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MusicFilmWeb: See It LoudPodcast #31: Let Fury Have the Hour
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Numerous films have explored music as a form of protest, and at first glance Let Fury Have the Hour seems cut from the same cloth, with its all-star cast of politically minded artists. But not long into Antonino D’Ambrosio’s rousing documentary, it becomes clear that something both more broad and more nuanced is afoot. Very loosely based on D’Ambrosio’s book of the same name, a collection of essays about the life and legacy of Joe Strummer, Let Fury Have the Hour examines the nexus of creativity, community, and social and economic justice via a fast-m...2012-11-2930 minMusicFilmWeb: See It LoudPodcast #10 Again: Raymond Scott Revisited
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Raymond Scott
Deconstructing Dad, Stan Warnow’s music documentary about the enigmatic composer, bandleader, and inventor Raymond Scott, makes an overdue theatrical bow on Friday, July 13, at Greenwich Village indie/art house Quad Cinemas. It’s a story, and a movie, well worth getting to know, so if you missed it the first time around, here’s a rebroadcast (or whatever you call it when you repeat a podcast) of our See It Loud conversation with Warnow, recorded in 2010 as the movie was on its initial film festival run.
As the title implies, Scott...2012-07-1134 minMusicFilmWeb: See It LoudPodcast #30: Dissing in the Material World
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Martin Scorsese’s mammoth music documentary George Harrison: Living in the Material World has been widely hailed (including in these pages) for the breadth and cinematic skill with which it tackles the life of the so-called Quiet Beatle. But the bubble of approbation has been pricked by some very sharp critical sticks, variously objecting to the film as tediously long, riddled with gaps, or adulatory to the point of hagiography, simplifying and sentimentalizing a complex figure.
In a probing recent entry in his IndieWire.com column Grey Matters, music, film, and culture writer Ian Grey ta...2012-01-1137 minMusicFilmWeb: See It LoudPodcast #29b: Tony Palmer Part 2 – Lennon and Stalin
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Tony Palmer at the Sound+Vision music film festival. Photo by Tommy Weir/Cinema North West.
In this edition of See It Loud, the music documentary podcast, we continue our conversation with Tony Palmer at last week’s Sound+Vision music film festival in Sligo, Ireland.
After detailing the tangled history of his restored Leonard Cohen tour documentary Bird on a Wire in part one of our interview, the veteran British filmmaker here recounts how John Lennon launched his career as a chronicler of rock and pop, explains why he dramatized rather than do...2011-12-0130 minMusicFilmWeb: See It LoudPodcast #29a: Tony Palmer Part 1 – Travels With Leonard Cohen
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Editor’s note: With the very belated theatrical release in January of the storied 1974 Leonard Cohen tour documentary Bird on a Wire, we’re reposting our 2011 interview with the great music-film maker Tony Palmer on the doc’s tortured history and glorious rebirth.
Since film sidetracked him from an academic career in the 1960s, Tony Palmer has been responsible for some of the most incisive and acclaimed music films of the last 50 years, ranging in subject from classical giants to rock gods to opera divas to, in the monumental 1976 BBC series All You Need Is Love...2011-11-3031 minMusicFilmWeb: See It LoudPodcast #28: How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin
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In his music film How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin, the distinguished British documentarian Leslie Woodhead tackles the untold story of a generation of young Soviets’ illicit love for the Fab Four, and how that passion ripped a gaping hole in the Iron Curtain. It’s a tale of crude bootleg vinyl, homemade guitars, and befuddled apparatchiks featuring a varied cast of true Beatle believers, from a wild-eyed John Lennon worshiper to one of Vladimir Putin’s right hand men. It was also a personal journey for Woodhead, who shot the first footage of the Beatles in Liverp...2011-08-2435 minMusicFilmWeb: See It LoudPodcast #27: Kevin, or Don’t Knock the Lost Rockers
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Kevin Gant
Through the magic of podcasting, See It Loud returns to Los Angeles to talk to acclaimed feature filmmaker Jay Duplass (Baghead, Cyrus) about his new music documentary, Kevin, which screens this week at LA’s Don’t Knock the Rock film fest.
For his first nonfiction film, Duplass tracked down the musical hero of his Austin film-school days – a troubadour named Kevin Gant who won a fierce following for his cosmic, flamenco-influenced folk songs until abruptly quitting music and vanishing from the local scene in 1995. Fifteen years later, Duplass finds out what h...2011-07-2632 minMusicFilmWeb: See It LoudPodcast #26: Hole and the Monster
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Bob Forrest was the crazed frontman of indie cult band Thelonious Monster. Patty Schemel was the pounding drummer driving Hole in its heyday, and one of the few out lesbians in mainstream rock ‘n’ roll. And for a while in the 1990s, they might have topped anyone’s list of LA rock’s likeliest drug casualties. Schemel spent time as a homeless crack whore, Forrest as a homeless junkie, and a lot of people thought they were dead.
How Schemel and Forrest survived, recovered, and re-invented themselves – she is happily married, gigging, and running a dog-sittin...2011-06-1629 minMusicFilmWeb: See It LoudPodcast #25: The Beat Is the Law
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Coinciding with the reunited Pulp’s first tour in nine years, The Beat Is the Law – Fanfare for the Common People traces Jarvis Cocker and company’s long, bumpy ride to Britpop stardom against the backdrop of musical and social ferment the 1980s wrought in their hometown of Sheffield.
Due out on DVD tomorrow, Eve Wood’s documentary threads Pulp’s story with that of a decade-plus in which the northern English city was riven by industrial and economic decline and its music scene – briefly the national vogue with the experimental/electronic pop success of the Human Le...2011-05-3127 minMusicFilmWeb: See It LoudPodcast #24: Upside Down and All Around
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From the mid-’80s to the late ’90s, the sound of British indie rock was the sound of Creation Records, the buccaneering label that launched the Jesus and Mary Chain, Ride, Primal Scream, Teenage Fanclub, and a little Mancunian outfit called Oasis, among others. A dozen years after mercurial founder Alan McGee shuttered the label, audiences all over the world are reliving its tumultuous history, and re-hearing its remarkable output, in Danny O’Connor’s Upside Down: The Creation Records Story.
As candidly told by McGee and most of Creation’s key players (including Noel Gallagher...2011-04-2732 minMusicFilmWeb: See It LoudPodcast #23: Post-Austin, Player Hating
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It’s music docs back and forth on the latest edition of See It Loud as the MFW team reviews what we saw at South by Southwest and previews a highlight of the upcoming Chicago International Music & Movies Festival (CIMMFest).
First, Andy Markowitz, Dave Watson, and Cinetic Media’s Matt Dentler offer post-Austin analysis on the SXSW music doc lineup, with takes on Chicago-bound films like Outside Industry, Sound It Out, and Last Days Here; the VH1-bound Foo Fighters: Back and Forth; and more.
In part two, Andy talks to Maggie Hadleigh-West abou...2011-04-0640 minMusicFilmWeb: See It LoudPodcast #22: Everyday Sunshine
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With their genre-bending sound, furious shows, and all-out assault on musical and racial stereotypes, Fishbone has done just about everything a band could do, except become stars. Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone tells the tale of one of the great live bands of the last 30 years, an all-black outfit that emerged from LA’s early ‘80s hardcore scene with a mix of punk, funk, metal, and ska and a combustible combination of personalities that fueled off-stage turmoil to match their onstage energy.
When both the movie and the band played South by Southwest earlier this...2011-03-2930 minMusicFilmWeb: See It LoudPodcast #21: Punk Rock Parenthood
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It’s See It Loud’s first remote! Direct from Austin, Texas, MFW talks to director Andrea Blaugrund Nevins, producer Cristan Reilly, and Jim Lindberg, ex-frontman for SoCal skate-punk icons Pennywise, about The Other F Word, a South by Southwest world premiere that takes an intimate look at what happens when punk veterans like Lindberg, Flea, Everclear’s Art Alexakis, and Lars Frederiksen of Rancid and become fathers and rebelliousness morphs into responsibility.
This edition contains a couple F-bombs and candid opinions about a certain Music Doc Whore. The opening music by Los Musicos by Jose is...2011-03-1526 minMusicFilmWeb: See It LoudPodcast #20: SXSW 2011 Pregame Show
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All sonic and cinematic roads lead to Austin this week as the 25th anniversary edition of South by Southwest gets underway Friday. As the MusicFilmWeb team prepares to hit the Texas capital for a smorgasbord of music, movies, breakfast tacos, and Lone Star beer, we’re talking SXSW music docs on See It Loud.
First up, Andy Markowitz talks to South by Southwest film fest producer Janet Pierson about how she and her team went about assembling this year’s slate of more than 20 feature length music films, ranging in subject from Willie Nelson and John...2011-03-0843 minMusicFilmWeb: See It LoudPodcast #19: Straight Outta Buckinghamshire
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On this edition of See It Loud we’re kickin’ it old school with Dick Fontaine, one of the deans of British documentary and the director of the rare hip hop docs Beat This! and Bombin’.
Made for British TV in the 1980s and screening February 19 and 24 at New York’s Anthology Film Archives as part of an eight-day retrospective of Fontaine’s nearly 50-year career, Beat This! and Bombin’ respectively trace the rise of rapping, scratching, breaking, and graffiti out of the gang culture of New York’s South Bronx and explore its explosive effect on urba...2011-02-0837 minMusicFilmWeb: See It LoudPodcast #18: Troubadours
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Morgan Neville has covered a lot of ground in his music doc career, from Nat King Cole to Hank Williams to the Brill Building to Memphis soul. But never has he – or many other nonfiction filmmakers, for that matter – made such a neck-snapping swerve in subject matter between projects as with his latest work. After documenting the making of Iggy and the Stooges’ snarling 1973 album Raw Power, one of the holy relics of punk, in Search and Destroy (about which we podcasted last spring), Neville turns to the introspective, strummy Southern California sound of early ‘70s with Troubado...2011-01-1732 minMusicFilmWeb: See It LoudPodcast #17: Who Is John Scheinfeld (And Why Are We Talkin’ About Harry Nilsson with Him?)
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Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?) unravels the life and art of one of the most enigmatic pop stars of his day. Harry Nilsson was a New York kid who wound up in 1960s Los Angeles and rode omnivorous songwriting chops, a three-and-a-half octave vocal range, and a highly publicized endorsement from The Beatles to the top of the charts, then rode back down on the back of a heavy duty drinking problem and a series of self-defeating (if often artistically challenging) career moves.
By 1994, when he died of a he...2010-12-1637 minMusicFilmWeb: See It LoudPodcast #16: Good Gravy
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Wavy Gravy has been at the forefront of the American counterculture for 50 years, from the Greenwich Village Beat scene to the Merry Prankster acid tests to the muddy fields of Bethel, N.Y., where he and his cohorts from the famed Hog Farm commune fed the Woodstock masses and talked down victims of the brown acid.
Wavy’s Woodstock stage announcements made him famous, but it’s the life he’s lived in the four decades since that provide the title for Saint Misbehavin’, a new documentary about the hippie icon, former Ben & Jerry’s flavor, an...2010-12-0637 minMusicFilmWeb: See It LoudPodcast #15: Anvil After Anvil!
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The 2008 documentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil turned a has-been Canadian metal band and the middle-aged headbangers at its core, motormouth guitarist Steve “Lips” Kudlow and stoic drummer Robb Reiner, into hard rock folk heroes, persevering through Spinal Tap-ish indignities and heartbreaking obstacles in pursuit of their boyhood dreams of musical glory.
Two years on Anvil are still riding the wave launched by the movie, conceived and directed by screenwriter Sacha Gervasi (The Terminal, the new Henry’s Crime), who roadied for the band during their early ‘80s near-heyday. Following a summer tour that went consider...2010-11-2027 minMusicFilmWeb: See It LoudPodcast #14: Stephin Merritt’s Strange Powers
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Stephin Merritt might be the least likely icon in indie rock, a prodigious song stylist whose incisive, melodic, and musically off-kilter odes to love, lust, and heartbreak owe more to Tin Pan Alley than to Nirvana or the Clash (although he did write a song called “Punk Rock Love”). While his band, The Magnetic Fields, has attracted a small but rabid following, Merritt has largely avoided the spotlight, earning a reputation as dour and disdainful on those occasions when he does surface.
Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields celebrates the artist while stripping away...2010-10-1934 min