September 9, 2026 • 46 mins
With the new Oasis doc Don't Look Back in Anger coming soon to theaters—and inspiring this month's Movie Death Match (The Last Waltz vs. Stop Making Sense)—we're sharing Adam and Josh's Top 5 Music Docs from 2023.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
What kind of a show are you guys putting on
here today?
Speaker 2 (00:06):
You're not interested in art?
Speaker 3 (00:07):
No.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Well, look, we're going to do this thing.
Speaker 3 (00:09):
We're going to have a conversation.
Speaker 4 (00:13):
Hey, film spotters.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
As we were thinking about this archive episode and what
we should drop into the feed, a couple things were
on our minds. First, Oasis, don't look back in anger.
The New documentary out September 11th, which is the chronicle
of the band's reunion, Josh, for their 2025 tour.
Speaker 4 (00:34):
Well, that's coming out.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
That's also what was the inspiration for the recent movie
deathmatch episode that we had in the film spotting feed,
pitting the two greatest concert films of all time against
each other, Stop Making Sense and The Last Waltz. So
we thought, well, what's in the archive that's relevant today?
Speaker 4 (00:56):
To these movies.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
And we thought about our last Waltz episode, talked about
it for its 45th anniversary in 2023. As part of
that show, we did our top five music documentaries. That's
what we're dusting off here.
Speaker 5 (01:12):
We did. And both of those titles that Movie Deathmatch
consider made our list. Not shocking that that happened. Also
looking at mine, I won't give it away, but A crossover,
let's just say, for me, with our movie tattoos we
would get. Yes. That were both, I think, inching ever
closer towards actually getting at some point. But yeah, one
(01:35):
of my picks here, also one of my movie tattoos.
We'll see if listeners can place that as they listen
to our picks here going ahead.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
A reminder that you can access the Film Spotting Archive
and episodes and segments like this at your fingertips by
becoming a family member at Learn more at filmspottingfamily.com. Here
is our top five music docs.
Speaker 6 (02:00):
You start a conversation, you can't even finish it.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
You're talking a lot, but you're not saying anything. Let's
get into this week's topic, Josh, with The Last Waltz
and Robbie Robertson's unfortunate passing. And of course, as we mentioned,
Stop Making Sense, returning to theaters. We thought it was
time to share. our top five music documentaries. We did
consider at first maybe just doing specifically concert films like
(02:29):
The Last Waltz, like Stop Making Sense, decided to broaden
it a little bit, open it up to any documentary
that is about music, is about musicians. I'm sure between
our lists, we'll cover a few of the different ways
documentarians have approached this subject matter. It was tough eventually
to weed it down to just five.
Speaker 5 (02:49):
I think I did end up leaning mostly towards concert docs.
There's one definitely on my list that wouldn't have made
it if I was super strict about that. And a
couple of them do take forays away from the stage. But,
you know, you need that even in a concert doc,
even in something like The Last Waltz, we see how
you have these other elements that bring some context, some
(03:09):
background information. And maybe some other opportunities for artistic flourishes
that the filmmaker is otherwise restricted to what's happening on
the stage, right? And how they can capture that. And
by broadening it, yeah, we're maybe opening the door to
some ways that filmmakers put their own stamp on the genre.
Speaker 4 (03:28):
Let's dive in. What's your number five?
Speaker 6 (03:29):
All right.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
My number five is Dave Chappelle's Block Party.
Speaker 5 (03:33):
Now, before he joined the ranks of comedy's problematic figures,
that's where he is now.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Totally, totally get that.
Speaker 5 (03:40):
Dave Chappelle put together this concert in Brooklyn, and I
described it in my 2006 review, perhaps ironically, now in hindsight,
but I described it as inflammatory yet inclusive. So that
last quality, it might have fallen away in your sense
when it comes to Chappelle, but as a musical document,
it still applies to this music documentary, Dave Chappelle's Block Party.
(04:05):
And he even describes it, in the film as the
concert I've always wanted to see. So this includes artists
like Mo Steph, Erykah Badu, Kanye West, The Roots, and
a reunion at the time.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Of the Fugees.
Speaker 4 (04:20):
You have something in your throat there?
Speaker 5 (04:22):
Yeah, Kanye, you know, he's more of an issue than
Chappelle at the moment, right? Yes.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Way more.
Speaker 5 (04:27):
So I get that as well, but still, watching revisiting
clips of this and some of these performances, I have
to highlight his rendition of Jesus Walks with John Legend
and a marching.
Speaker 6 (04:44):
Band.
Speaker 5 (05:03):
So I think that lineup speaks for itself, but What
makes this distinct for me is also Chappelle as this
giddy host who's just so over the moon that this
thing has come together, as ramshackle as it is. And
he's doing interviews with the stars, of course, but he's
also hanging out in this neighborhood. I think of this
interview with a couple of ancient hippies who happen to
(05:23):
live on the same block and really have no idea
what's going on. The whole thing is loose. There's a
sense of camaraderie to it. And I think some of
that probably comes from the director here, Michelle Gondry. No
stranger to ramshackle dreams, he did Be Kind, Rewind, The
Science of Sleep, and then, you know, a bit more polished,
I would say, a great one, Eternal Sunshine of the
(05:45):
Spotless Mind. So yeah, this pick comes with some caveats.
Chappelle and West totally understand if people just don't want
to make time for either of them these days, but
still as a document of a more promising time for
both of them, as well as just a different sort
of concert doc in general, I'm going to start my
list with Dave Chappelle's Block Party.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
That is a wonderful performance from Kanye that you singled out.
And also, thank you, Ramshackle Dreams is going to be
the name of my next band.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
All right, you got it. It's all yours.
Speaker 4 (06:14):
Well said.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
My number five music documentary is from director Sam Jones,
who has come up this year on the show with
another revealing making of an album documentary. He's the director
of Jason Isbell, Running With Our Eyes Closed. My pick
is I Am Trying to Break Your Heart. the chronicle
of the making of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot from the band Wilco.
(06:38):
And in the trailer, you hear music critic and fellow
podcaster slash radio host on WBEZ, Greg Cott, say, it's
not a VH1 behind the music story. It's not a
drugs groupie celebrity kind of story at all. This band's
story is the music. And he is so right. Just today,
rewatching clips reminded me how incredible the album that this
(07:03):
film documents the making of is. For people who don't
feel the same way about the music that I do,
is the documentary still compelling?
Speaker 4 (07:12):
I don't know, but it should be.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
It isn't a drugs or groupies or celebrity kind of story,
but there's plenty of drama. You've got a fairly established band.
This is their fourth album, I believe. It's a fairly,
up to this point, straight-ahead kind of alt-rock band. And
here they're taking a huge musical swing. That's enough of
a decent narrative through line. Add in the fact that
(07:38):
they are taking this ambitious step and their label hates it.
And they hate it so much they cut them from
the label. Only to end up eventually signing. The band
eventually signs with the subsidiary of their previous label. They're
both subsidiaries of the same unit.
Speaker 5 (07:58):
So.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
As the joke goes, they basically got paid twice to
make the same album that one of the groups rejected.
And if that's not enough, two of the key creative
forces in the group, Jeff Tweedy and Jay Bennett, are
not seeing eye to eye at all. And that results
in Bennett, during the making of this movie, Bennett being
(08:21):
expelled from the band. So you have all this tension
and conflict. which you can see is taking its toll
on Tweety, but there are no major fireworks either that
I recall. It all sort of unfolds very plaintively, like
Wilco and their music. Not all of their music, mind you,
(08:43):
but especially some of the songs on this album, and
a song like the opening track, the opening track of
this movie. The opening credits is one of my favorite
parts of this film, where you have this kind of
grungily beautiful.
Two-minute black and white sequence. The whole film is in
black and white. It's Tweety driving through Chicago, going to rehearsal,
(09:05):
wherever the band is playing or recording. And most of it,
you're just seeing his point of view of the city.
You're not really aware of that until much later into
the montage that it's him driving. But you're getting his perspective.
And the song that's playing over this is the album's
first track and the movie's title track, I Am Trying
(09:27):
to Break Your Heart But it's not the funkier, eclectic
album version. It's this acoustic version, sounds more like a
demo of just Tweety and his guitar. And you would
almost think it's this earnest love song, except for that
undertow of pain and aggression in the declaration, I am
(09:51):
trying to break your heart.
Speaker 6 (09:53):
I am trying to break your heart. I'm trying to.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
That's actually at the center of this film. And also
this excitement, this excitement around the fact that they are
doing something new, that they are being more adventurous with
their music. And fortunately, Josh, things work out in the end.
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot ends up being their most successful album
(10:40):
to date. It's the one that most critics look back
on and still hail as a masterpiece and one of
the best of that period. And I feel that way
as well, which is also a reason why I love
I'm Trying to Break Your Heart so much.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Love that album. Love Wilco.
Speaker 5 (10:54):
And this was next up on my homework list that
I unfortunately didn't get to. So can't comment myself, but
it makes me think I did hear from one of
my favorite music writers, Eric Danielson. He writes actually for
the Columbia Daily Tribune, and he was suggesting this to
me saying, you got to catch up with this one
if you can before making your list.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
And Found his note here.
Speaker 5 (11:16):
He just said it's one of the great creative process
docs I've ever seen. And Eric's seen way more of
these documentaries than I have. So I believe him and
I believe you. All right. At number four, I don't know,
maybe should have asked this question at the top, but
it seems to me that it's right that this list
is going to lend itself more to personal.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Taste, maybe.
Speaker 5 (11:37):
Just the fact that music is being the main ingredient.
I feel like that's where I was drawn to maybe
giving some leeway to the documentaries simply because I loved
the music so much. And so this is a personal
one at number four, Rattle and Hum, 1988, U2. It's
(12:01):
personal because.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
This is not a beloved music doc.
Speaker 5 (12:03):
I know it's had that reputation pretty much since it
came out and has stayed that way, especially for U2 detractors.
But for me personally, to have this movie come out
in 88, there was no way it wasn't going to
be formative. I mean, this is when I was just
seriously getting into music, really choosing what I was going
to spend my hard-earned lawn mowing money on. What tapes
(12:25):
am I going to buy, Adam? And so I would
actually buy something like R.E.M. 's Green album or U2' s
Joshua Tree, some of the first music I actually owned.
And so Rattle and Hum, you know, not only the
album follow-up to Joshua Tree, but This music documentary of
that tour, of the Joshua Tree Tour across America, chronicled
the band's performances and collaborations as well with the likes
(12:47):
of Bob Dylan, B.B. King, the New Voices of Freedom
Gospel Choir, also gave us one of the great U2 songs, Desire.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
What's this film about?
Speaker 3 (13:21):
Sort of a musical journey, really.
Speaker 5 (13:23):
You know?
Speaker 2 (13:26):
That's good.
Speaker 5 (13:27):
Now, you can tell from the lack of an answer
there and really the lack of participation, the band was
in a bit of a smug face. And that was
one of the complaints about the movie overall, that that
was kind of just coming off of them and coming
off of the screen. And probably because of that, Rattle
and Hum barely cracked Rolling Stones. One of the articles
(13:50):
I tracked down to help me formulate this list was
Rolling Stones' 70 Greatest Music Documentaries. And again, I think
it might be the last title on that list. It's
definitely near the end, but Tim Grierson did offer this
defense in his blurb on it. At the time of
its release, this documentary of U2' s Joshua Tree Tour was
lambasted for its overly reverent, self-important tone. Now, with hindsight,
(14:11):
Rattle and Hum can be seen properly as an honest
portrait of the Irish quartet. whose holy quest was to
change the world through rock and roll. Allow the band's
piousness and Americana obsessions to turn you off, and you'll
miss an intriguing look at a band adjusting to a
global superstar status they haven't relinquished since. So that's Tim Grierson.
And I'd also argue, you know, that in retrospect, looking
(14:34):
at it now, you know, Rattle and Hum captures what
was so essential and exciting about Octoon Baby. and then
the Zoo TV tour. That was just a few years later.
And you see a band here in Railroad and Hum
in desperate need of reassessment and reinvention. The artistic talent
is there. But yeah, you can see they've hit a
(14:56):
wall with who they were. And we get them busting
through that wall and that process starting here, but eventually
busting through with Octoon Baby. So Aside from the great music,
you know, a concert doc on a band this big
is going to need some iconic visuals. And I think
we get that here from the director, Phil Joano, and
(15:16):
cinematographers Robert Brinkman and Jordan Cronenweth. They mix black and
white and color film footage, and visually they're really continuing
in the vein of Anton Corbain's photos for Joshua Tree. Cronenweth, incidentally,
he worked on the likes of Blade Runner and The
Talking Heads concert doc Stop Making Sense, which might just
come up later, but For now, I've got Rattle on
(15:38):
Helmet number four.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
What's the film about?
Speaker 4 (15:43):
It's a musical.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
That inarticulateness that you see, that perhaps willful inability to
articulate what their music's about and what they're trying to
do as a band, that will connect nicely to an
upcoming pick of mine. And the other thing I'll say
about that desire scene is even though they are performing
for the camera, the vibe is they're rehearsing. It's not
(16:12):
in front of any kind of audience. And yet there
is Bono in all of his glory. He's not just
standing there singing. He is giving it.
Speaker 4 (16:21):
Every second, every ounce of insouciance. He is just glorious,
isn't he?
Speaker 2 (16:28):
It's incredible.
Speaker 5 (16:29):
And just, yeah, how young they look too is, it.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Makes you feel not so young. I'll just say that.
Speaker 3 (16:35):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
Well, for my number four, I'll start by saying the Oscars,
as we often bemoan, don't usually get it right, somewhat
notoriously when it comes to best documentary feature. But in 2016,
they did. This film won the best documentary Oscar, beat out,
among other films, Joshua Oppenheimer's very good The Look of
Silence and another very good music documentary, Liz Garbus' What Happened,
(17:01):
Miss Simone. Definitely recommend that if you haven't seen it.
But this film is Amy. directed by Asif Kapadia, who
came onto my radar in 2010 when he made Senna,
which was one of my top 10 films of that year.
Another documentary about a legendary artist, you could say, who
died tragically, died too young, Formula One driver Ayrton Senna.
(17:24):
He was 34. Amy Winehouse was just 27. And the
same approach I loved in Senna is the one he
takes with Amy. It's not so uncommon now, but it
felt very new and vital to me in 2010, and
it was certainly a departure from most documentaries I had seen,
and certainly most music documentaries I had seen. This is
(17:45):
one that relies completely on archival footage to produce what
he has called quote-unquote true fiction. So he's acknowledging that
even though it's a documentary, he's of course telling a story,
there is a narrative, there is a construct to this,
but It is all actual footage. It's home movies. It's
(18:07):
performance footage. It's behind-the-scenes recording.
Speaker 4 (18:10):
It's friends. It's family members. It's Amy.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
It's everyone just shooting footage that he was able to
get his hands on. And they're shooting at a time
when smartphones weren't ubiquitous, and yet he had this incredible
trove to cull together. And another choice he makes is
to let her lyrics tell the story. Literally, the lyrics
often appear on screen, handwritten, and it feels like you're
(18:33):
getting access to her innermost thoughts. You're reading her diary.
And that, of course, supports the overall confessional nature of
the music.
Speaker 6 (18:41):
She would tell me stories about Blake and this tempestuous,
extreme relationship. That first day she wrote Back to.
Speaker 4 (18:50):
Black, all the lyrics and the melody in two or
three hours.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
I have to admit, in 2006, I think it was
when she broke out with the Back to Black album,
I didn't get the Amy Winehouse phenomenon, but I also
didn't devote any energy to trying to get it. It
was just sort of popular music. I heard the songs
on the radio. I could appreciate it as catchy, but
(19:32):
that was kind of it. I don't know about you, Josh.
Then I watched this documentary about 10 years later, and
without anyone in the film, because there are no talking heads,
without anyone pronouncing it or contextualizing her greatness for you,
you just witness it.
Speaker 4 (19:49):
And it's undeniable.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
It's undeniable that she had and was a singular voice.
You mentioned the Rolling Stone top 70 music docs, which
I also took a look at. Vulture did a top 50.
Our friend Noel Murray wrote that piece, and he had
Amy at number 20 He said, what's most heartbreaking about
Amy is that all its previously unseen footage shows a
(20:12):
complex young woman that the public never really got to
know because it was easier both for the singer and
the tabloids to sell a simpler story of reckless self-indulgence.
And one of the feelings I came away with, and
I know others have expressed this similarly, you'll hear a
word that will often come up after people experience this film.
You come away feeling a certain complicity in.
Speaker 4 (20:33):
It all, even if, of course.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
you were never directly or even really indirectly involved in
exploiting her. You're just very aware of the narrative that
was created around her and how easy it was for
me as an individual simply to accept that. And the
documentary shatters that.
Speaker 5 (20:54):
Yeah, definitely my experience. It is, in a sense, a
cinematic shaming that is due. I think the movie does
that by showing us their there were friends and family
who stood by, if not enabled, you know, her. And
I think we are included in.
Speaker 3 (21:12):
This, Adam.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
That was my experience as well.
Speaker 5 (21:13):
Even if it was just to like laugh at a
punchline that, you know, a comedian maybe made about her
erratic behavior. I was, you know, it sounds like similar,
definitely listened to her pretty common even today, you know,
to hear her songs being played somewhere in our house.
But didn't really do a deep dive into her background
or her story until I saw this documentary. And then,
(21:37):
you know, did feel bad about not doing that, but
instead just, I guess it's not even so much that
I didn't do that, but that I did just accept
the narrative that was being presented.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
Right.
Speaker 5 (21:48):
And I think this movie, yeah, this movie rightly challenges
having a relationship like that to musical artists.
Speaker 4 (21:56):
That's a good word.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
It challenges that because You see the footage of Jay
Leno or whatever making cracks on The Tonight Show. I
don't think Jay Leno is responsible for Amy Winehouse's death.
I don't think the movie is suggesting that. And I
can't even say that I laughed at any of those
jokes when or if I saw them, but the acceptance
of them. And the acceptance of them to an extent
that they were just harmless rather than seeing them as
(22:21):
part of this larger narrative and the destructiveness of that,
that's something the movie definitely made me realize.
Speaker 5 (22:30):
All right, number three, I have Summer of Soul. And
I don't think I'm going to spend a lot of
time on this one. We've talked about it quite a
bit on the show. It actually made, I had forgotten
this until I looked it up, but it made all
four of our 2021 top 10 lists. That was a
year-end show we did with Michael Phillips and Dana Stevens.
And before that, we had previously given it a full
review on the show as well. So in case you
(22:55):
hadn't heard any of those conversations and aren't familiar, briefly,
This is Musician Questlove's rescue project, really, is how I
describe it. It's a compiling of footage from the Harlem
Cultural Festival of 1969 that had sat largely unseen for
50 years.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
So this is who we're talking about here.
Speaker 5 (23:13):
Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, Gladys
Knight and the Pips, Mahalia Jackson, B.B. King, The Fifth Dimension,
Pop Staples and the Staples Singers, And that includes a
very young Mavis Staples. As a matter of fact, there
was more talk about this at our wrap party for
Best Music Moment. I know I had Mavis and Mahalia
singing together for my pick. So the footage is great, obviously.
(23:37):
But what really makes Summer of Soul distinct that I
want to emphasize are the contemporary interviews, yes, with some
of the artists. But how about those ones with regular
folks who Questlove tracked down, who remember attending Mavis? the
festival when they were younger. And this is one of them,
Musa Jackson, who went to the fest as a child.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
I was a little kid.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
I remember being with my family, walking around the park,
and as far as I could see, it was just
Black people. This was the first time I'd ever seen
so many of us.
Speaker 6 (24:17):
It was incredible.
Speaker 5 (24:19):
There are other interviews that are incredibly moving in this way,
and they just work as beautiful companion pieces to the
brilliant music. So Summer of Soul I've got at number three.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
Yeah, I like that fifth dimension clip as well, just
because I remember spending a fair amount of time during
our review on the redemption of that band being one
of the really fun, moving storylines from Summer of Soul,
and making connections here with other topics we're discussing. This
is the second appearance of Questlove so far on your list.
(24:55):
He pops up in the Jesus Walks performance in Block Party,
and Mavis Staples appearing as well, quite memorably, in The
Last Waltz. My number three music documentary is, well, I'll
not attempt to imitate the central figure, and I'll just
give you my favorite exchange, my favorite bit of dialogue
(25:19):
from that artist in this film.
Speaker 4 (25:21):
Are you going to see the concert tonight? Are you
going to hear it?
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
You hear it and see it and it's going to
happen fast and you're not going to get it all.
And you might even hear the wrong words, you know?
And then afterwards, I won't be able to talk to
you afterwards. I got nothing to say about these songs
I write. I mean, I just write them. I don't
have to say anything about them. I don't write for
any reason. There's no great message. I mean, if you
want to tell other people that, go ahead and tell them,
but I'm not going to have to answer to that.
(25:45):
That's the infamous Bob Dylan exchange with a Time Magazine
reporter in D.A. Pennebaker's seminal 1967 artist on tour documentary,
Don't Look Back. Pennebaker followed Dylan to England. He was
touring the country in 1965, and we get sort of
(26:07):
fly-on-the-wall footage. I'll talk more about that in a second.
We get scenes of Dylan with the media interacting with
occasionally with fans, maybe more at a distance. Definitely a
lot of interactions with his honorage, including Joan Baez, who
he was in a relationship with at the time.
Speaker 4 (26:26):
And the importance or.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
The significance of this film, it's significant as a film
and as a documentary of this artist and kind of
setting a template for other films like it that would follow.
But the relevance is heightened with the benefit of hindsight.
It's this 1965 tour. By the time the movie's released,
this all happens basically right after the tour ends, Dylan
decides to go electric. In 1966, the folk protest icon
(26:53):
sells his soul. In 66, he plays three electric songs
at the Newport Folk Festival. And then about 10 months later,
after releasing Blonde on Blonde, that's when he gets called
a Judas by an angry fan in Manchester, England. because
he's playing an electric set, an all electric set. And Josh,
(27:14):
of course, who is he playing that electric set with? Well,
now you've seen The Last Waltz and you know that
that band was the band, though at the time they
were called the Hawks because they had just come off
the road from playing with Ronnie Hawkins. That iconoclastic impulse
in the Manchester scene, in going electric, in the dialogue
(27:36):
I shared, that impulse to challenge expectations, but not just
challenge them, to make us question what's really driving those expectations.
Why do we need to put Dylan or any artist
on this mantle and just hope they'll stay put and
deliver what we think we need from them? It's really
(27:58):
at the heart of Dylan's entire career in music and
at the heart of this film. And why I love
that exchange for the easy it would have been for Dylan,
maybe not easy for him because it's so fundamentally not
who he is, but how easy it would be for
most of us to get caught up in that, to
(28:20):
play into the image that others have built for you,
embrace the adulation and the grandiosity of being this folk
Messiah label. And it really wouldn't have even been that hard.
Like he wouldn't have had to be overly eloquent to
and constantly state his message in interviews. He just could
have kind of sat back and let others impose it
(28:43):
on him and just not denied it. And of course,
he can't help himself. He has to deny it. He
says emphatically, I got nothing to say about these songs
I write. I mean, I just write them. I don't
have anything to say about them. I don't write for
any reason. He's basically saying, I owe you nothing.
Speaker 4 (29:00):
And I believe him. I agree with him.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
I didn't see this documentary until I think 2006 as
part of a film spotting marathon. And it It really
did completely alter the way I think about artists and
my own desire to put them in a box or
demand of them who or what I think that they
should be. I also think that Pennebaker realized something about Dylan,
(29:23):
something that Dylan himself realized, which is the more famous
he got, this whole notion of celebrity is just an
absurd dance.
Speaker 4 (29:32):
It's all artifice.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
It's all performance, just as much, if not more, than
the performance happening on the stage. And you've got Pennebaker,
who's coming out of this fly-on-the-wall school of documentary. Except here,
he's making no attempts to work invisibly. He's showing you
the strings a little bit. This isn't a case of
capturing Dylan in these really private, reflective moments. No, he's
(29:56):
going to make you aware of the camera. It's going
to be noticeable. It's going to be crammed into confined
spaces and jiggling about like in the back of a
car one night after Dylan comes off the stage and
he's in there with his manager, Albert Grossman, and other
members of his entourage. And he gets a little focused
(30:17):
on a certain word that's being thrown around about him.
Speaker 4 (30:21):
They've started calling you an anarchist.
Speaker 5 (30:23):
Who?
Speaker 4 (30:23):
Papers, that's the word now.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
Anarchist.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
No problem.
Speaker 3 (30:27):
You're kidding.
Speaker 4 (30:28):
Which papers did you see there?
Speaker 5 (30:29):
Oh, two or three.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
An anarchist.
Speaker 4 (30:33):
Just because you don't offer any solution.
Speaker 5 (30:35):
You're kidding.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
Of course.
Speaker 5 (30:44):
An anarchist.
Speaker 3 (30:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (30:45):
Give me a cigarette.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Give the anarchist a cigarette.
Speaker 1 (30:48):
Dylan kind of can't let it go, but not because
I think at all that he's offended by it or
takes it seriously. He's amused more than anything at this criticism,
if you will, and I think he's really amused by
the word choice, the way a great writer might. I
love how it just lingers with him throughout that entire scene.
You see the cuts, and you know that he's coming
(31:11):
back to it over some period of time, but what
you get with that film is a certain... inscrutability. And
this goes back to what you were saying about U2.
I don't think they're reflecting it quite the way Dylan is,
but that, that inability or that lack of desire to
explain themselves to other people and to let the music
(31:32):
stand for itself.
Speaker 4 (31:34):
That's, that's really what Dylan does here.
Speaker 5 (31:37):
So Bob Dylan also popping up a lot on this show.
I mean, he's in rattle and hum and of course
the last waltz too.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
That's right. All right.
Speaker 5 (31:45):
So number two, A little unusual because it's actually a
recent documentary. It came out in 2018, but it chronicles
a 1972 performance. This is Aretha Franklin over two days
making the live recording of her gospel album, Amazing Grace.
This was done at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church
in Watts. So the album itself, you know, made at
(32:08):
the height of her mainstream popularity, it returned her to
her church roots and ended up being her best-selling release.
The film shares the album's title, Amazing Grace, and it
features not only Aretha, but also gospel legend, Reverend James Cleveland,
sort of the conductor of the events. And she's got
the Southern California Community Choir as backup. There's even a
(32:31):
sermon from Aretha Franklin's father, Reverend C.L. Franklin, which adds
some familial sweetness, but also a little tension to the
proceedings because you have this sense of I don't know.
I don't want to interpret what it is, but you
definitely sense there's a lot there between them, even as
they're happy to be in this space together. And then,
of course, there are the audience slash church members who
(32:53):
are in the pews. Now, the nice thing, usually, Adam,
about having my own website where I still write reviews, larsonandfilm.com,
serves as a handy archive for these top five lists, right?
I often go back, see what I wrote about a movie,
take some notes there, and bring those into our picks.
So I thought, this will be great. Searched for Amazing Grace.
(33:15):
This is all I found. Holy Moses, no need to
desecrate this with any more words.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
So I was silenced.
Speaker 4 (33:22):
You copped out. You copped out as a critic.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
No, I was silenced by Amazing Grace.
Speaker 5 (33:28):
I had no more. I did not want to desecrate
this thing with words. So I'm going to lean on others'
words here.
Speaker 4 (33:34):
I get it.
Speaker 5 (33:34):
Critic Odie Henderson, he had a four out of four
star review. Over at RogerEbert.com on this one, he said,
this film is a powerful love letter to the black church,
offering a soul-shaking introduction for the unfamiliar and a grandmotherly
yank of the arm for those who know. It drags
you from the theater straight into the pews.
Speaker 4 (33:52):
I love that.
Speaker 5 (33:53):
Here's some more praise for the movie that came from listeners.
I put out on social media, you know, what's your
favorite music doc?
Speaker 2 (33:59):
The one.
Speaker 5 (34:00):
You have to just choose one. Which one are you
going with? Kevin McLenathan over on Blue Sky. Yes, yes,
I am on Blue Sky.
Speaker 2 (34:07):
Look at you.
Speaker 5 (34:08):
Kevin said this, haven't seen as many as I should,
but 2018's Amazing Grace got to me in a way
that no other live music doc has. A big reason
might be the shots of the audience. They're not just spectators,
they're participants, and they're participating in more than just an
Aretha Franklin event.
Speaker 2 (34:25):
And one more.
Speaker 5 (34:26):
Here from Twitter slash X, Carl Friedhoff picked Amazing Grace.
Aretha at her height, a fantastic backing choir, and a
rapt audience. So now why the delay? Why, you know,
this was 72. Why did we not get it until 2018? Well,
there was a technical error at the time with the footage.
(34:46):
I should note this was shot by a crew led
by director Sidney Pollack. And so that made it impossible
to sync with the sound. Kind of a problem for
something like this. Then there were legal hurdles for many
years while the tech was being fixed. Eventually, you know,
that all came together so that This saw the light
of day. Amazing Grace, a belated treasure, but a treasure
(35:07):
for sure.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
I looked at Letterboxd, and I don't have this logged,
and yet I know I have seen this movie, or
at least most of this movie, back around awards season.
I know that I checked it out because everyone was
raving about it, and rightfully, for all the reasons you mentioned,
maybe I owe Aretha a full watch here at some point, Josh.
(35:29):
I already said my number one. It's The Last Waltz.
So I'm going to spoil things a little bit by
giving you my number two, which I know is also
your number one. A perfect culmination for this episode. We're
going to talk about the film that largely inspired us
to do the top five. Yes, Jonathan Demme's Stop Making
(35:50):
Sense is back in theaters, coming back to theaters thanks
to A24. Can't wait to go see this, including with
my daughter Sophie.
Speaker 5 (35:59):
What a.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
thrill.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
How incredible is it to be able to say, I
saw Stop Making Sense for the first time on the
big screen? I know there are people listening who actually
did see it for the first time on the big
screen in 1984. I was not one of those people.
To now have a chance for people to see it
for the first time or to revisit it, as in
our case, Josh, it's something that I am incredibly excited for.
(36:23):
And maybe we can help get others excited as well.
There's a Jonathan Demme quote about Stop Making Sense. I
think I referenced back when we talked about it during
that 8 from 84 review. He said something about shooting
live music. This probably isn't true, but I think this
is the purest form of filmmaking. There are these artists
(36:43):
doing that, and we're here to team up with that
and capture that in the way that best suits the
music being played. No pun intended there on the suits,
I'm sure, from Jonathan Demme. Now, if you'd never seen
Stop Making Sense or maybe didn't know a lot about
the band or Jonathan Demme, you might be inclined to
hear that quote and think that the director is saying,
(37:04):
it's my job as a filmmaker just to capture that.
They're amazing artists. They're performing. I'll render that as unobtrusively
as possible. I'll capture it and get out of the
way and just let talking heads be talking heads. Arguably,
that's the Scorsese approach to The Last Waltz. I mean,
the most artistic flourishes seem to come really in the
(37:25):
staged numbers of And it's hard to really discern the
directing choices, the shots and editing decisions in, I think,
the live performances themselves. But Jonathan Demme really does team up.
He comes up with a way to capture this that
best suits the music being played. It is truly an
(37:48):
artistic collaboration in its entirety, in its totality, but then
song to song.
Speaker 4 (37:54):
Think about how they.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
Present psycho killer i've talked about it before i think
my number three jonathan demi scene this is a song
ostensibly from the point of view of an alienated homicidal
man so how do we get it david burn alone
on stage guitar and boombox deliriously.
Speaker 4 (38:15):
Deranged hi i got a tape i want to play.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
This lonely man, so lonely that for the first minute
of that performance, you're not even sure as a viewer
that there are really people in the audience. This is
like a performance that could be taking place only in
his demented mind. He's eventually then joined one by one
by the rest of the band, and then it culminates
like The Last Waltz. It culminates in this joyous celebration
(38:50):
of community. We see it in a number like Making
Flippy Foppy, where Demi showcases the entire stage groups of performers.
And there's scarcely a shot of an individual to be
found in that number. It's all just so intentional. And
on top of it, the music is incredible as well.
Speaker 5 (39:20):
To your point about Demi, and yes, this stopped Making sense.
My number one to your point about Demi's presence here
as a director, you know, looking up what I wrote
when I reviewed it, I said, while a strong pair
of directorial hands can be a good thing, not getting
in the way requires a certain artfulness as well. And
I think that's exactly the balance that Demi strikes.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
This is one, Adam, if.
Speaker 5 (39:42):
People are going to theaters to see it I hope
we can take some credit for it because we've been
talking a ton about this this movie I mean we
mentioned some of these but we did it as part
of our 8 from 84 series that was in 2020
we did in 2017 our top 5 films of 84
you had it at number 3 I had it at
number 2 and then it showed up on both of
(40:04):
our top 5 Jonathan Demi moments lists when we honored
the director after his passing that was 2017 so I
If listeners want more on this movie, they can go
to any of those conversations. Interestingly, I think of this
as Demi, going back to what you were just talking about,
Demi establishing David Byrne as the auteur. And not just,
(40:25):
you know, this inspired composer of these really manic but
also melodic new wave pop songs, but an inventive installation artist.
And I think a stage presence you can only call alarming.
And perhaps that's, you know, never more so than when
he dons that big suit for Girlfriend is Better. So
(40:59):
you've heard enough from me in recent years on Stop
Making Sense. I'm going to give one more thought from
Criterion curator Ashley Clark. Ashley wrote about this. after seeing
it recently and it's re-released. So he's one of those
folks who went and checked it out on Twitter slash X.
Ashley is underscore Ash underscore Clark. I've seen Stop Making
Sense a million times, but never on a screen as
(41:21):
big as the Bam Brooklyn Harvey. It's no newsflash to
call it one of the best concert films ever made,
but in all its lavish drama and escalating tension, writ
so large, you can remove that concert qualifier. So yeah,
obviously I agree. This thing just breaks the boundaries. of
the music documentary in many ways. At the same time,
(41:42):
it's the best one I've ever seen. So it's my
number one.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
Those are our top five music documentaries. I know I've
got a few honorable mentions. I'll set you up with
a couple of picks from listeners. Josh Jarrett in Astoria,
New York City wrote in and said, this is GWAR.
I loved this documentary. It made me weep uncontrollably, which
is probably why I loved it. If you're a GWAR fan,
and Josh, I know you are, you probably already saw this.
(42:07):
If you're not a GWAR fan, but you're GWAR adjacent, comics, horror, wrestling, punk,
and metal, you should see this. If you're not into
any of that stuff, but you want an incredible documentary
about art and friendship, you should see this. Thank you, Jared,
for that recommendation. He says it's available on Shudder. Not
sure where else. And then we got this from Lynn Brown,
who is a sustainer for WJCT 89.9 in Jacksonville, where
(42:31):
David Luckin and Matt Shaw do a whole lot for music.
Shout out, David and Matt. My hope for your show
on music documentaries would include Standing in the Shadows of Motown,
20 Feet from Stardom, Searching for Sugar Man, and Summer
of Soul. Each documentary is an excellent representation of some
of the unsung artists who created the soundtrack of my
life and many others. All docs I've seen, all good ones,
(42:52):
of course, Summer of Soul made your list an honorable
mention for me. I also really did go for Searching
for Sugar Man when that documentary was released. What about you, Josh?
Speaker 4 (43:01):
Any other titles that you want to sneak in?
Speaker 5 (43:03):
Yeah, I'll hit you with three quick ones, all recent ones.
But Beyonce's Homecoming, you know, watching that on Netflix, that's
pretty much why I was convinced we had to put
out the cash and catch her Renaissance tour this summer.
Miss Sharon Jones is from 2015, a documentary from Barbara
Koppel about the career and the cancer struggles of the
(43:24):
now late soul singer. And speaking of Jonathan Demme, a
nice chaser for Stop Making Sense. When you get home,
check out his 2016 doc, Justin Timberlake. and the Tennessee Kids.
Quite good.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
I love this genre, so indulge me here for a
second with a few titles. The Decline of Western Civilization
Part II, The Metal Years, came out in 1988, and
I'm happy to see, in looking at a lot of lists,
ranks quite highly, and people look back on it quite fondly.
I think appropriately so, as someone who, at the time
(43:57):
it was released, was very much trying to emulate... the
hair metal artists that were depicted in this film, despite
the fact that it's really a cautionary tale or on
some level is a cautionary tale about their excess and self-destructiveness.
Of course, I didn't get any of that when I
was a kid who wanted to grow my hair out
(44:18):
and wear makeup like them, but I do recommend that film. Scorsese,
of course, is someone who's made some other really good
music documentaries. George Harrison, Living in the Material World, the
Bob Dylan Rolling Thunder review back in 2019. In 2005,
No Direction Home, tie it back to Dylan and the
band in The Last Waltz. In No Direction Home, that's
(44:39):
where you can see the footage of the guy yelling Judas,
that infamous Manchester show with the band then known as
the Hawks backing up Dylan. Brett Morgan, of course, has
made a couple really good ones in the past seven
to eight years in Cobain, Montage of Heck, and the
David Bowie documentary from last year, Moon Age Daydream You
(44:59):
got to talk about the measles in Gimme Shelter. I
love Todd Haynes' Velvet Underground doc that came out a
few years ago. LCD Sound Systems version, I guess, of
The Last Waltz, shut up and play the hits. And
if you haven't watched The History of the Eagles on Netflix,
I don't know what you're doing. I don't care how
you feel about the Eagles. Watch The History of the
Eagles and Metallica, Some Kind of Monster. That also is
(45:22):
a fascinating document of that group trying to record an
album while they're completely disintegrating as egos and friends within
that group. And they've got their therapist sitting there quite notoriously,
not only trying to help manage all that tension, but
also suggesting song.
Speaker 4 (45:41):
Lyrics, Josh.
Speaker 5 (45:42):
I've heard a lot of support for that one, actually.
Saw that one come up in social media quite a bit.
Speaker 4 (45:46):
It's been a beast, and it's sucked a lot of
me into it.
Speaker 1 (45:56):
Those were our top five music documentaries from September 2023.
Access to the Film Spotting Archive, just one of the
benefits of being a Film Spotting Family member, plus bonus shows,
weekly newsletter, early access to.
Speaker 4 (46:09):
Events, and more. Learn more at filmspottingfamily.com. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 3 (46:14):
This conversation can serve no purpose anymore.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
Goodbye.
Speaker 6 (46:25):
Thank you.
What kind of a show are you guys putting on
here today?
Speaker 2 (00:06):
You're not interested in art?
Speaker 3 (00:07):
No.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Well, look, we're going to do this thing.
Speaker 3 (00:09):
We're going to have a conversation.
Speaker 4 (00:13):
Hey, film spotters.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
As we were thinking about this archive episode and what
we should drop into the feed, a couple things were
on our minds. First, Oasis, don't look back in anger.
The New documentary out September 11th, which is the chronicle
of the band's reunion, Josh, for their 2025 tour.
Speaker 4 (00:34):
Well, that's coming out.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
That's also what was the inspiration for the recent movie
deathmatch episode that we had in the film spotting feed,
pitting the two greatest concert films of all time against
each other, Stop Making Sense and The Last Waltz. So
we thought, well, what's in the archive that's relevant today?
Speaker 4 (00:56):
To these movies.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
And we thought about our last Waltz episode, talked about
it for its 45th anniversary in 2023. As part of
that show, we did our top five music documentaries. That's
what we're dusting off here.
Speaker 5 (01:12):
We did. And both of those titles that Movie Deathmatch
consider made our list. Not shocking that that happened. Also
looking at mine, I won't give it away, but A crossover,
let's just say, for me, with our movie tattoos we
would get. Yes. That were both, I think, inching ever
closer towards actually getting at some point. But yeah, one
(01:35):
of my picks here, also one of my movie tattoos.
We'll see if listeners can place that as they listen
to our picks here going ahead.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
A reminder that you can access the Film Spotting Archive
and episodes and segments like this at your fingertips by
becoming a family member at Learn more at filmspottingfamily.com. Here
is our top five music docs.
Speaker 6 (02:00):
You start a conversation, you can't even finish it.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
You're talking a lot, but you're not saying anything. Let's
get into this week's topic, Josh, with The Last Waltz
and Robbie Robertson's unfortunate passing. And of course, as we mentioned,
Stop Making Sense, returning to theaters. We thought it was
time to share. our top five music documentaries. We did
consider at first maybe just doing specifically concert films like
(02:29):
The Last Waltz, like Stop Making Sense, decided to broaden
it a little bit, open it up to any documentary
that is about music, is about musicians. I'm sure between
our lists, we'll cover a few of the different ways
documentarians have approached this subject matter. It was tough eventually
to weed it down to just five.
Speaker 5 (02:49):
I think I did end up leaning mostly towards concert docs.
There's one definitely on my list that wouldn't have made
it if I was super strict about that. And a
couple of them do take forays away from the stage. But,
you know, you need that even in a concert doc,
even in something like The Last Waltz, we see how
you have these other elements that bring some context, some
(03:09):
background information. And maybe some other opportunities for artistic flourishes
that the filmmaker is otherwise restricted to what's happening on
the stage, right? And how they can capture that. And
by broadening it, yeah, we're maybe opening the door to
some ways that filmmakers put their own stamp on the genre.
Speaker 4 (03:28):
Let's dive in. What's your number five?
Speaker 6 (03:29):
All right.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
My number five is Dave Chappelle's Block Party.
Speaker 5 (03:33):
Now, before he joined the ranks of comedy's problematic figures,
that's where he is now.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Totally, totally get that.
Speaker 5 (03:40):
Dave Chappelle put together this concert in Brooklyn, and I
described it in my 2006 review, perhaps ironically, now in hindsight,
but I described it as inflammatory yet inclusive. So that
last quality, it might have fallen away in your sense
when it comes to Chappelle, but as a musical document,
it still applies to this music documentary, Dave Chappelle's Block Party.
(04:05):
And he even describes it, in the film as the
concert I've always wanted to see. So this includes artists
like Mo Steph, Erykah Badu, Kanye West, The Roots, and
a reunion at the time.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Of the Fugees.
Speaker 4 (04:20):
You have something in your throat there?
Speaker 5 (04:22):
Yeah, Kanye, you know, he's more of an issue than
Chappelle at the moment, right? Yes.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Way more.
Speaker 5 (04:27):
So I get that as well, but still, watching revisiting
clips of this and some of these performances, I have
to highlight his rendition of Jesus Walks with John Legend
and a marching.
Speaker 6 (04:44):
Band.
Speaker 5 (05:03):
So I think that lineup speaks for itself, but What
makes this distinct for me is also Chappelle as this
giddy host who's just so over the moon that this
thing has come together, as ramshackle as it is. And
he's doing interviews with the stars, of course, but he's
also hanging out in this neighborhood. I think of this
interview with a couple of ancient hippies who happen to
(05:23):
live on the same block and really have no idea
what's going on. The whole thing is loose. There's a
sense of camaraderie to it. And I think some of
that probably comes from the director here, Michelle Gondry. No
stranger to ramshackle dreams, he did Be Kind, Rewind, The
Science of Sleep, and then, you know, a bit more polished,
I would say, a great one, Eternal Sunshine of the
(05:45):
Spotless Mind. So yeah, this pick comes with some caveats.
Chappelle and West totally understand if people just don't want
to make time for either of them these days, but
still as a document of a more promising time for
both of them, as well as just a different sort
of concert doc in general, I'm going to start my
list with Dave Chappelle's Block Party.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
That is a wonderful performance from Kanye that you singled out.
And also, thank you, Ramshackle Dreams is going to be
the name of my next band.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
All right, you got it. It's all yours.
Speaker 4 (06:14):
Well said.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
My number five music documentary is from director Sam Jones,
who has come up this year on the show with
another revealing making of an album documentary. He's the director
of Jason Isbell, Running With Our Eyes Closed. My pick
is I Am Trying to Break Your Heart. the chronicle
of the making of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot from the band Wilco.
(06:38):
And in the trailer, you hear music critic and fellow
podcaster slash radio host on WBEZ, Greg Cott, say, it's
not a VH1 behind the music story. It's not a
drugs groupie celebrity kind of story at all. This band's
story is the music. And he is so right. Just today,
rewatching clips reminded me how incredible the album that this
(07:03):
film documents the making of is. For people who don't
feel the same way about the music that I do,
is the documentary still compelling?
Speaker 4 (07:12):
I don't know, but it should be.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
It isn't a drugs or groupies or celebrity kind of story,
but there's plenty of drama. You've got a fairly established band.
This is their fourth album, I believe. It's a fairly,
up to this point, straight-ahead kind of alt-rock band. And
here they're taking a huge musical swing. That's enough of
a decent narrative through line. Add in the fact that
(07:38):
they are taking this ambitious step and their label hates it.
And they hate it so much they cut them from
the label. Only to end up eventually signing. The band
eventually signs with the subsidiary of their previous label. They're
both subsidiaries of the same unit.
Speaker 5 (07:58):
So.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
As the joke goes, they basically got paid twice to
make the same album that one of the groups rejected.
And if that's not enough, two of the key creative
forces in the group, Jeff Tweedy and Jay Bennett, are
not seeing eye to eye at all. And that results
in Bennett, during the making of this movie, Bennett being
(08:21):
expelled from the band. So you have all this tension
and conflict. which you can see is taking its toll
on Tweety, but there are no major fireworks either that
I recall. It all sort of unfolds very plaintively, like
Wilco and their music. Not all of their music, mind you,
(08:43):
but especially some of the songs on this album, and
a song like the opening track, the opening track of
this movie. The opening credits is one of my favorite
parts of this film, where you have this kind of
grungily beautiful.
Two-minute black and white sequence. The whole film is in
black and white. It's Tweety driving through Chicago, going to rehearsal,
(09:05):
wherever the band is playing or recording. And most of it,
you're just seeing his point of view of the city.
You're not really aware of that until much later into
the montage that it's him driving. But you're getting his perspective.
And the song that's playing over this is the album's
first track and the movie's title track, I Am Trying
(09:27):
to Break Your Heart But it's not the funkier, eclectic
album version. It's this acoustic version, sounds more like a
demo of just Tweety and his guitar. And you would
almost think it's this earnest love song, except for that
undertow of pain and aggression in the declaration, I am
(09:51):
trying to break your heart.
Speaker 6 (09:53):
I am trying to break your heart. I'm trying to.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
That's actually at the center of this film. And also
this excitement, this excitement around the fact that they are
doing something new, that they are being more adventurous with
their music. And fortunately, Josh, things work out in the end.
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot ends up being their most successful album
(10:40):
to date. It's the one that most critics look back
on and still hail as a masterpiece and one of
the best of that period. And I feel that way
as well, which is also a reason why I love
I'm Trying to Break Your Heart so much.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Love that album. Love Wilco.
Speaker 5 (10:54):
And this was next up on my homework list that
I unfortunately didn't get to. So can't comment myself, but
it makes me think I did hear from one of
my favorite music writers, Eric Danielson. He writes actually for
the Columbia Daily Tribune, and he was suggesting this to
me saying, you got to catch up with this one
if you can before making your list.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
And Found his note here.
Speaker 5 (11:16):
He just said it's one of the great creative process
docs I've ever seen. And Eric's seen way more of
these documentaries than I have. So I believe him and
I believe you. All right. At number four, I don't know,
maybe should have asked this question at the top, but
it seems to me that it's right that this list
is going to lend itself more to personal.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Taste, maybe.
Speaker 5 (11:37):
Just the fact that music is being the main ingredient.
I feel like that's where I was drawn to maybe
giving some leeway to the documentaries simply because I loved
the music so much. And so this is a personal
one at number four, Rattle and Hum, 1988, U2. It's
(12:01):
personal because.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
This is not a beloved music doc.
Speaker 5 (12:03):
I know it's had that reputation pretty much since it
came out and has stayed that way, especially for U2 detractors.
But for me personally, to have this movie come out
in 88, there was no way it wasn't going to
be formative. I mean, this is when I was just
seriously getting into music, really choosing what I was going
to spend my hard-earned lawn mowing money on. What tapes
(12:25):
am I going to buy, Adam? And so I would
actually buy something like R.E.M. 's Green album or U2' s
Joshua Tree, some of the first music I actually owned.
And so Rattle and Hum, you know, not only the
album follow-up to Joshua Tree, but This music documentary of
that tour, of the Joshua Tree Tour across America, chronicled
the band's performances and collaborations as well with the likes
(12:47):
of Bob Dylan, B.B. King, the New Voices of Freedom
Gospel Choir, also gave us one of the great U2 songs, Desire.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
What's this film about?
Speaker 3 (13:21):
Sort of a musical journey, really.
Speaker 5 (13:23):
You know?
Speaker 2 (13:26):
That's good.
Speaker 5 (13:27):
Now, you can tell from the lack of an answer
there and really the lack of participation, the band was
in a bit of a smug face. And that was
one of the complaints about the movie overall, that that
was kind of just coming off of them and coming
off of the screen. And probably because of that, Rattle
and Hum barely cracked Rolling Stones. One of the articles
(13:50):
I tracked down to help me formulate this list was
Rolling Stones' 70 Greatest Music Documentaries. And again, I think
it might be the last title on that list. It's
definitely near the end, but Tim Grierson did offer this
defense in his blurb on it. At the time of
its release, this documentary of U2' s Joshua Tree Tour was
lambasted for its overly reverent, self-important tone. Now, with hindsight,
(14:11):
Rattle and Hum can be seen properly as an honest
portrait of the Irish quartet. whose holy quest was to
change the world through rock and roll. Allow the band's
piousness and Americana obsessions to turn you off, and you'll
miss an intriguing look at a band adjusting to a
global superstar status they haven't relinquished since. So that's Tim Grierson.
And I'd also argue, you know, that in retrospect, looking
(14:34):
at it now, you know, Rattle and Hum captures what
was so essential and exciting about Octoon Baby. and then
the Zoo TV tour. That was just a few years later.
And you see a band here in Railroad and Hum
in desperate need of reassessment and reinvention. The artistic talent
is there. But yeah, you can see they've hit a
(14:56):
wall with who they were. And we get them busting
through that wall and that process starting here, but eventually
busting through with Octoon Baby. So Aside from the great music,
you know, a concert doc on a band this big
is going to need some iconic visuals. And I think
we get that here from the director, Phil Joano, and
(15:16):
cinematographers Robert Brinkman and Jordan Cronenweth. They mix black and
white and color film footage, and visually they're really continuing
in the vein of Anton Corbain's photos for Joshua Tree. Cronenweth, incidentally,
he worked on the likes of Blade Runner and The
Talking Heads concert doc Stop Making Sense, which might just
come up later, but For now, I've got Rattle on
(15:38):
Helmet number four.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
What's the film about?
Speaker 4 (15:43):
It's a musical.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
That inarticulateness that you see, that perhaps willful inability to
articulate what their music's about and what they're trying to
do as a band, that will connect nicely to an
upcoming pick of mine. And the other thing I'll say
about that desire scene is even though they are performing
for the camera, the vibe is they're rehearsing. It's not
(16:12):
in front of any kind of audience. And yet there
is Bono in all of his glory. He's not just
standing there singing. He is giving it.
Speaker 4 (16:21):
Every second, every ounce of insouciance. He is just glorious,
isn't he?
Speaker 2 (16:28):
It's incredible.
Speaker 5 (16:29):
And just, yeah, how young they look too is, it.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Makes you feel not so young. I'll just say that.
Speaker 3 (16:35):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
Well, for my number four, I'll start by saying the Oscars,
as we often bemoan, don't usually get it right, somewhat
notoriously when it comes to best documentary feature. But in 2016,
they did. This film won the best documentary Oscar, beat out,
among other films, Joshua Oppenheimer's very good The Look of
Silence and another very good music documentary, Liz Garbus' What Happened,
(17:01):
Miss Simone. Definitely recommend that if you haven't seen it.
But this film is Amy. directed by Asif Kapadia, who
came onto my radar in 2010 when he made Senna,
which was one of my top 10 films of that year.
Another documentary about a legendary artist, you could say, who
died tragically, died too young, Formula One driver Ayrton Senna.
(17:24):
He was 34. Amy Winehouse was just 27. And the
same approach I loved in Senna is the one he
takes with Amy. It's not so uncommon now, but it
felt very new and vital to me in 2010, and
it was certainly a departure from most documentaries I had seen,
and certainly most music documentaries I had seen. This is
(17:45):
one that relies completely on archival footage to produce what
he has called quote-unquote true fiction. So he's acknowledging that
even though it's a documentary, he's of course telling a story,
there is a narrative, there is a construct to this,
but It is all actual footage. It's home movies. It's
(18:07):
performance footage. It's behind-the-scenes recording.
Speaker 4 (18:10):
It's friends. It's family members. It's Amy.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
It's everyone just shooting footage that he was able to
get his hands on. And they're shooting at a time
when smartphones weren't ubiquitous, and yet he had this incredible
trove to cull together. And another choice he makes is
to let her lyrics tell the story. Literally, the lyrics
often appear on screen, handwritten, and it feels like you're
(18:33):
getting access to her innermost thoughts. You're reading her diary.
And that, of course, supports the overall confessional nature of
the music.
Speaker 6 (18:41):
She would tell me stories about Blake and this tempestuous,
extreme relationship. That first day she wrote Back to.
Speaker 4 (18:50):
Black, all the lyrics and the melody in two or
three hours.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
I have to admit, in 2006, I think it was
when she broke out with the Back to Black album,
I didn't get the Amy Winehouse phenomenon, but I also
didn't devote any energy to trying to get it. It
was just sort of popular music. I heard the songs
on the radio. I could appreciate it as catchy, but
(19:32):
that was kind of it. I don't know about you, Josh.
Then I watched this documentary about 10 years later, and
without anyone in the film, because there are no talking heads,
without anyone pronouncing it or contextualizing her greatness for you,
you just witness it.
Speaker 4 (19:49):
And it's undeniable.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
It's undeniable that she had and was a singular voice.
You mentioned the Rolling Stone top 70 music docs, which
I also took a look at. Vulture did a top 50.
Our friend Noel Murray wrote that piece, and he had
Amy at number 20 He said, what's most heartbreaking about
Amy is that all its previously unseen footage shows a
(20:12):
complex young woman that the public never really got to
know because it was easier both for the singer and
the tabloids to sell a simpler story of reckless self-indulgence.
And one of the feelings I came away with, and
I know others have expressed this similarly, you'll hear a
word that will often come up after people experience this film.
You come away feeling a certain complicity in.
Speaker 4 (20:33):
It all, even if, of course.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
you were never directly or even really indirectly involved in
exploiting her. You're just very aware of the narrative that
was created around her and how easy it was for
me as an individual simply to accept that. And the
documentary shatters that.
Speaker 5 (20:54):
Yeah, definitely my experience. It is, in a sense, a
cinematic shaming that is due. I think the movie does
that by showing us their there were friends and family
who stood by, if not enabled, you know, her. And
I think we are included in.
Speaker 3 (21:12):
This, Adam.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
That was my experience as well.
Speaker 5 (21:13):
Even if it was just to like laugh at a
punchline that, you know, a comedian maybe made about her
erratic behavior. I was, you know, it sounds like similar,
definitely listened to her pretty common even today, you know,
to hear her songs being played somewhere in our house.
But didn't really do a deep dive into her background
or her story until I saw this documentary. And then,
(21:37):
you know, did feel bad about not doing that, but
instead just, I guess it's not even so much that
I didn't do that, but that I did just accept
the narrative that was being presented.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
Right.
Speaker 5 (21:48):
And I think this movie, yeah, this movie rightly challenges
having a relationship like that to musical artists.
Speaker 4 (21:56):
That's a good word.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
It challenges that because You see the footage of Jay
Leno or whatever making cracks on The Tonight Show. I
don't think Jay Leno is responsible for Amy Winehouse's death.
I don't think the movie is suggesting that. And I
can't even say that I laughed at any of those
jokes when or if I saw them, but the acceptance
of them. And the acceptance of them to an extent
that they were just harmless rather than seeing them as
(22:21):
part of this larger narrative and the destructiveness of that,
that's something the movie definitely made me realize.
Speaker 5 (22:30):
All right, number three, I have Summer of Soul. And
I don't think I'm going to spend a lot of
time on this one. We've talked about it quite a
bit on the show. It actually made, I had forgotten
this until I looked it up, but it made all
four of our 2021 top 10 lists. That was a
year-end show we did with Michael Phillips and Dana Stevens.
And before that, we had previously given it a full
review on the show as well. So in case you
(22:55):
hadn't heard any of those conversations and aren't familiar, briefly,
This is Musician Questlove's rescue project, really, is how I
describe it. It's a compiling of footage from the Harlem
Cultural Festival of 1969 that had sat largely unseen for
50 years.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
So this is who we're talking about here.
Speaker 5 (23:13):
Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, Gladys
Knight and the Pips, Mahalia Jackson, B.B. King, The Fifth Dimension,
Pop Staples and the Staples Singers, And that includes a
very young Mavis Staples. As a matter of fact, there
was more talk about this at our wrap party for
Best Music Moment. I know I had Mavis and Mahalia
singing together for my pick. So the footage is great, obviously.
(23:37):
But what really makes Summer of Soul distinct that I
want to emphasize are the contemporary interviews, yes, with some
of the artists. But how about those ones with regular
folks who Questlove tracked down, who remember attending Mavis? the
festival when they were younger. And this is one of them,
Musa Jackson, who went to the fest as a child.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
I was a little kid.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
I remember being with my family, walking around the park,
and as far as I could see, it was just
Black people. This was the first time I'd ever seen
so many of us.
Speaker 6 (24:17):
It was incredible.
Speaker 5 (24:19):
There are other interviews that are incredibly moving in this way,
and they just work as beautiful companion pieces to the
brilliant music. So Summer of Soul I've got at number three.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
Yeah, I like that fifth dimension clip as well, just
because I remember spending a fair amount of time during
our review on the redemption of that band being one
of the really fun, moving storylines from Summer of Soul,
and making connections here with other topics we're discussing. This
is the second appearance of Questlove so far on your list.
(24:55):
He pops up in the Jesus Walks performance in Block Party,
and Mavis Staples appearing as well, quite memorably, in The
Last Waltz. My number three music documentary is, well, I'll
not attempt to imitate the central figure, and I'll just
give you my favorite exchange, my favorite bit of dialogue
(25:19):
from that artist in this film.
Speaker 4 (25:21):
Are you going to see the concert tonight? Are you
going to hear it?
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
You hear it and see it and it's going to
happen fast and you're not going to get it all.
And you might even hear the wrong words, you know?
And then afterwards, I won't be able to talk to
you afterwards. I got nothing to say about these songs
I write. I mean, I just write them. I don't
have to say anything about them. I don't write for
any reason. There's no great message. I mean, if you
want to tell other people that, go ahead and tell them,
but I'm not going to have to answer to that.
(25:45):
That's the infamous Bob Dylan exchange with a Time Magazine
reporter in D.A. Pennebaker's seminal 1967 artist on tour documentary,
Don't Look Back. Pennebaker followed Dylan to England. He was
touring the country in 1965, and we get sort of
(26:07):
fly-on-the-wall footage. I'll talk more about that in a second.
We get scenes of Dylan with the media interacting with
occasionally with fans, maybe more at a distance. Definitely a
lot of interactions with his honorage, including Joan Baez, who
he was in a relationship with at the time.
Speaker 4 (26:26):
And the importance or.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
The significance of this film, it's significant as a film
and as a documentary of this artist and kind of
setting a template for other films like it that would follow.
But the relevance is heightened with the benefit of hindsight.
It's this 1965 tour. By the time the movie's released,
this all happens basically right after the tour ends, Dylan
decides to go electric. In 1966, the folk protest icon
(26:53):
sells his soul. In 66, he plays three electric songs
at the Newport Folk Festival. And then about 10 months later,
after releasing Blonde on Blonde, that's when he gets called
a Judas by an angry fan in Manchester, England. because
he's playing an electric set, an all electric set. And Josh,
(27:14):
of course, who is he playing that electric set with? Well,
now you've seen The Last Waltz and you know that
that band was the band, though at the time they
were called the Hawks because they had just come off
the road from playing with Ronnie Hawkins. That iconoclastic impulse
in the Manchester scene, in going electric, in the dialogue
(27:36):
I shared, that impulse to challenge expectations, but not just
challenge them, to make us question what's really driving those expectations.
Why do we need to put Dylan or any artist
on this mantle and just hope they'll stay put and
deliver what we think we need from them? It's really
(27:58):
at the heart of Dylan's entire career in music and
at the heart of this film. And why I love
that exchange for the easy it would have been for Dylan,
maybe not easy for him because it's so fundamentally not
who he is, but how easy it would be for
most of us to get caught up in that, to
(28:20):
play into the image that others have built for you,
embrace the adulation and the grandiosity of being this folk
Messiah label. And it really wouldn't have even been that hard.
Like he wouldn't have had to be overly eloquent to
and constantly state his message in interviews. He just could
have kind of sat back and let others impose it
(28:43):
on him and just not denied it. And of course,
he can't help himself. He has to deny it. He
says emphatically, I got nothing to say about these songs
I write. I mean, I just write them. I don't
have anything to say about them. I don't write for
any reason. He's basically saying, I owe you nothing.
Speaker 4 (29:00):
And I believe him. I agree with him.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
I didn't see this documentary until I think 2006 as
part of a film spotting marathon. And it It really
did completely alter the way I think about artists and
my own desire to put them in a box or
demand of them who or what I think that they
should be. I also think that Pennebaker realized something about Dylan,
(29:23):
something that Dylan himself realized, which is the more famous
he got, this whole notion of celebrity is just an
absurd dance.
Speaker 4 (29:32):
It's all artifice.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
It's all performance, just as much, if not more, than
the performance happening on the stage. And you've got Pennebaker,
who's coming out of this fly-on-the-wall school of documentary. Except here,
he's making no attempts to work invisibly. He's showing you
the strings a little bit. This isn't a case of
capturing Dylan in these really private, reflective moments. No, he's
(29:56):
going to make you aware of the camera. It's going
to be noticeable. It's going to be crammed into confined
spaces and jiggling about like in the back of a
car one night after Dylan comes off the stage and
he's in there with his manager, Albert Grossman, and other
members of his entourage. And he gets a little focused
(30:17):
on a certain word that's being thrown around about him.
Speaker 4 (30:21):
They've started calling you an anarchist.
Speaker 5 (30:23):
Who?
Speaker 4 (30:23):
Papers, that's the word now.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
Anarchist.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
No problem.
Speaker 3 (30:27):
You're kidding.
Speaker 4 (30:28):
Which papers did you see there?
Speaker 5 (30:29):
Oh, two or three.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
An anarchist.
Speaker 4 (30:33):
Just because you don't offer any solution.
Speaker 5 (30:35):
You're kidding.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
Of course.
Speaker 5 (30:44):
An anarchist.
Speaker 3 (30:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (30:45):
Give me a cigarette.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Give the anarchist a cigarette.
Speaker 1 (30:48):
Dylan kind of can't let it go, but not because
I think at all that he's offended by it or
takes it seriously. He's amused more than anything at this criticism,
if you will, and I think he's really amused by
the word choice, the way a great writer might. I
love how it just lingers with him throughout that entire scene.
You see the cuts, and you know that he's coming
(31:11):
back to it over some period of time, but what
you get with that film is a certain... inscrutability. And
this goes back to what you were saying about U2.
I don't think they're reflecting it quite the way Dylan is,
but that, that inability or that lack of desire to
explain themselves to other people and to let the music
(31:32):
stand for itself.
Speaker 4 (31:34):
That's, that's really what Dylan does here.
Speaker 5 (31:37):
So Bob Dylan also popping up a lot on this show.
I mean, he's in rattle and hum and of course
the last waltz too.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
That's right. All right.
Speaker 5 (31:45):
So number two, A little unusual because it's actually a
recent documentary. It came out in 2018, but it chronicles
a 1972 performance. This is Aretha Franklin over two days
making the live recording of her gospel album, Amazing Grace.
This was done at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church
in Watts. So the album itself, you know, made at
(32:08):
the height of her mainstream popularity, it returned her to
her church roots and ended up being her best-selling release.
The film shares the album's title, Amazing Grace, and it
features not only Aretha, but also gospel legend, Reverend James Cleveland,
sort of the conductor of the events. And she's got
the Southern California Community Choir as backup. There's even a
(32:31):
sermon from Aretha Franklin's father, Reverend C.L. Franklin, which adds
some familial sweetness, but also a little tension to the
proceedings because you have this sense of I don't know.
I don't want to interpret what it is, but you
definitely sense there's a lot there between them, even as
they're happy to be in this space together. And then,
of course, there are the audience slash church members who
(32:53):
are in the pews. Now, the nice thing, usually, Adam,
about having my own website where I still write reviews, larsonandfilm.com,
serves as a handy archive for these top five lists, right?
I often go back, see what I wrote about a movie,
take some notes there, and bring those into our picks.
So I thought, this will be great. Searched for Amazing Grace.
(33:15):
This is all I found. Holy Moses, no need to
desecrate this with any more words.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
So I was silenced.
Speaker 4 (33:22):
You copped out. You copped out as a critic.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
No, I was silenced by Amazing Grace.
Speaker 5 (33:28):
I had no more. I did not want to desecrate
this thing with words. So I'm going to lean on others'
words here.
Speaker 4 (33:34):
I get it.
Speaker 5 (33:34):
Critic Odie Henderson, he had a four out of four
star review. Over at RogerEbert.com on this one, he said,
this film is a powerful love letter to the black church,
offering a soul-shaking introduction for the unfamiliar and a grandmotherly
yank of the arm for those who know. It drags
you from the theater straight into the pews.
Speaker 4 (33:52):
I love that.
Speaker 5 (33:53):
Here's some more praise for the movie that came from listeners.
I put out on social media, you know, what's your
favorite music doc?
Speaker 2 (33:59):
The one.
Speaker 5 (34:00):
You have to just choose one. Which one are you
going with? Kevin McLenathan over on Blue Sky. Yes, yes,
I am on Blue Sky.
Speaker 2 (34:07):
Look at you.
Speaker 5 (34:08):
Kevin said this, haven't seen as many as I should,
but 2018's Amazing Grace got to me in a way
that no other live music doc has. A big reason
might be the shots of the audience. They're not just spectators,
they're participants, and they're participating in more than just an
Aretha Franklin event.
Speaker 2 (34:25):
And one more.
Speaker 5 (34:26):
Here from Twitter slash X, Carl Friedhoff picked Amazing Grace.
Aretha at her height, a fantastic backing choir, and a
rapt audience. So now why the delay? Why, you know,
this was 72. Why did we not get it until 2018? Well,
there was a technical error at the time with the footage.
(34:46):
I should note this was shot by a crew led
by director Sidney Pollack. And so that made it impossible
to sync with the sound. Kind of a problem for
something like this. Then there were legal hurdles for many
years while the tech was being fixed. Eventually, you know,
that all came together so that This saw the light
of day. Amazing Grace, a belated treasure, but a treasure
(35:07):
for sure.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
I looked at Letterboxd, and I don't have this logged,
and yet I know I have seen this movie, or
at least most of this movie, back around awards season.
I know that I checked it out because everyone was
raving about it, and rightfully, for all the reasons you mentioned,
maybe I owe Aretha a full watch here at some point, Josh.
(35:29):
I already said my number one. It's The Last Waltz.
So I'm going to spoil things a little bit by
giving you my number two, which I know is also
your number one. A perfect culmination for this episode. We're
going to talk about the film that largely inspired us
to do the top five. Yes, Jonathan Demme's Stop Making
(35:50):
Sense is back in theaters, coming back to theaters thanks
to A24. Can't wait to go see this, including with
my daughter Sophie.
Speaker 5 (35:59):
What a.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
thrill.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
How incredible is it to be able to say, I
saw Stop Making Sense for the first time on the
big screen? I know there are people listening who actually
did see it for the first time on the big
screen in 1984. I was not one of those people.
To now have a chance for people to see it
for the first time or to revisit it, as in
our case, Josh, it's something that I am incredibly excited for.
(36:23):
And maybe we can help get others excited as well.
There's a Jonathan Demme quote about Stop Making Sense. I
think I referenced back when we talked about it during
that 8 from 84 review. He said something about shooting
live music. This probably isn't true, but I think this
is the purest form of filmmaking. There are these artists
(36:43):
doing that, and we're here to team up with that
and capture that in the way that best suits the
music being played. No pun intended there on the suits,
I'm sure, from Jonathan Demme. Now, if you'd never seen
Stop Making Sense or maybe didn't know a lot about
the band or Jonathan Demme, you might be inclined to
hear that quote and think that the director is saying,
(37:04):
it's my job as a filmmaker just to capture that.
They're amazing artists. They're performing. I'll render that as unobtrusively
as possible. I'll capture it and get out of the
way and just let talking heads be talking heads. Arguably,
that's the Scorsese approach to The Last Waltz. I mean,
the most artistic flourishes seem to come really in the
(37:25):
staged numbers of And it's hard to really discern the
directing choices, the shots and editing decisions in, I think,
the live performances themselves. But Jonathan Demme really does team up.
He comes up with a way to capture this that
best suits the music being played. It is truly an
(37:48):
artistic collaboration in its entirety, in its totality, but then
song to song.
Speaker 4 (37:54):
Think about how they.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
Present psycho killer i've talked about it before i think
my number three jonathan demi scene this is a song
ostensibly from the point of view of an alienated homicidal
man so how do we get it david burn alone
on stage guitar and boombox deliriously.
Speaker 4 (38:15):
Deranged hi i got a tape i want to play.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
This lonely man, so lonely that for the first minute
of that performance, you're not even sure as a viewer
that there are really people in the audience. This is
like a performance that could be taking place only in
his demented mind. He's eventually then joined one by one
by the rest of the band, and then it culminates
like The Last Waltz. It culminates in this joyous celebration
(38:50):
of community. We see it in a number like Making
Flippy Foppy, where Demi showcases the entire stage groups of performers.
And there's scarcely a shot of an individual to be
found in that number. It's all just so intentional. And
on top of it, the music is incredible as well.
Speaker 5 (39:20):
To your point about Demi, and yes, this stopped Making sense.
My number one to your point about Demi's presence here
as a director, you know, looking up what I wrote
when I reviewed it, I said, while a strong pair
of directorial hands can be a good thing, not getting
in the way requires a certain artfulness as well. And
I think that's exactly the balance that Demi strikes.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
This is one, Adam, if.
Speaker 5 (39:42):
People are going to theaters to see it I hope
we can take some credit for it because we've been
talking a ton about this this movie I mean we
mentioned some of these but we did it as part
of our 8 from 84 series that was in 2020
we did in 2017 our top 5 films of 84
you had it at number 3 I had it at
number 2 and then it showed up on both of
(40:04):
our top 5 Jonathan Demi moments lists when we honored
the director after his passing that was 2017 so I
If listeners want more on this movie, they can go
to any of those conversations. Interestingly, I think of this
as Demi, going back to what you were just talking about,
Demi establishing David Byrne as the auteur. And not just,
(40:25):
you know, this inspired composer of these really manic but
also melodic new wave pop songs, but an inventive installation artist.
And I think a stage presence you can only call alarming.
And perhaps that's, you know, never more so than when
he dons that big suit for Girlfriend is Better. So
(40:59):
you've heard enough from me in recent years on Stop
Making Sense. I'm going to give one more thought from
Criterion curator Ashley Clark. Ashley wrote about this. after seeing
it recently and it's re-released. So he's one of those
folks who went and checked it out on Twitter slash X.
Ashley is underscore Ash underscore Clark. I've seen Stop Making
Sense a million times, but never on a screen as
(41:21):
big as the Bam Brooklyn Harvey. It's no newsflash to
call it one of the best concert films ever made,
but in all its lavish drama and escalating tension, writ
so large, you can remove that concert qualifier. So yeah,
obviously I agree. This thing just breaks the boundaries. of
the music documentary in many ways. At the same time,
(41:42):
it's the best one I've ever seen. So it's my
number one.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
Those are our top five music documentaries. I know I've
got a few honorable mentions. I'll set you up with
a couple of picks from listeners. Josh Jarrett in Astoria,
New York City wrote in and said, this is GWAR.
I loved this documentary. It made me weep uncontrollably, which
is probably why I loved it. If you're a GWAR fan,
and Josh, I know you are, you probably already saw this.
(42:07):
If you're not a GWAR fan, but you're GWAR adjacent, comics, horror, wrestling, punk,
and metal, you should see this. If you're not into
any of that stuff, but you want an incredible documentary
about art and friendship, you should see this. Thank you, Jared,
for that recommendation. He says it's available on Shudder. Not
sure where else. And then we got this from Lynn Brown,
who is a sustainer for WJCT 89.9 in Jacksonville, where
(42:31):
David Luckin and Matt Shaw do a whole lot for music.
Shout out, David and Matt. My hope for your show
on music documentaries would include Standing in the Shadows of Motown,
20 Feet from Stardom, Searching for Sugar Man, and Summer
of Soul. Each documentary is an excellent representation of some
of the unsung artists who created the soundtrack of my
life and many others. All docs I've seen, all good ones,
(42:52):
of course, Summer of Soul made your list an honorable
mention for me. I also really did go for Searching
for Sugar Man when that documentary was released. What about you, Josh?
Speaker 4 (43:01):
Any other titles that you want to sneak in?
Speaker 5 (43:03):
Yeah, I'll hit you with three quick ones, all recent ones.
But Beyonce's Homecoming, you know, watching that on Netflix, that's
pretty much why I was convinced we had to put
out the cash and catch her Renaissance tour this summer.
Miss Sharon Jones is from 2015, a documentary from Barbara
Koppel about the career and the cancer struggles of the
(43:24):
now late soul singer. And speaking of Jonathan Demme, a
nice chaser for Stop Making Sense. When you get home,
check out his 2016 doc, Justin Timberlake. and the Tennessee Kids.
Quite good.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
I love this genre, so indulge me here for a
second with a few titles. The Decline of Western Civilization
Part II, The Metal Years, came out in 1988, and
I'm happy to see, in looking at a lot of lists,
ranks quite highly, and people look back on it quite fondly.
I think appropriately so, as someone who, at the time
(43:57):
it was released, was very much trying to emulate... the
hair metal artists that were depicted in this film, despite
the fact that it's really a cautionary tale or on
some level is a cautionary tale about their excess and self-destructiveness.
Of course, I didn't get any of that when I
was a kid who wanted to grow my hair out
(44:18):
and wear makeup like them, but I do recommend that film. Scorsese,
of course, is someone who's made some other really good
music documentaries. George Harrison, Living in the Material World, the
Bob Dylan Rolling Thunder review back in 2019. In 2005,
No Direction Home, tie it back to Dylan and the
band in The Last Waltz. In No Direction Home, that's
(44:39):
where you can see the footage of the guy yelling Judas,
that infamous Manchester show with the band then known as
the Hawks backing up Dylan. Brett Morgan, of course, has
made a couple really good ones in the past seven
to eight years in Cobain, Montage of Heck, and the
David Bowie documentary from last year, Moon Age Daydream You
(44:59):
got to talk about the measles in Gimme Shelter. I
love Todd Haynes' Velvet Underground doc that came out a
few years ago. LCD Sound Systems version, I guess, of
The Last Waltz, shut up and play the hits. And
if you haven't watched The History of the Eagles on Netflix,
I don't know what you're doing. I don't care how
you feel about the Eagles. Watch The History of the
Eagles and Metallica, Some Kind of Monster. That also is
(45:22):
a fascinating document of that group trying to record an
album while they're completely disintegrating as egos and friends within
that group. And they've got their therapist sitting there quite notoriously,
not only trying to help manage all that tension, but
also suggesting song.
Speaker 4 (45:41):
Lyrics, Josh.
Speaker 5 (45:42):
I've heard a lot of support for that one, actually.
Saw that one come up in social media quite a bit.
Speaker 4 (45:46):
It's been a beast, and it's sucked a lot of
me into it.
Speaker 1 (45:56):
Those were our top five music documentaries from September 2023.
Access to the Film Spotting Archive, just one of the
benefits of being a Film Spotting Family member, plus bonus shows,
weekly newsletter, early access to.
Speaker 4 (46:09):
Events, and more. Learn more at filmspottingfamily.com. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 3 (46:14):
This conversation can serve no purpose anymore.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
Goodbye.
Speaker 6 (46:25):
Thank you.
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