Home Screenings: Musicians
Inside: documentaries, concert films, retrospectives, and the insanity
Welcome to this edition of Home Screenings, in which I talk about the movies I’ve seen recently. I wanted to do a themed watch for forever – and what better topic than to watch movies about my favorite subject, musicians! This is a two-parter, and the second part will be about fictional musicians. (Okay, so I wrote this before I had my writing break; I’m not writing that fictional musicians bit during this break. Definitely after, though, so look out for it.)
There is something so fascinating about the way musicians choose to portray themselves. I didn’t realize it as I watched Monsta X’s The Dreaming, but as I entered the space of more serious productions, the endless possibilities of a musician doc fascinated me. There was the retrospective (Milli Vanilli, Gimme Danger, Framing Britney Spears); there was the tour, as it happened (Madonna: Truth or Dare, Depeche Mode 101); there was a mix of both (Instrument), there was the recording of only one (1) concert (Stop Making Sense, PNYC: Portishead – Roseland New York). There was artifice. There was reality. And when it came to the music? It could place anywhere: at the margins, front and center, milestones of other aspects of their lives. This isn’t on here, but I started a little bit of the BBC Pet Shop Boys Reel Stories episode, and Neil Tennant brings that up, of how he think of events in his life as part of a tour, or an album. It makes sense, but it’s not something you as a fan think of. And speaking of: where are the fans in a documentary?
A thousand ways to shoot a scene, to construct a narrative – or not. A million ways to depict your passion, which is a job, which is your life. A billion ways to resonate with the viewer, and just as many that leave them stone cold. Today I’m talking about the following:
Gimme Danger (2016, dir. Jim Jarmusch) about The Stooges
Framing Britney Spears (2021, dir. Samantha Stark) & The Woman in Me (memoir) both about Britney Spears
Milli Vanilli (2023, dir. Luke Korem)… girl you know it’s true, this is about Milli Vanilli
PNYC: Portishead – Roseland New York (1998, dir. Dick Carruthers) about Portishead
Stop Making Sense (1984, dir. Jonathan Demme) about Talking Heads
Depeche Mode: 101 (1989, dir. D. A Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus, David Dawkins) about Depeche Mode
Instrument (1999, dir. Jem Cohen & Fugazi) about Fugazi
Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991, dir. Alek Keshishan) about Madonna
Are musicians our modern gods, or are they the poor humans fashioning themselves the demigods, perennially cursed with the burden of fame? That is the question.
Gimme Danger
2016, dir. Jim Jarmusch
The Stooges. According to Jim Jarmusch, they are the greatest rock’n’roll group of our time. I don’t know if I agree with that, but The Stooges – with lead Iggy Pop – is part of the rock canon as the progenitors of punk. When it comes to The Stooges, what you’ll get is music that rocks very hard, has a psychedelic slant, and is both dooming and bright at once. It’s clean, it goes on for way longer than it needs to, probably, and it rips frequently.
Now when it came to the documentary, the winning aspects were probably anytime we saw Iggy Pop perform, which is positively electrified. He jumps around on stage, does wild expressions, and ends up shirtless. He is also the one that has the most to talk about, the clear magnet of both The Stooges and by extension the documentary. The most happened to him, including having groupies that are underage (rock ‘n’ roll, baby), drugs, more drugs, and rehab. And drugs! Then there’s also multiple animated moments in the movie that were… let’s call them goofy and leave it at that. Would I recommend this movie to you without having at least read Please Kill Me? Absolutely not. Would I rather you watch Velvet Goldmine, which is kinda-sorta fanfic about David Bowie and Iggy Pop? Yes, but I don’t think Ewan McGregor is a convincing Iggy Pop. There’s… no one like Iggy Pop. This is the Stooges in mid-age. There’s the Stooges, and then he’s him.
Framing Britney Spears
aka New York Times Presents: Framing Britney Spears, 2021, dir. Samantha Stark / The Woman In Me, written by Britney Spears, released 2023
“Leave her alone,” music critic Rob Harvilla says. He’s tired of the over-apologetic tone that the #culture has struck with her and uncomfortable at what has been made of her at the peak of her career: an underage sex object, a difficult woman (the type that society loathes), a cheater, fodder. He’s not particularly wrong. Britney Spears has seen an unparalleled fever pitch of the media circus full of vitriol and misogyny. When she wasn’t agreeable, when she was sexually active, when she wasn’t sexually active, it was just fodder. People thought they could talk any kind of way about celebrities. I know that right now we’re at a point in which celebrities are over-apologised for, over-humanized, if you will, in their decision as though they are our friends. But it was worse in the early 2000s. It was open season on people thrust into fame. Now it’s up to the culture to pick up the pieces, make sense of it all, and, yes, apologise for what has happened. Is that the right thing to do? I’m of two minds of this.
I think I’ll start with what I read first, which was The Woman In Me, penned by Britney Spears herself (at least allegedly). The memoir follows Britney’s life, from her beginnings all the way to being freed with no small support from the #FreeBritney moment. The memoir is wildly incoherent. It summarizes too often, and repeats other parts a lot. Justin Timberlake, the man that used their relationship as a jumping off point, pops up a lot here. There’s anecdotes that will have you shake your head here, that will have you feel really sorry for her. It’s been everyone that exploited her and nobody that looked out for her. At every turn, somebody wanted something from her, or saw profit in her. The people that weren’t are like… Paris Hilton and Madonna? Lol the memoir is fantastic. You can really hear Britney’s voice out of it, and whether she’s had a ghostwriter for this one or not, they let her talk on for hours on end. That Britney doesn’t have much to say about her career I thought made sense, especially as such a large portion of it was no longer in her hands. Of course she won’t have anything to say about it. The parts that were on it, I thought were more than adequate. At least for me.
This cannot be said at all about the documentary, Framing Britney Spears, which I’ve seen because I wanted to put visuals to the events that Britney was describing, and she brought up how people she thought were friends went to these documentaries without talking to her. (See? Everyone sees her as profit to be made) So I’m not unaware of the fact that the New York Times is currently deservedly under fire for dehumanizing Palestinians in their coverage of the ongoing genocide, as well as repeating ad verbatim what Israel tells them without fact-checking. But I was surprised that they would do that about a popstar. Nothing about the things that Britney Spears faced is particularly hard to have a stance about. There’s a lot of talking heads but not one person that can definitively say what has happened to Britney Spears is a uniquely shitty thing. They even let the paparazzi that made a load of money off of her speak, for God’s sake! It’s a lot of “letting the viewers form opinions” which here just registers as a lot of saying something without much value.
What I miss the most out of the Britney Spears case is that she’s been a world-class performer and artist. She wasn’t “just” sex object. Right? She wasn’t “just” a girl/not yet a woman. I’m not saying people should stop talking about this. I’m saying that I want to see more appraisal of her as an artist. Of reorganizing her into the canon, to which she’s had an indelible impact. The media has overpowered it, maybe, yes, but she’s been at the forefront of electronic pop music, and the natural end point of what Madonna was trying to do in the early 2000s, and a definitive impact on capital-P pop music. Slayyyter, Kim Petras, and a whole host of the best K-Pop had to offer in the late 2000s and early 2010s owe everything to Britney Spears. If anyone wants to apologise to Britney, start taking her tenure as an artist seriously.
Milli Vanilli
2023, dir. Luke Korem
What was the first thing I knew of 80s act Milli Vanilli? I think it was the fact they didn’t sing. I am pretty sure I confused them with Vanilla Ice, and definitely did not know that they were two people that were both Black until, like, way later. It’s an interesting thing to find out about an artist, that they can’t/didn’t sing, because it is the only thing I could think of that is sacrilegious in music. They are the only act to have ever had their Grammy revoked. If you look at the Best New Artist slate in 1989, the Recording Academy draws a blank. They were the very first episode of VH1’s Behind the Music series.
But as I was watching the excellent documentary for Paramount+, I saw a lot of K-Pop in it. The outfits, the stages, the dancing – oh yes, the dancing, goofed and made to the point of parody in the late 80s. Their songs are pop in the sense that they draw from a lot of inspirations but could only really be that one genre that allows everything to happen as long as the structure is intact; the first K-Pop song is a new jack swing song much like “Girl You Know It’s True”. The story of Milli Vanilli, of two Black kids that wanted to be singers and got roped into a hellish contract by Frank Farian, a German producer who had previously made a Black guy lipsync to a white man’s words. (Look up Boney M sometime. That man is so weird) is one that feels like harshest, worst example of what the music industry has to offer, and this is a place full of horror stories if you keep up long enough. There was fame, but at what price? They were a fad, if anything, burning out extremely fast top to bottom, reaching an end with the Grammy win in which they lipsynced at a hall where everyone was meant to sing live, and a tell all from Frank Farian admitting it was all a hoax.
The documentary does a fantastic job with the history, its talking heads – Fabrice Morvan makes an appearance here, and Robert Pilatus’s spoken bits were taken from an interview of German TV, the last before his untimely death – carefully placed and selected (except Timbaland and Rob Sheffield, who offered close to nothing, lol), and the argument pretty clear: Milli Vanilli harmed no one, and were in fact harmed. Poet and critic Hanif Abdurraqib has M.V.P status on this one for me, providing crucial racial context and making the most concise case of the argument that Luke Korem wants to tell. I wish we’d have gotten a perspective of their peers (not Timbaland) or their fans, the overwhelming majority of which white. But what we got was fantastic. In the end, what has left of Milli Vanilli is the nostalgia for what never was, a project that veered into the uncanny valley for no reason that has claimed a life. An illuminating video. “Girl You Know It’s True” is great, too, if a bit… eerie.
It seems there will be a German movie about them soon. We’ll see how that goes lol.
PNYC: Portishead – Roseland New York
1998, dir. Dick Carruthers
This movie is a concert recording of Portishead at Roseland Ballroom, New York, in 1997, supporting their sophomore self-titled album. Portishead is an outfit from Bristol, UK, and their brand of music is hazy and noir – both in the sense of it being dark and it being sensual. The glue to hold it all together, both in the movie and in the music, is vocalist Beth Gibbons, who sounds perpetually close to breaking down as she sings of indecipherable sadnesses and heartbreaks. On streaming services you will find it as Portishead Roseland NYC Live and its 25th anniversary remaster record. I don’t know if the movie will be big to anyone who doesn’t know the band, which is why I recommend you listen to them first before giving that some “visuals”, which is mostly a cramped-looking set with shots of an orchestra maestro directing the strings while Beth Gibbons smokes (indoors, lmfao) and vibes out to her own music. If you do know the group and their music, though, I think you’ll enjoy the interspersed shots of New York. Doesn’t the city feel so empty sometimes, especially at daytime? Isn’t it such a conundrum of nothingness, yet bearing so much life? The movie tries to make that argument, and I think largely succeeds because it is such a natural match to the music. “Strangers” is the best song on here, as it is elsewhere.
Stop Making Sense
1984, dir. Jonathan Demme
Compared to PNYC, where I was intimately familiar with the music of Portishead and even the album before seeing the movie, I thought of making an experiment. I would watch this concert film of New York new wave band Talking Heads – a band that’s been around for as long as early punk giants Television and Patti Smith – without making myself familiar with their discography beforehand. I had heard Remain in Light many years before, but had sort of dismissed it as white people discovering African beats. (Many such cases.) Widely regarded as the best concert film ever made, I would be acquainted to this band with their concert film Stop Making Sense, which recently saw a remaster for its 40th anniversary.
The movie is a single performance. Unlike Portishead’s movie, it doesn’t cut to other things inbetween. David Byrne shows up with a radio tape and starts performing. Gradually the other members come in – bassist Tina Weymouth (whose hips don’t lie), drummer Chris Frantz (her husband), keyboardist Jerry Harrison, back-up singers Lynn Marbly and Edna Holt, Bernie Worrell on a second set of keyboards, and lastly guitarist Alex Weir. It feels like a house coming together, a gradual construction, culminating in an energy so palpable and electric that all that Jonathan Demme needs to do is to cut to the people performing. The setlist is fantastic, the re-arrangements breathing a fullness into these often cold and curious songs, in particular “Burning Down The House”. The visuals of the concert – there’s a section in which there’s text flashing on the screen with a blue background? – becomes so secondary to the musical feast. There’s funk and soul and good old pop in all these songs. Tying it all together is David Bryne (and Tina Weymouth’s swaying no matter the song or what the dancers are doing), whose wiry, zany energy is a livewire of expression. It is a blast. Highly recommended.
Depeche Mode: 101
1989, dir. D. A Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus, David Dawkins
At this stage of their career, Depeche Mode were not yet the rockstars that would tap into their own fame and ruin into the nineties. They are also not yet stars that would be the biggest world of the world in 1990, with Violator. This is 1989, off the heels off Music For The Masses, touring it all across the United States. Something is about to happen – something has happened. They have become college radio mainstays, critical darlings with their blend of synths and drums, a darkness that is both majestic and squalid. (Trent Reznor felt inspired by their album Black Inspiration. As have I!) Depeche Mode, accordingly, thinks that they need someone to position them into the 80s, the decade they started in.
What D.A Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus made of this prompt is one of the most interesting documentaries I’ve seen during this run. It essentially both follows Depeche Mode as they tour through the United States and superfans that were casted to be in a Depeche Mode documentary. And the performance! The other thing that the documentary does is approach the matter in a cinema vérité style. There’s discussions on fashion and whether its art or not. There’s Dave Gahan “jokingly” mentioning that he’d kick out someone just because they told the band to turn the music off a little, and then the same singer much later talking about how he was at least happier at his grocery store job. Alan Wilder showing off the synths and the way they’re programmed. Photoshoots. Fletch (the hottest, RIP to a real one) talking about how he’s the bum, but when the camera shows to him during a performance, and he will dance along and lipsync so many times, clearly having fun.
None of this would work so well without the performance to juxtapose it. Mostly singing songs off Music For The Masses and Black Celebration, the clear star of the show is Dave Gahan, who will bend over like a bird reaching for water at any bar, shake his hips whenever he isn’t singing, and growl loudly to fire the crowd up. The colors – deep, primary colors, red and blue, light and dark, and in one particular shot, the spotlight was only on Dave Gahan, and he was one man in a sea of hundreds and thousands of others. It was arresting, very emblematic of the kind of person that Gahan was as a frontman (literally, the rest of the band is at the back). For all the stress that he was going through, the relief of hearing “Everything Counts” back by thousands of fans translated to tears backstage, and there needs to be no voiceover to feel the conciseness and depth of that arc.
101 is accomplished because there was both an awkwardness of performing in front of a camera, and an eagerness to “set the record right”. (More on this later) It wasn’t the ease that we expect of singers and ordinary people now. People were absolutely fascinated by it. I’m not surprised at all that this movie would spawn the entire reality doc genre. It is a very, very good movie, definitely recommended whether or not you like Depeche Mode.
Instrument
1999, dir. Jem Cohen & Fugazi
This documentary follows Washington, D.C band Fugazi over an extended period of time. This includes performances primarily, but also some behind-the-scenes work of recording an album, hanging out together to discuss things, and shots of Washington, D.C. There’s also lots of interspersed shots of their lyrics that feels vaguely All About Lily Chou-Chou ish (though this one preceeds that movie) and shots that are drenched in yellow and red. The director, Jem Cohen, is a close friend of frontman Ian MacKaye, and the proximity to the subjects mean some intimate moments in which Fugazi is unaware of the camera running while they comfortably talk, or straight up refusing to talk because the camera is on. A very interesting, completely disorganized approach to 101, which means that your mileage will absolutely vary.
I like Fugazi just fine. I am not too familiar with their work, I heard In On The Kill Taker recently and thought it was fantastic, but think of their debut album Repeater many times, the way the riffs interplay like leaves bristling in the wind, the aggressiveness but also its beauty, its sense of curiosity. I am lucky in one sense that I got to know Fugazi not through their oft-repeated tenets – their aggressive independence, the insistence on all-age shows that were $4, their refusal for music videos – but through their music, because I feel like the sheer fact that Fugazi employ politics in their work (no matter its slant) makes it a tall order to some people? Like, not to quote Rob Harvilla again – that’s oomf from “the only podcast I bump” side – but to me he’s just the perfect example of music journalists both in their brilliant and their not-so-brilliant sides. He fully admitted that, to him, it was intimidating that Fugazi were so steadfast. And like… I don’t know. The Merchandise episode wasn’t great. Like why is that your only focus? Sorry, it stresses me out when musicians are not talked about in addition to their artistry.
For better or worse, Instrument won’t dispel the severity of their politics. It isn’t a piece of hagiography so much as it is a document of their career up to that point. (With that in mind, the section where their fans / viewers talk about the group near the end was very illuminating and thoughtful) But spare a thought for their concerts, which are jam sessions, or failed attempts at telepathy. Spare a thought for Guy (you pronounce it “Gee”) Picciotto, guitarist and second vocalist, doing things that will make Iggy Pop seem normal on stage. It’s watching a car crash dance. Especially before they figured out he could take the higher range? That man would jump through hoops. I’m not joking! Main dancer shit. I walked away from this wanting to hear more Fugazi for certain. I am a patient for it! I WAIT I WAIT I WAIT I WAIT
Madonna: Truth or Dare
aka In Bed With Madonna, 1991, dir. Alek Keshishan
This movie follows world-class superstar Madonna while she is on the world tour Blonde Ambition, supporting her smash album Like A Prayer. We start off in Japan, in severe black-and-white shots, and voiceover of Madonna complaining that it’s cold. There are many such instances of things going awry, despite prayer circles before: frayed vocals, malfunctions, absent brothers showing up too late, unwilling boyfriends, her crush Antonio Banderas being with a girlfriend…
But then there’s the performance and the film bursts in color. Literally, it will show the concert bits in high definition and expertly made. Madonna, as this is hopefully not a surprise to you to read, is a performer at the peak of her powers, both capable of dancing the hell out of these routines, singing live through it all, and giving a story, a journey, as she calls it, into acceptance.
I have many thoughts. As I write this, critic Angelica Jade Bastién released a review of Beyoncé’s concert film Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé, talking about how Beyoncé chooses to be relatable in a number of ways while also being rich and not particularly standing for anything. This upset a great many people, saying she went too far. I haven’t seen the film and plan on pirating it (I’m not supporting anyone showing a movie in Israel lol), but it reminded me quite a bit of Truth or Dare. Both are obsessed with perfection, both are workhorses, and both want to be seen vulnerable and human. For Madonna, that means a comic overexaggeration of her problems. She is so aware of the camera that it’s almost as if she’s doing the things she does just to elicit a response from you, personally. There’s a moment where she deepthroats a bottle like it’s a blowjob, for a dare, and yes, it’s on camera. She will have her tonsils checked on camera, and Warren Beatty goes, “Why do you do this for a documentary”? Even that feels so put-on. She’s deep-frying her life as if it was a meme to make funnier that way. It doesn’t make her more complex.
Beyoncé is not like that. Beyoncé will give you vulnerability the way a K-Pop idol will: show things of no consequence clearly meant to imply something that was overcome, showing her “just like human”-ness. It asks not for your outrage, but for your sympathy. Homecoming was already like that a little, Life is but a dream was like this a lot, so I can extrapolate Renaissance is no different.
That sidebar aside: the second half of Truth or Dare was better, after Madonna loses her voice and relies on voice-over. It races through Europe, where Madonna faced conservative backlash for her overly sexual performances, and where the unbelievably stupid idea of inviting dancers one by one for pillow talk becomes a montage that shows off what a deeply strange person Madonna is. I think the moments that Madonna clearly didn’t think were that important show off her complexity: someone who wants to please her parents, but also do things her way. Deeply catholic, but also deeply sexual. Deeply affectionate to her dancers, but also casually resenting them. The contrasts she kept in, where she forgets there is a camera watching because so many other things are happening.
The performances were way too short. For a woman of this caliber, it’s practically unforgivable. I did not see the journey she talked about. Unless that was the point, in which case I suppose it’s laying it on a bit thick…? Like many other singers…? I don’t know. It felt too short to me. Madonna would go on to raise her controversy levels to a fever pitch in that decade, be it with the Sex book or the Bedtime Stories rollout/music videos, having to reinvent herself for the umpteenth time in 1997 with her best record, Ray of Light. That’s when she did spiritual themes over dance beats. What a way to close out a decade. Only Madonna.