Home Screenings: Musicians (Fictional)
Inside: satires, parodies, played straight, groupies, and stans on the Internet
Welcome back to Home Screenings! On the promised second part of my venture about musician movies, this time we’re going to look at fictional musicians. Like with the first part on real-life musicians, there are a thousand ways to tackle this – only this time, it is fiction, and thus the scope of the musician in question is practically defined by the narrative the director/screenwriter want to tell. And then there’s the juxtaposition with real life, especially if it references to a real-life musician: what is added to them, what is removed?
Today’s list includes the following movies:
All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001, dir. Shunji Iwai) about shoegaze artist Lily Chou-Chou
This is Spinal Tap (1984, dir. Rob Reiner) about glam rock band Spinal Tap
Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016, dir. 2/3rds of Lonely Island) about rapper Conner4real
Inside Llewyn Davis (2013, dir. Coen Brothers) about folk singer Llewyn Davis
Nashville (1975, dir. Robert Altman) about a variety of country singers
Almost Famous (2000, dir. Cameron Crowe) about rock band Stillwater
All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001)
dir. Shunji Iwai
Lily Chou-Chou is the kind of musician that is best described as shoegaze. Originally a member of the band Philia, successful in their own right, she released music under her own name after the band split up. It’s unsurprising, then, that she is somewhat of a cult figure, and particularly so with teenagers; she has a large, well-visited online forum. Two of the forum’s users, Philia aka Yuichi and Blue Cat aka Shusuke, center the heaviest in this film, charting a year of school that spirals out of control and gets progressively darker and more fucked up. Yet at the climactic moment of the movie, and easily the strongest, where Yuichi is about to kill himself, Blue Cat reminds him of Lily Chou-Chou. I’m most fascinated by the choice of the music here. What better genre to affirm your life than shoegaze? What better genre to realize all of life is a lie than with the genre so heavily entrenched in reverb that it almost sounds like your own blood rushing uselessly through your veins?
Lily Chou-Chou briefly appears, in a videowall. Yuichi never gets to see her in real life, because Shusuke bullies him out of it. Yuichi only finds out Shusuke is Blue Cat, the person saving him from suicide, when it’s too late. (I’m not spoilering that much of the movie, don’t worry). Yuichi wants to commit suicide because of Shusuke. Shusuke himself dies a spiritual death in Okinawa. This is a grave movie. And yet, its excessively bright palette with this pitch-black gravity pulls people in to this day… especially teenagers. Mostly, for me, what it got at best and what I haven’t seen pulled off as well as on a 22-year-old film is depicting Internet friendships. It understands stans better and is more empathic about them than something like HIVE. It also helps that Lily Chou-Chou sounds good and sounds exactly like the kind of artist to foster a devoted niche of people that burrow themselves into the sound and never walk back out of it.
Music: ★★★★☆
Movie: ★★★☆☆
Content warning for rape and suicide
This is Spinal Tap (1984)
dir. Rob Reiner
Spinal Tap. You write Spinal Tap with two little dots over the n, by the way; this is a glam rock band that started out as a Beach Boys-esque boyband and pivoted to the metal circuit. They had some success, but not when we meet them, aka in the middle of their documentary that follows their American tour to… diminishing returns. This is a band that keeps losing drummers, but not in the normal way; they just die, one after the other. The two centers of the band are childhood friends David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel, who over the course of the film find themselves exceedingly at odds, not the least of which because of girlfriends. The music? Nice melodies, good stage technics, but the lyrics are not exactly deep.
Highly recommended if you’ve seen music documentaries, as I think this is a fantastic riff on that genre specifically. I’m not very well-versed with glam rock bands, having only passingly read about them in the book I Want My MTV, but I have been engaging with band and their antics for the better part of the year and that really did hit the nail on its head: singers thinking they’re hot shit and being none of that. (And its homoeroticism!) This is quite the hyped movie and for good reason.
Music: ★★★☆☆
Movie: ★★★★☆
Amp: ★★★★★★★★★★★
Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016)
dir. Akiva Schaffer & Jorma Taccone
Conner4real originally debuted as Kid Conner of Style Boyz. After a feature of his on “Turn Up The Beef” catapults him to superstardom, plus Conner claiming he wrote the verse himself and not Lawrence (Akiva Schaffer), a subsequent mega-selling debut album turns all eyes on newly minted solo star Conner4real and the upcoming sophomore album. The rollout is not received well, the album is a flop, and what is originally a creative idea – plugging Conner4real music on everybody’s refrigerators and smart home applications – is the beginning of a tailspin of Conner’s problems.
I watched this when I started out watching movies, aka when it came out at 2016. The Lonely Island was of course a name to me – my cousin introduced me to “Jack Sparrow”, still a great song – and this was both a movie with Andy Samberg, who I really liked on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and The Lonely Island. I was neighing the whole time watching it the first time. The second time, I was laughing too, but I was also a little tickled. As a matter of fact, I think the movie’s actual problem is that it is a The Lonely Island movie. There is no sense of Conner working as even a satirical figure, because he gets a sympathetic ending and is, like, really sad about flopping. The bits that TLI took for Conner – Jay-Z rolled out Magna Carta with Samsung phones, U2 dropped an album of theirs like a virus on Apple users, a boyband member turning solo – work with the individual instances because the idols are outsized people. I mean, can you imagine Jay-Z be sad? Bono? Peak Justin Timberlake? (Whose scepter not only looms incredibly large here alongside a certain other Justin, but appears here as a character, because of course he does) This is Spinal Tap got at this brilliantly: they were characters thinking they were caricatures, rock gods. In the realm of pop, which is a court of kings and queens, Conner is more the court jester who makes puppy eyes when you don’t laugh for once.
How to best summarize it? A dumb man like Conner4real is not in the capacity to write or even convincingly perform “Finest Girl (Bin Laden Song)”. Even a song like “Equal Rights”, all I hear is a smart person writing a dumb character. I hear a parody trying to tell me really bad it’s a parody. I feel like Conner4real with the personality that he has would blow up once with a song like “Moo!” and then never again. But the narrative tells me his second album is the most hyped of the decade… the 2010s. “Finest Girl” is outrageously catchy though. “I said you’re harboring a fugitive: that ass!” – top tier line.
Oh, and Hunter the Hungry is such a stupid riff of Tyler, the Creator lmao
Music: ★★★☆☆
Movie: ★★★☆☆
Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)
dir. Ethan & Joel Coen
Llewyn Davis (❤ Oscar Isaac ❤) is a folk singer down on his luck. Over the course of the movie, we figure out why: he refuses to “sell out” and be a careerist, he refuses to have any job on the side, he refuses to do grunt work unless his friends coax him to, and he does not want to play nice. That means that more often than not he not only leeches off his better-off friends over at Greenwich Village, but also insulting them at critical moments sometimes. On the other hand, Davis wants to be true to his art and to himself, and he has a father that is in dire need of assistance. This world is all a little too much for Davis.
I’ll admit that for this one, I am not too well-versed in folk. I like some indie folk records, but I hadn’t touched classic folk. That changed this year and that also meant I watched this movie not with any knowledge, but with an open mind nonetheless. It was a very good character study. There is a line that I read on Wikipedia about how the Coen brothers were so concerned with plot that they brought in a cat, and you can sort of tell their attempts at it before they let go, but by and large this is introspective and the biggest reveal here is Llewyn singing to his father and seeing why exactly he has avoided his father for so long. That, and the gasp I made when the cat’s name was revealed… I won’t tell you the name of the cat. Anyway, everyone sings live in the movie here, without any playback. All of them sung well (Justin Timberlake appears here too), and Oscar Isaac is a good enough singer that it matches with terrific acting, probably his best still.
Apparently, and I came across this during research, people thought this was meant to fictionalize Dave Van Ronk, (even including the “Inside” album), but the Coen brothers denied this. In either case, this green-drenched movie made me curious about the whole scene, which is the reason why I have no choice but to engage with Bob Dylan next year.
Music: ★★★★☆
Movie: ★★★★ 1/2
Cats: ★★★★★
Nashville (1975)
dir. Robert Altman
This movie is about Nashville. It is about a cast of characters – twenty-four in total – over the course of a couple days in Nashville, following:
Barbara Jean, a folk singer over the course of an illness and three performances;
Linnea, the wife of a local campaign runner who ends up in an affair;
trio Bill, Mary and Tom at the end of their rope, because Mary has an affair with Tom, a local player;
the campaign of Hal Philip Walker, a third-party candidate;
Jeff Goldblum? Okay, we’re not following this character too closely, but he’s here, riding around.
and many, many more; it is a movie that is more about celebrity, and celebrity politics, and politician celebrities, but it is also a movie that knows performance is important, as is good manners, as is being a good showman. It’s so hard to describe this film not because it is particularly complex, but because it has so many plotlines that criss-cross that you can only zoom out and talk about the “big themes”. It’s lengthy – three hours – but I was not bored at all. It feels truer than real life at points. The ending is particularly bone-chilling.
Music: ★★★★☆
Movie: ★★★★ 1/2
Almost Famous (2000)
dir. Cameron Crowe
This movie is set in 1973, so a little before punk breaks out with Sex Pistols, but around that time (after all, we meet Lester Bangs, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman). It follows a teenage William Miller (Patrick Fugit) wanting to be a rock journalist/rock critic and following American rock group Stillwater, who originally open for Black Sabbath for their tour. With him in tow is groupie/”band aide” Penny Lane (Kate Hudson) as they tour with Stillwater, led by leader Russell (Bill Crudup), who seems the only one with half a brain in his own group, but also caught up in burgeoning rockstar problems.
I really like this movie because it is very kind to all its characters – I watched the director’s cut and everything felt evenly paced and well-explored. (Penny and Will’s mom played by Frances McDormand especially!) It is obvious that Crowe writes from his own perspective for that reason and also because Will is incredibly wide-eyed about everything, passive in his own world, which is nevertheless rewarded at every turn. We never hear Will’s voice as a writer, but are supposed to believe that he is a good writer. We never hear Will have opinions on bands ever, but are supposed to believe he is a good critic? Lester Bangs, with what little he is given, is much fuller of a character, and much closer to the colorful personality of a music critic about the thing they are most passionate about. Like, yeah, William is fifteen, but you have opinions at fifteen too?
The other problem is – and this is a problem that plagued me for Y/N by Esther Yi also – that even though we hear a little bit of Stillwater, I have no idea what kind of band they’re supposed to be. They are not art punk types if they tour with Black Sabbath. Are they MOR types? Does Russell want to be a punk type a la Stooges? Russell is magnetic off-stage, but because we get so little on-stage of the band, I also fail to see what it is with him in particular. They kind of give cover band to me now that I write it – a band just trudging about, playing the greatest hits. Jenny Nicholson tweeted the other day about how she finds it funny to think about how a good movie gets a hobby wrong, and I suppose that is hilarious as long as it isn’t my hobby they’re tackling. They can get my job wrong though. Please hack to the mainframe by wildly keysmashing more often!
Music: ★★☆☆☆
Movie: ★★★★☆
Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Bill Crudup, and Frances McDormand: ★★★★★