenever Bridges is onscreen, Goats gives over to his Dude-induced bliss, and everything is better for it. Along with our updated Gable, he brings a lot of hilarious heart to the material.
McGregor, sadly, has the exact opposite effect. Stuck in a one-note joke of a role (the big gag? He doesn’t understand the concept of a “Jedi”…think about for a moment…), he is a sad sack as a plot device, a means of getting us to the updated Cassady, the story behind the entire psychic project, and the last act reveal about what has happened to the concept since. He adds nothing to the narrative, and in fact draws our attention away from entertainment possibilities with his incessant whining and fake-accented antics. It seems odd that a British actor would be hired to play an American reporter (especially when Ronson himself was from Wales), but one imagines some studio interference in the decision. And let’s not even discuss a dull-eyed Spacey doing ‘villain’ in his sleep. As two facets of the failed modern material, they both sink Goat‘s chances of succeeding.
In fact, both the past and present in this particular movie offers limited entertainment value. Heslov, taking the reigns of a major feature film for the first time, clearly needs a few more turns behind the lens before tackling material this complex. It’s not just a question of comic timing or overall tone. As a director, he truly doesn’t understand where the best bits lie. Whenever the flashbacks fill the screen, Bridges et. al. doing their best bemused hippy shtick, we are immediately whisked away to a more innocent - and enjoyable - era. The jokes flow and the sight gags click. But then, just as we are getting into the groove, Heslov brings back the War in Iraq road movie and things simply die. No matter their level of talent, Clooney and McGregor are an unsuccessful Hope and Crosby.
But more importantly, Goats really has no point. The script doesn’t find a fresh way of dealing with military incompetence or the often surreal situations surrounding same. In fact, the most telling attempt comes at the expense of excellent actor Stephen Lang, who definitely gets the deranged Dr. Strangelove nuttiness involved. Yet beyond one or two brief moments of comedic clarity, Goats doesn’t “get” it. Instead, it throws random scenes at the audience and hopes that they make the necessary critical connections. With Bridges, such cinematic heavy lifting is easy. Everyone else, however, only increases the burden. While Heslov should get most of the blame, the script by Peter Straughan doesn’t help. After all, this is the man responsible for disemboweling Toby Young’s bitter magazine publishing rant How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, turning it into a tired media spoof.
Somewhere buried in all the screwball struggles and inconsistent time shifts is a potent film about outsized ideas and the perversion of same. When Bridges is explaining his notion of an “Earth First” army, we easily recognize his goal. Too bad few in the film follow in his footsteps. As another example of Clooney’s patented “mainstream/iconoclastic” back and forth, career wise, The Men Who Stare at Goats is a likeable failure. There may not be enough here to completely satisfy, given the inconsistency behind the scenes, but at the very least there are individual sequences that illustrate what this wacky military farce could have been. We expect a little lunacy from those invested with keeping out country safe. Unfortunately, the bumpy approach to this particular “true” story thwarts its intentions.
—Bill Gibron
11:10 am
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When the Event is Everything: Michael Jackson’s ‘This Is It’
We will never see the final version of Michael Jackson’s This Is It concert. We will never experience the full blown macabre mastery of the epic “Thriller” number, complete with 3D zombies and a stunning recreation of perhaps the most well-known dance in all of pop music. We will never get to see how a 50 year old Jackson would truly sell his pre-teen Motown legacy, the perfunctory run through as part of Kenny Ortega’s inspired film doing little to inspire confidence. We’ll also never know how audiences would react to the moment in “Earth Song” when a giant bulldozer crashes through the stage backing and threatens the fading King of Pop. In fact, we will never know if the actual event would have lived up to its creator’s varied vision and posthumous hype. One thing is certain, however, Jackson was game to try.
Offering little of the money-grubbing graverobbing that the project’s announcement inferred, This Is It is like a DVD bonus feature without an actual movie to support. One could easily see this hodgepodge of rehearsal takes, expertly edited together by a team that deserves some kind of award for consistency and continuity, as a guide or animatic. Indeed, it is very much like the computer created cartoons that action filmmakers used to pre-visualize their stunt sequences, except this time, we have our own human special effect at the center. Jackson, acting half his notorious age, dances, prances, demonstrates, and illustrates as he puts his band and back-up “flare” through their paces. While the opening of the film gives us a glimpse at the devoted artists who come whenever Mr. Jackson calls, any additional personal insight is decidedly absent. In its place are several sensational musical numbers, followed by a few flashes of what this famed 50 show stand in London would have looked like.
As with many of Jackson’s shows, this is a greatest hits package carefully choreographed for maximum impact and guaranteed audience appreciation. The King is not breaking out new material, or mining his albums for unusual cuts to spice up the set-list. We move from dance hit to power ballad, “Wanna Be Starting Something” reminding us of how fresh early Michael sounded, while “Human Nature” highlights the singer’s sensational voice. Sadly, there is no take on “Rock with You” (Off the Wall is almost always forgotten by Jackson live) and the equally effective title track to Bad is missing as well. Other major hits not making the cut include “Remember the Time”, “In the Closet” and “You Are Not Alone”, while you can forget about seeing anything from Invincible. Indeed, what director Kenny Ortega (who also handled the same duties for the concert “experience”) understands is, as an elegy to a man taken too soon from his fanbase, familiarity eases the lingering pain.
Still, it’s hard to sync up the man on stage with the media maelstrom of the last five months. There are no signs of drug abuse or use, no obvious physical symptomology of the addiction that would supposedly kill him. In his element, Jackson is strong, if scarily bone thin, and while a bit out there in his ability to interact, he is still in command of his craft and how it is presented. He comments frequently on preserving his voice, admits to slacking off in some of the dance numbers to guarantee that the staging is just right. He is present for all the film work forged to amplify the overall live show experience, and even adds his two cents to sequences he feels need to “sizzle” or “simmer” more. As his muscular back-ups bob and weave around him, Jackson’s ever-present magnetism never lets him down. Even when he’s merely going through the practice motions, he’s as dynamic as he ever was.
All of which begs the question - what happened? How could someone this confident and carefree onstage (he is so light on his feet and lithe that it’s the very definition of “effortless”) become a press room pariah, unable to live a leisurely life in the public eye. It’s a weird dichotomy, one that This Is It has no desire to delve into. Even with all the tabloid tattling and clever character assassination surrounding the icon, his musical ability belies all the gossip and grotesqueries that have come to define him - even in bereavement. As a matter of fact, one of the best things that This Is It does is rewrite the legacy that Jackson left at the time of his death. TMZ nation would have us believe he was half off his nut, doped to the gills with human aesthetic on top of an already near-lethal cocktail of various narcotics. But reality - or careful editing - argues otherwise.
And then there is the notion of Jackson repeating this immense spectacle day in and day out for 50 grueling shows once he headed over to England. It’s sad to think that some promoter saw an opportunity to exploit the entertainer’s recent financial distress and decided to bludgeon his coy cash cow for as much milk money as possible. One truly believes the singer when he smiles and says “this is really it” during the promotional press conferences that announced the “tour”. No matter what he did after the concerts, he could never top the ideas he was trying to showcase here. That this rehearsal material provides actual glimpses of what could have been stands as a testament to what Jackson conceived, as well as how nimble Ortega is at cobbling together what was clearly meant as nothing more than random reference footage.
So instead of spending almost two months making sure that fans from around the world got one last shot of seeing their idol in person, This Is It will be the event that facilitates the final chapter in the myth of Michael Jackson - and then that’s truly “it”. Even if another album of amazing material is lifted from the vaults (and the original tune presented here as the movie’s theme is no great shakes) and the artist who once owned the pop charts scales them once again, there will never be more than “this”. No more videos. No more news cycles. No more music. As titles go, Jackson’s own self-penned label lingers with hints of what could have been and what never will be. Still, for anyone still looking for a little bit of his magic, This Is It contains more than enough.
—Bill Gibron
1:30 pm
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‘Antichrist’ is an Ambitious, Audacious Masterpiece
It’s fairly obvious that vision is in short supply in Hollywood. Just look at what passes for art among the mindless mainstream movies that make their weekly pilgrimage to your local Cineplex and see if it’s not true. We live in blank, bland times. But there’s something that goes hand in hand with imagination and daring, a word that many misconstrue as consistent with arrogance, pretention, and ego. Some even use it as an excuse for limiting clear creativity. Yet “audacity” is equally lacking in today’s motion picture landscape. Few filmmakers simply take their ideas and run wild with them. Typically, they simply slink along, looking to make their money before moving on to the next journeyman job.
To put it mildly, Lars Von Trier is not your typical anything. Over a career that has seen him embrace the strictures of the no-frills Dogme ‘95, dabble in TV terror, and defy convention with musicals and haughty historical period pieces, he has avoided easy description as his films have lacked commercial consideration. Now comes Antichrist, a work of unqualified brilliance - and impudence. Some have even dubbed it the most misogynistic movie ever created. Actually, it will probably stand as Von Trier’s masterpiece.
A married couple experiences a horrific tragedy when their infant son leaves his crib and crawls out an open window, falling to his death. Overtaking by grief, the mother (Charlotte Gainsbourg) spends over a month in a mental hospital while her therapist husband (Willem Dafoe) disagrees with her chemical course of treatment. Removing her from the facility and forcing her to do away with all medication, he feels he can talk her through the pain. When she reveals an unnatural fear of the woods surrounding a cabin in a place called Eden, he decides to take her there.
Initially, she is frightened into a state of near inertia. He finds her anxieties almost comical. Slowly, they begin to probe her wounded psyche. But as her attitude improves, he begins to suspect something sinister. Indeed, she has used her research into historical crimes against women to conclude that the female gender is inherently evil. It’s become her post-motherhood mantra. He believes that is utter nonsense - until his wife turns violent, physically, emotionally, and above all, sexually.
Absolutely stunning in its visual flourishes, horrifying in its aggressive violence, and knowing in its psycho-sexual philosophical bent, Von Trier’s Antichrist is simply astonishing. It’s a structured walk through one woman’s terrifying mental breakdown, a deconstructed cry for relief and understanding. So obsessed with birth and biology that the symbols practically stand up and shout their intent, this is New Age therapeutics as Grand Guignol geek show.
It is obvious what Von Trier is messing with - what happens to a “mother” when she loses that title (perhaps by her own actions, or lack thereof) - and along with the awkward supposition that history has prove the woman wicked, he intends to explore every possible angle of attack. That’s why we get sequences of passion, bloodletting, comforting conversation, and unhinged insanity. In the end, he offers no real conclusions. Instead, we see one couple completely disintegrate over the impact of grief, and wonder what will come next.
Like Dante’s Inferno, what we wind up with is a literal trip through Hell, a beautiful, beguiling place that holds many horrific truths barely simmering under its lush surface. Several times throughout the course of Antichrist, Von Trier pulls back the curtain to reveal the redolence underneath. Limbs are hacked. Body parts are beaten. We aren’t supposed to take what happens to the characters as being wholly realistic. Instead, the moment they leave their quiet urban apartment and head into this mythic wilderness, the lens purposefully distorts to argue against authenticity. It’s a piece of filmic finesse that happens several times during the story.
Unlike Breaking the Waves, which took an almost documentary approach on a similar subject and theme (human degradation and the females role in same), we get the kind of aesthetic aggressiveness that makes Antichrist another ‘love it or loathe it’ extreme. The prologue with its abundant monochrome slow motion is so remarkable, so hypnotic in its carefully composed presentation that we are instantly taken aback by its power. It’s shockingly handsome. Luckily, the rest of the movie lives up to this opening promise.
Indeed, the cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle (Oscar Winner for Slumdog Millionaire and previous Von Trier collaborator) deserves considerable praise. There are times when the movie almost stands still, the filmmakers using their incredibly long holds and static shot framing to build a considerable amount of texture and suspense. Of course, there are also handheld close-ups and action elements that tend to forward the film’s intimate, in your face nature. Along with the amazing work by Gainsbourg and Dafoe, Von Trier creates an insular realm where his dream logic and nightmare scenarios can play out - and the results aren’t always pleasant.
Both actors are required to bare everything onscreen - from their bodies to their souls - and they do so magnificently. Some will still be bothered by the narrative’s lack of crystal clarity. Others will take the obvious step and scream ‘hate’. But there is an intriguing middle ground which suggests we are watching Dafoe work through his emotional attachment to his wife and dead child. The violent struggle to resolve same appears to be part of the movie’s motive. The finale foretells his decision.
By delivering a faux horror film that’s as much about the bloodletting as it is about the basis for all human fear, Lars Von Trier provides a statement so profound, so difficult to embrace fully and honestly that Antichrist will leave many confused and angry. It will be seen as a blight, as exploitation disguised as artistic arrogance, all meant to cover up that most typical of complaints against the director - he hates women. But even as it embraces a similar stance and offers up one character’s physical proof of an anti-female agenda (Gainsbourg’s final act is too horrific to even consider calmly), it’s obvious that this movie is merely a meditation on what’s it’s like to give birth, to lose said biological immortality, and wonder if it was such a horrible crime not to care.
When our heroine argues that she’s afraid of Nature, that it’s “Satan’s Kingdom” on Earth, her husband translates that as a simple statement of self-loathing. For more than 90 minutes we’ve watched as she acts out on such irrational, apocalyptic ire. By the end, Antichrist suggests that almost anything is survival - except, perhaps, the battle within. It’s one cosmic war that never produces an actual victor.
—Bill Gibron
9:55 pm
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Art Deconstructs a Life Lived ‘In Public’
The ‘90s will be remembered for a lot of things - grunge, Bill Clinton, the arrival of DVD and the birth of file sharing. But perhaps the biggest impact, culturally, socially, financially, and philosophically, was the rise of the Internet and the empowerment of the Dot.Com Kids. Feisty young entrepreneurs who hoped to revolutionize the new media, these free thinking uber-nerds, blessed with both brains and the chutzpah to re-imagine the burgeoning technological wilderness, took the industry (and NASDAC) by storm. Of the many fiery flash in the pans, none were as noted (and notorious) as Joshua Harris. Earning his first million with the then prescient notion of collecting online statistical data for advertisers and merchants, he soon turned his attention to an equally profound kind of web ‘performance art’. With it, Harris invented “reality television”, pushed the boundaries of acceptable social experimentation, and destroyed most of his collected commercial clout in the process.
As the subject of Ondi Timoner’s fascinating documentary, We Live in Public, viewers learn about his early success, how he built his ragtag information machine into an attempt at reinventing television. The web-based Pseudo offered streaming content as early as 1993, setting the ground rules for most of the online content (both personal and professional) seen today. With the money he made, Harris’ next decided to turn the lens on the very audience he was courting. Setting up a bunker like hotel in the basement of a New York building, he installed hundreds of cameras, created a complicated authoritarian social structure that involved interrogation rooms, personality profiles, and self-contained law enforcement. Dubbed “Quiet” many consider it to be the dawn of fact-based POV entertainment.
Others saw Harris himself as a post-modern Andy Warhol, with his Factory consisting of a pod-filled Big Brother controlled kingdom. Perhaps the most telling line of his entire spiel was an actual riff on the famed pop artist’s best known mantra. For Harris, people didn’t want a mere 15 minutes of fame. They wanted it every single day. And as Timoner - who actually participated in the Quiet experiment - points out, even that wasn’t good enough for the multi-millionaire. When he fell in love with Tanya Corrin, he brought his new gal pal into his next online brainstorm. Calling it “We Live in Public”, Harris had his New York loft fitted with hundreds of recording devices, cameras located everywhere (including the inside of the toilet bowl). The couple then simply went about their daily existence. There were tensions - his desire to have sex for the viewers being one of them - but at the beginning at least, both were up for the challenge.
Where We Live in Public gets most of its dramatic heft is not in the interpersonal clash between people (though there is plenty of that to go around). No, as the Dot.Com bubble bursts, as hundreds of businesses lose value and tank, Harris’ own financial meltdown is recorded daily for everyone to see. One particularly profound moment comes as our hero, sitting on the John, learns that he has no money in the bank. From this point on, We Live in Public turns dark and foreboding. Harris and Tanya fight. Their battles become more intense. She decides she can no longer live like a hamster in a 24 hour a day monitored cage. He abandons his project and simply disappears. Where Harris winds up - in one of three fabulous false endings - is the stuff of legend. As Timoner herself points out, even she can’t believe where the story takes us.
There is so much about We Live in Public that is mesmerizing, so much that is both shocking in its statement and knowing in its insight, that it’s hard to take in at one sitting. As she did with the music industry masterpiece DiG! , Timoner takes a relatively simple subject and deconstructs the outer layers to show the surreal substance within. Many could look at Harris as nothing more than a high tech con man, a slick huckster working in the human condition vs. ornate Bibles or Florida swampland time shares. His “art projects” today seem like nothing more than wasted YouTube temper tantrums and even with their importance to the progress of the Web, we don’t really see how anyone thought they could really be the “future” of entertainment - especially commercially. Granted, Harris was right about the Internet and people’s desire for fame. But the “promise” of Pseudo or Quiet is still far from being realized today.
Because Timoner is such an amazing filmmaker, because she understands pacing and documentary plotting better than any other director working today, We Live in Public simply sizzles. We get caught up in Harris’ vision, watch as it plays out in all its debauched, deranged ideals. With the access she had - both first hand and in follow-up - we get a better than insider’s glance at the entire nu-tech approach. There is a giddiness that’s hard to comprehend, mid ‘90s New Yorkers viewing Harris as some kind of media Messiah. If anything, he comes across as an accidental Marshall McLuhan, a suddenly rich eccentric who could see the self-produced webcam writing on the wall. That it couldn’t successfully translate into the mainstream was not Harris’ biggest flaw. That he couldn’t remove himself from being the center of attention was.
As with any classic example of the genre, We Live in Public raises as many troubling questions as it answers. Why did Harris revert to the weird clown persona “Luvvy” under stress? Why the equally unhinged fascination with Gilligan’s Island? Did he really think that something like Quiet or We Live in Public would really generate significant revenue opportunities, or was this merely a case of a crazy man with too much money and too many people saying “Yes”. While the saga seems to have a somewhat happy ending, Harris remains an enigma - albeit one we seem to recognize a whole lot easier. Ondi Timoner seems draw to individuals who confuse arrogance with ambition, who are addicted to the process as much as they are their own ego. There is no denying that Joshua Harris had vision. What he saw, and in turn, what he wanted us to see, makes We Live in Public a great cinematic experience.
—Bill Gibron
7:30 pm
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‘Goldberg’ Highlights Forgotten Media Sensation
You’d think in our media-savvy, information overload society that a story like this would be rote. We’d all know the legend of Tillie Edlestein, her years of struggle helping with her immigrant Jewish father’s Catskills hotel, her eventual leap into the limelight as creator, writer, and star of one of radio’s biggest hits, and the reasons why the Red Scare almost ruined her career. We’d acknowledge the fact that she was the first ever winner of an Emmy for Best Actress in a comedy, would recognize her place as the “inventor” of the situation comedy, and champion her ability to make highly ethnic issues mainstream, especially in a time of rampant Anti-Semitism. We also question her continuing mythos even today.
Yet ask your average media buff about Gertrude Berg (Tillie’s stage name), the various incarnations of her Goldberg’s persona and program (radio, TV, and film), and her nearly five decades of superstardom, and they will stare at you dumbfounded, wondering why you’re making this all up. Yet as part of the remarkable documentary Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, director Aviva Kempner hopes to change all that. As the marketing tagline says, Berg was “the most famous person in America you’ve never heard of”, and this smart, sentimental film wants to alter that perception once and for all.
Part of the problem with Berg’s lingering legacy is that she made her name in that now dead artform known as serial radio. Five days a week, 15 minutes each day, the diva-dynamo created a homey comedy sketch of life in the marginally middle class neighborhoods of New York. Her characters were decidedly Jewish, but her stories focused less on religion and more on the pure family dynamics of the time. She had a wonderful ear for dialogue, even if some critics complained that she was making fun of, not having fun with, the very people she was championing and as the years went by, audiences grew weary of the woman’s combination of earnestness, ethnicity, and easy going humor. By the time the ‘60s rolled around, she had been in the business for almost 50 years - and yet today, she’s a virtual unknown.
Yet thanks to Kempner’s clever combination of biography, historical perspective, and talking head appreciation, we begin to understand what made Berg so special. In a unique way, she was both larger than life and yet completely down to Earth. People recognized that her famed persona - Molly Goldberg - was an amalgam of the entire immigrant experience. When the nation was sinking deeper into Depression, the country-loving optimism of Berg’s character helped alleviate some of the country’s ills. Perhaps the most amazing fact about the Goldberg program, aside from its popularity, is its longevity. Throughout the ‘30s and ‘40s Berg was a near constant presence on the air. Not only did she do her show, but she was a successful shill for many of the main products of the time - and this during a time of growing (and often horrific) Anti-Semitism.
It’s interesting to see these famous and not so famous faces sing Berg’s praises. Everyone from noted actors and activists to a member of the Supreme Court discuss the impact the character and its creator had on their ethnic identity. Like she did with the equally compelling story The Life and Times of Hank Goldberg, director Kempner personalizes the political underpinnings of her narrative. When Berg is suddenly “blacklisted” because she continued to support co-star Philip Loeb after his run-in with the House Un-American Activities Committee, the unfairness of the position is supporting by the more modern judgments of those interviewed. There is no attempt to justify it. Berg simply soldiered on, regaining her import by sheer force a will. It is through anecdotes like this that we learn more about the impact the celebrity had on her own life and career than by a simple repetition of facts.
Of course, context is everything, but due to the era in which Berg performed, precious little of her material remains. We hear a few snippets from her radio shows and experience some old kinescopes of her sitcom. Perhaps the most intriguing bits come in the form of a failed Goldberg movie, as well as a filmed comedy in which a now remained “Mrs. G” decides to become a post-war college freshman. It is clear that, up until the swinging ‘60s, Berg was still seen as a hot commercial commodity. The desire to squeeze her into an idea, to continue to provide the audience with exactly what they wanted shows how substantial The Goldbergs trademark was. In fact, many of the participants argue that the series and the character of Molly set the standard for Jewish mothers (both bad and good) for the entire 20th Century.
If Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg has a failing - and it’s really a minor quibble at best - it’s that there’s no attempt by Kempner or her subjects to fully explain why Berg’s star dimmed so quickly. Granted, she died just as the country was going through its own countercultural revolution, and the lack of archival acknowledgement couldn’t have helped. There is also the notion that contemporary comics like Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and perhaps most importantly, Totie Fields, deconstructed a lot of what Berg established, tuning it into something to pity rather than celebrate. But when we think about pioneers from the past, when we discuss radio highlights (or in the case of Amos and Andy, notorious lowlights) or early TV icons, Berg is barely mentioned. Again, for many this movie will be the first time they have ever heard of her. And that’s a shame. No matter the accomplishments during her lifetime, Gertrude Berg remains an integral part of the modern media’s formation. Thankfully, we now have a permanent testament to how important - and irresistible - she was.
—Bill Gibron
8:10 am
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‘Loud’ Loses It’s Focus Early and Often
They represent three generations of guitar godliness, axmen supreme who helped helm The Yardbirds/Led Zeppelin, U2, and The White Stripes straight to the top of the rock pops. Each one has their own distinct style - accomplished journeyman and heavy metal monster; excessive experimenter who relies on technology to fuel his musical imagination; confirmed bluesman who can’t make heads or tails out of this reliance on science to make a joyful noise. So when all three come together to discuss their stock and trade in Davis Guggenheim’s ambitious documentary It Might Get Loud, we except a sonic summit of Olympian proportions. What we get instead are three slight biographies followed by sequences that merely suggest what such a coming together could actually achieve.
For Guggenheim, superficial context is king. We get all the well known backstories - Page as a skiffle kid in ‘50s England; The Edge pairing up with Bono in school, both inspired by punk; White working out his retro demons on any guitar he could get his hands on (including a plastic model from Woolworths) - plus a scant few things we didn’t know. Perhaps the most compelling is the notion of the man responsible for “Stairway to Heaven”, the infamous double neck guitar, and some of rock’s greatest riffs working steadily as a session musician. Page apparently played on everything - movie scores, commercial jingles, syrupy pop hits, you name it. It’s amazing to watch his eyes light up as he speaks of this time, if only because he seems so laid back and detached during most of the movie. White is also compelling in his own insular way. His devotion to the past and it’s various idiosyncrasies is so deep and so dedicated that you actually question his sanity at certain points.
The Edge, sadly, lacks anything remotely similar, except his country of origin. The “troubles” in Ireland are only invoked once, and his words are mesmerizing. The rest of the time however is spent as U2’s sonic voice runs around his old rehearsal spaces, plugs into his massive set of synthesizers and effects peddles, and piddles around on his instrument. He seems like the odd man out, the competent professional with the slightest artistic flair floundering often in the wake of his band’s international mega-success. As he argues his need for technology, as he pulls out demo tapes showing how the opening of “Where the Streets Have No Name” was built layer by layer, he makes a good case for his way of thinking. But when White can pull out a crappy old toy guitar and make it sound like a hurricane, The Edge’s approach is almost laughable.
Indeed, the biggest fallacy that befalls It Might Get Loud is that it never really does. We get snippets of the trio playing “I Will Follow” or “In My Time of Dying”, but it all takes a backseat to Page’s explanation of recording Led Zeppelin VI, or White explaining where the trademark red and white Stripes motif came from. We want to hear these guys play together, to drop the façade of their famous gigs and show us why they love the guitar. Telling us is one thing. Showing us is quite another. We smile like school kids as Page plays a vintage 45 of one of his favorite songs - Link Wray’s “Rumble” - and strums his air guitar right along with it. We also get a kick out of Edge’s impromptu reading of a Ramones track. But these are the exceptions, not the rule. We have to wait until the end credits before a well-practiced jam of The Band’s “The Weight” takes place.
It’s at this moment, thrown away while the individual cast and crew names scroll up the screen, that It Might Get Loud illustrates what it could have been. Granted, there is really nothing wrong with the material as it is presented, but expectations come when you cast about names like Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White. Indeed, why no mention of the old man’s former brush with Satanism? How about the constant calls for a Zep reunion? Why has the Edge never ventured into solo album territory? How has U2 stayed together for over three decades? And what about the whole wife/sister thing with Meg? If the Raconteurs feature so prominently in the live footage, why no mention of them either? Indeed, perhaps the biggest sin committed by It Might Get Loud is being enamored of its own star status. Instead of making the trio earn its keep, Guggenheim plays shorthand sketch artist.
Like finally meeting your hero and finding him polite, erudite, and rather drab, this documentary promises fire and brimstone and can only deliver friendliness and brotherhood. We keep waiting for the eventual fireworks, the smoke screen strum of an overamplified guitar feeding back, linking three generations to the same sound that illustrates their connection faultlessly. Instead, we bear witness to a genial garden party, complete with roadies, tech aides, attitude, ambiguities, and lots and lots of missed opportunities. Maybe it’s in the casting. Perhaps another famed musician like Paul Weller, Mick Jones, Lindsey Buckingham, or Eddie Van Halen could have been tossed into the mix, livening things up with their unorthodox styles and sensibilities. For as many differences as they proclaim, Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White seem cut out of the same cloth. Even when they don’t particular agree on how to toe the rock and roll line, the end results seem awfully familiar. It does indeed get loud at times. Too bad it’s not consistently compelling.
—Bill Gibron
9:00 pm
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