That Summer Feeling's Gonna Haunt You the Rest of Your Life in Leos Carax's Annette

ANNETTE 

(Leos Carax, 2021, France, rated R, 140 mins) 

There's absolutely no one like French filmmaker Leos Carax (not his real name), and if he didn't exist, we would have had to invent him. His singular vision is a bracing tonic in a play-it-safe movie world. It means that he's unafraid to plunge full-bore into ridiculousness, and yet his films never feel like the work of a showoff or a scatterbrain. They feel like the work of Leos Carax. 

Annette complicates that pattern by bringing collaboration into play. For his first English-language feature and full-fledged musical--music has always loomed large in his work--Carax teamed up with avant-pop duo Sparks, who cowrote both music and script. It's the Los Angeles duo's second collaborative effort of the year after Edgar Wright's The Sparks Brothers, which is clearly the work of three people, and I mean that in the best of ways, since I never sensed Wright imposing his will on Ron and Russell Mael. He arranged the parts; they provided the raw material. It's great. 

Annette opens by breaking the fourth wall as Carax, in a control booth, directs Sparks, in a studio. They launch into "So May We Start?," and then they walk out of the studio, still singing, to encounter stars Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard. The band, stars, and backup singers stroll out of the building and down the street, running into costar Simon Helberg along the way. As the song ends, the story begins. The message is clear: "This is a movie. This is not real life." 

In the movie, Cotillard plays opera singer Ann Defrasnoux and Driver plays anti-comedian Henry McHenry, a disheveled, bathrobe-clad performer. She's sleek, he's not--press dub them "The Beauty and the Bastard." Beautifully-lit scenes by DP Caroline Champetier (Holy Motors) of Henry riding his motorcycle through deserted streets at night, sometimes with Ann and sometimes without, bring Carax's Mauvais Sang to mind. Guy likes his bikes.

During a gig, Henry announces his engagement to Ann. The audience lets out a collective gasp. Carax marks the chapters of their love story with excerpts from an excitable Entertainment Tonight-like show called Showbiz News. SBN breaks the news of their wedding, followed by news of Ann's pregnancy.

Duets, like "We Love Each Other So Much," illustrate their relationship, while the backup singers from the prologue often appear to add depth and grandeur. If Cotillard and Driver aren't great singers, they're good enough, much like Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor in Moulin Rouge (soprano Catherine Trottmann lends Ann's opera performances verisimilitude).  

 

 

Then, Ann gives birth. The backup singers, dressed as hospital workers, sing through her labor. Though the couple reacts to Annette as if she were human, she's an animatronic puppet with jug ears and articulated limbs. This isn't played as Chucky-like horror, though it's certainly disquieting. 

In the midst of their bliss, damaging news about Henry starts to make the rounds, but Carax drops this subplot as quickly as he brings it up, only to move into even more disturbing territory as Henry makes a chilling confession on stage that turns the entire audience against him. They express their displeasure in song; he responds in kind. The confession predicts the cataclysmic events to come, though Carax never returns to the accusations against Henry, making me wonder why he brought them up in the first place (Carax suggests that Ann, while half-asleep in her limousine, dreamt up the whole thing).  

Annette, meanwhile, grows from a baby into a toddler as her parents' marriage hits the skids. When they take an ocean voyage in an attempt to reconnect, Carax plays with allusions to Pinocchio and Wuthering Heights. The whale-shaped lamp in Annette's room, for instance, may simply have been intended to lend nautical flair to her surroundings, but the combination of wooden child and whale imagery brings Disney's majestic Pinocchio to mind. Similarly, Annette is about to enter the belly of the beast. 

Bad things continue to happen. Either Henry doesn't know how to be happy, he isn't happy, or he isn't quite right in the head. All three things can be true. Since his 1984 debut, Boy Meets Girl (starring cinematic alter ego Denis Lavant), Carax's films tend to follow a similar trajectory: men and women fall in love only to find that they're bad for each other. He splits the difference between romance and nihilism. 

As she grows older, Annette takes after her mother in revealing a gift for song. Talking will come later. This brings her into contact with Ann's accompanist (Florence Foster Jenkins' Helberg) who has become a conductor. The love story then gives way to a new narrative suffused with jealousy, exploitation, and transference. Though I expected the relationship between Ann and Henry to form the heart of the film, the title explains all: the deeper story involves Henry and Annette, though the moments between the Conductor and the girl prove more affecting than those between the girl and her father for reasons that go beyond musical affinities.

As Annette's red hair grows longer, Henry's shrinks and takes on a silver cast until he ends up looking like an elongated Leos Carax. I suspect it isn't completely coincidental, since Carax had a daughter with Russian-French actress Yekaterina Golubeva (Carax's Herman Melville adaptation Pola X), who died under mysterious circumstances in 2011. An end credit confirms my theory that Sparks' screenplay holds personal resonance: "Pour Nastya," the name of their now-adult daughter. 

For all of its visual beauty and musical effervescence, Annette is one of the most downbeat musicals I've ever seen. If the conclusion lets in a little light, unlike Lars von Trier's ultra-gloomy Dancer in the Dark, it's still the story of a damaged person who can't resist dragging everyone he cares about down with him. As ever, though, Carax is no fool, and the sequence that plays over the end credits brings things back to the beginning: "This is a movie. This is not real life"--except it's hard to shake the feeling that it kinda, sorta is--or could've been if Carax didn't get his demons under control.  

Annette opens on Friday, August 6, at the Crest in Seattle and Lincoln Square Cinemas in Bellevue. It comes to Amazon Prime on August 20. Images: Henry from Artforum, Sparks from Polygon (Anna Webber/Focus Features), Ann from Amazon Studios, Caroline Champetier shooting Annette from AFC (Kris Dewitte / Facts of Emotions), and cast still from Sony Music.  

The Sugarhill Gang Wants Their Name Back in Roger Paradiso's 2011 Documentary

This review originally appeared on The Stranger's Line Out music blog, which disappeared several years ago. I recovered it via The Wayback Machine.

FILMThe Sugarhill Gang Wants Their Name Back

posted by KATHY FENNESSY on THU, JUL 19, 2012 at 9:40 AM

I WANT MY NAME BACK
(Roger Paradiso, US, 2011, 93 mins.)

• ROGER PARADISO
• The Gang today

I Want My Name Back isn't so much the story of the Sugarhill Gang, but the story of their lawsuit against Sugar Hill Records.

In 2005, Vanity Fair published a profile of the label (Steven Daly, "Hip-Hop Happens"). Roger Paradiso follows the template of the article for the first half of the film, but moves in a different direction once identity theft enters the picture.

He starts by introducing Wonder Mike (Michael Wright) and Master Gee (Guy O'Brien) of the Sugarhill Gang. From 1979-1984, they released three platinum albums and had a 10 million-selling hit with the 15-minute "Rapper's Delight."

Then, Paradiso profiles what he terms the Con Artists: Sylvia and Joseph "Joe" Robinson Sr., the label founders, and Morris "Moe" Levy, their silent partner. By phone, Daly discusses Robinson's R&B; career and Levy's mob connections. Subsequent signings would include Spoonie G, the Funky 4 Plus 1, and Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five (I'm not sure why he wasn't able to get Daly on camera; using a phone call in lieu of a pro recording always sounds cheap).

• SUGAR HILL RECORDS

Just as Levy would "share" songwriting credits with his artists at Roulette , he and the Robinsons—including their sons—would do the same to the Sugar Hill acts. With most of their earnings going to the label, the Gang decided to hang it up in 1984, but Joey Robinson Jr. started to pass himself off as "Master Gee" in the 1990s. Then, after Joe Sr. died and Sylvia retired, Joey Jr. and his brother, Leland, took over the label. Just when the situation couldn't get much worse, a 2002 fire consumed the Sugar Hill Studios and destroyed everything in the place.

After Sylvia copyrighted the name "the Sugarhill Gang," the members decided to reform and record an album (with Hen Dogg and DJ T. Dynasty). Big Bank Hank, unfortunately, opted to perform with Joey Jr.'s fake version of the group. Following in his mother's footsteps, Junior proceeded to trademark the names "the Sugarhill Gang," "Wonder Mike," and "Master Gee" Is this guy a piece of work or what?

With few resources at their disposal, Master Gee and Wonder Mike turned to Jay Berger from Artists Rights Enforcement Corp. to represent their interests. Once he enters the picture, this music documentary segues into a film about copyright law, which isn't a bad thing, but don't go expecting a conventional biography.

I Want My Name Back is unapologetically one-sided, and if you only want to know how the case was resolved, you can Google the results, but if you want to hear Wonder Mike and Master Gee tell their side of the story in detail, Paradiso gives them ample opportunity (other speakers include Grandmaster Caz, Melle Mell from the Furious Five, and Vinnie and Treach from Naughty by Nature). Fortunately, they come across as reliable witnesses to a despicable injustice.

I Want My Name Back plays The Northwest Film Forum (1515 12th Ave) for a second and final set of screenings: tonight, July 19, at 7 and 9 pm. I'd imagine a DVD release is imminent...unless the Robinsons have anything to say about it.

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1

karma for not giving caz a dime; i'm sure he had some jewels to say.

Posted by Larry Mizell, Jr. on July 19, 2012 at 5:45 PM · Report this

2

@1 He did! He goes into detail about the rap Big Bank Hank stole, i.e. "I'm Casanova, and the rest is fly." You're not Caz--Cassanova Fly--dude!

Posted by Kathy Fennessy  on July 20, 2012 at 7:44 AM · Report this

It Was All Whirlwind, Heat, and Flash, or the Strange Saga of Zola and Stefani

ZOLA 

(Janicza Bravo, USA, 2021, 87 mins) 

Zola, which was filmed in 2018, began life six years ago as a viral thread by Twitter user @_zolarmoon before David Kushner blew it up into a Rolling Stone article later that year that fills in several blanks, debunks a few claims, and confirms, above all, that A'Ziah "Zola" King is very much a real person.

Janicza Bravo's film opens much like the thread as Zola (Taylour Paige, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom), a beautiful Black woman with long, luxuriant hair, is working a shift at a Detroit Hooters when she meets Stefani (the exceptional Riley Keough), a super-smiley white woman and her Black companion. 

Stefani, with her high ponytail and slip dress, speaks exclusively in what used to be known as "jive"--kind of like Barbara Billingsley in Airplane, but updated for the Cardi B Era. Her favorite words: "bitch," "ho," and "sis." 

Stefani shamelessly admires Zola's attributes, and asks if she dances. Zola catches her drift, and admits that she does (she even has a stripper pole in her living room). So, Zola joins her for a stripping session that night, and a partnership begins, since she's game for adventure, and Stefani is the kind of uninhibited loose cannon who makes things happen. 

Even if you haven't read the original 148-tweet thread, it's clear that Stefani, aka Jessica Rae Swiatkowski, is trouble. 

Though Zola, who narrates the saga, has a boyfriend, Stefani excites her more--not sexually, but in all other respects--so when she invites her to Tampa to make some quick stripping cash, Zola takes her up on the offer. 

This time, Stefani shows up with Derrek (Succession's Nicholas Braun), a skinny white dude, and X (Selma's commanding Colman Domingo), her Nigerian roommate. Zola finds the set-up curious, but that doesn't stop her from getting into X's SVU for a Migos-filled road trip. 

Once they get to town, the look on her face says it all. "This was a mistake." That look remains unchanged once she realizes they'll all be sharing the same motel room, but things work out as planned, at least for a while. 

Bravo pays as much attention to Zola and Stefani's bodies as any director of a stripper story would, from Steven Soderbergh's Magic Mike (which featured Keough in a non-stripper role) to Lorene Scafaria's Hustlers. 

Terms like "male gaze" and "female gaze," though, are in the eye of the beholder. Presumably, the actresses felt more comfortable working with a woman, but they're still dancing for our pleasure as much as that of the audience. That doesn't make it porn and nor does that make it exploitative, but that doesn't automatically exclude it from those descriptions either. 

If the women don't take everything off, they don't leave much to the imagination either. Zola even makes it clear that she's fine with nudity, except the Tampa club doesn't allow it (the women wear sequined pasties instead). Just when it seems as if the exposed flesh in the film will be exclusive to women, there's an entire sequence featuring nude men. Granted, Bravo doesn't sexualize them in the same way, but it restores some balance to the scenario. 

When Stefani encourages Zola to "trap," i.e. to turn tricks, she adamantly refuses, though it appears she might not have a choice, so she finds a way to turn the situation to her advantage. If that wasn't the case, I doubt Bravo would have gravitated towards the project in the first place, because it's otherwise the tale of a white woman taking a Black woman for a ride. 

If Zola puts her fate in the hands of a shady crew, she's never as mean or as stupid as any of them. Once she comes up with a plan to avoid tricking, the dynamic shifts, but she's still not out of the woods. Though they didn't kidnap her, she isn't free to leave, and it will soon become more difficult. 

Zola is an attractive film that benefits from the talents of composer Mica Levi (Under the Skin), cinematographer Ari Wegner (The Girlfriend Experience, also starring Keough), and editor Joi McMillon (Moonlight) even as it takes on more weight than an 87-minute film can comfortably handle, including female friendship, sex work, and cultural appropriation. 

If I prefer it to Bravo's directorial debut, Lemon with ex-husband Brett Gelman, it's largely because she's grown more confident in her filmmaking. She also built the previous comedy around an unbelievably boorish character, and a little went a long way. She doesn't strain so hard to be funny here, though Keough and Braun rises to the occasion as need be. 

 

In contrast with the tweet thread and Kushner's article, Zola Tells All: The Real Story behind the Greatest Stripper Saga Ever Tweeted, Bravo ends things on an ambiguous note, suggesting that exploitation by the exploited will never end. In her screenplay with Slave Play's Jeremy O. Harris, she resists turning Zola into a morality play about sex trafficking, but she doesn't provide any release either. No one is punished, and no one gets away, even though Zola witnesses a suicide attempt and a murder.

In real life, she made her escape and the murderer faced consequences, though Jessica has disputed parts of her story. At the time, she told Kushner, she was just trying to provide for her son. She now has two kids, while Zola and her boyfriend have one. Zola also served as an executive producer on the film, meaning money in the bank and a shot at further lucrative opportunities. Jessica, on the other hand, doesn't appear to have benefited in any significant way. I suspect that's exactly what Zola intended.

All images courtesy A24. Zola opens on Wednesday, June 30, at AMC Pacific Place 11, Regal Meridian, and Regal Thornton Place. VOD premiere TBA.  

Silver Screen Sex God of the '70s: David Bowie in Just a Gigolo and The Man Who Fell to Earth

JUST A GIGOLO 

(David Hemmings, West Germany, 1979, Shout! Factory, 105 mins)

 

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH 

(Nicolas Roeg, UK, 1976, The Criterion Collection, 139 mins) 

After playing a genital-free alien in his feature-film debut, Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth, David Bowie decided it was time for something sexier. He was living in Berlin at the time, working on a series of groundbreaking records with Tony Visconti and Brian Eno at Hansa Studios--Low, "Heroes," Lodger--and when he wasn't writing and recording, he and his sometime-roommate Iggy Pop were reinventing themselves by trading (or at least minimizing) their insatiable hunger for oblivion with an insatiable hunger for art and culture.

In the midst of all that activity, Bowie found time to take the lead in actor David Hemmings' directorial debut, Just a Gigolo, which takes place in Berlin in the years after World War I. In it, Bowie gradually, awkwardly segues from soldier to sex worker. The movie is many things: an almost love story, a post-war tragedy, and a satire about the rise of fascism. If it's better than its dismal reputation suggests, there's one thing it's not, and that's sexy.

To be sure, sexy is a subjective concept, but 1970s Bowie was generally considered sexy--to men, to women, and all other sentient beings--and The Man Who Fell to Earth runs on sex. It's possible Bowie was just being literal, because his flame-haired New Mexico-by-way-of-the-UK entrepreneur, Thomas Jerome Newton, may be genital-free in his alien form, but he spends the majority of the film in his non-alien form as a genitally-intact human, and we know this, because Roeg includes male full-frontal nudity (see also Donald Sutherland in 1973's Don't Look Now).

And it isn't just Bowie! In his loose adaptation of the Walter Tevis novel, Roeg introduces Dr. Bryce (Rip Torn) as a randy professor with a yen for attractive co-eds (he eventually gives it up, lest anyone worry that Roeg presents him as some kind of heroic figure). Then there's Mary-Lou (Candy Clark, Roeg's girlfriend at the time) who takes one look at Tommy and decides, "That's for me!" 

There's plenty of nudity from Torn, Clark, and a bevy of female extras, though I'm sorry to report that Buck Henry abstains, and I'm not completely joking, because his character, Oliver Farnsworth, is gay. Several scenes feature him and his partner, Trevor, but there's no indication of a sexual relationship. Though it's possible there was no need to depict one, that was also the playbook in the 1960 and '70s: few limits when it came to female nudity, straight or otherwise (especially in the unrated European features of Jess Franco and Just Jaeckin), significant limits when it came to straight male nudity, and most every limit when it came to gay male nudity. 

 

Granted, plenty of sexy movies don't feature any nudity at all, especially those made during the Production Code-era, but the 1970s was a different time. Hemmings' decision to play things safe wasn't necessarily a bad one. He may have wanted to avoid a rating that would limit his film's exposure, except Just a Gigolo was such a bomb that even an X wouldn't have made much difference (and the dreaded X didn't stop Midnight Cowboy from topping the box office in 1969). The film, in its original 147-minute version, crashed and burned at Cannes, and that was pretty much the end of that as it didn't receive the kind of promotion befitting a major motion picture starring Bowie, Marlene Dietrich (after a 16-year break), and Kim Novak (after a 10-year break) plus direction from the star of Antonioni's Blow-Up. 

The only truly sexualized characters in the film are two women with whom Bowie's Lt. Paul Ambrosius von Przygodski has relations, Cilly (future aerobics instructor Sydne Rome, the weakest cast member), a nightclub performer who becomes a Hollywood star, in a manner recalling Dietrich (who gives her final performance as Paul's boss, the Baroness), and Novak's widow, Helga, who hires Paul when she feels the need for male companionship. Sadly, Helga comes across as more desperate and silly than anything else. Even if that was Hemmings' intention, it's hard not to feel sorry for the soulful beauty of Vertigo being reduced to a quasi-punchline. Though Novak was only 40 at the time, the film suggests there's something especially tawdry about a middle-aged woman expressing a desire for sex. 

In the end, though, Just a Gigolo revolves around Bowie, and there's a certain unformed quality to Paul, since he's simply more reactive than proactive--much like Johnny Depp's in-over-his-head accountant in Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man--but it helps to explain why he doesn't come across as particularly sexy. He lacks the necessary confidence, and like Newton, but for entirely different reasons, he doesn't seem especially comfortable with his body. 

Further, he seems mystified by women, a bizarre quality in a gigolo, but it fits into the idea that sex work may represent the field that suits him best, except he's no more likely to find the perfect job any more than he's likely to find his place in Weimar-era Berlin, because he's too good to join the fascists and too weak to resist them--so the two opposing forces destroy him. As different as the two films may seem, things don't work out much better for Newton in the Roeg film. He gets out of his world alive, yet ends up utterly alone.

If one picture is held in high regard, and the other isn't, Just a Gigolo deserves a second chance to find an audience. At the very least, the costume (Mago, Ingrid Zoré) and production design (Peter Rothe) is exquisite, and at the very most, it gets a few things right that could have gone very wrong. At the outset, for instance, when Paul realizes that Eva (singer and actress Erika Pluhar), his mother's most glamorous boarder, works as a prostitute, she shrinks in his estimation. The audience already knows that he'll soon be walking in her shoes, but she's also one of the least conflicted characters in the entire film. Hemmings may judge Helga, but he doesn't judge her. Nor does he suggest that there's something especially shameful about a man who turns tricks. It's just another job. If anything, it's a step up from Paul's previous gig as a human-size beer bottle.  

The Man Who Fell to Earth may come across as the sexier film, but the sexual relationship between Newton and Mary-Lou originated with Roeg and screenwriter Paul Mayersberg and not Walter Tevis, who had depicted a platonic relationship in his 1963 novella. (In the Mayersberg interview included with The Criterion Collection edition, he reveals that he prefers later Tevis works, like The Queen's Gambit, which would become a Netflix sensation in 2020.) 

That said, Clark makes it abundantly clear, in her Criterion interview, that she hated shooting the sex scenes, of which there are many. She says Bowie did, too. Whether her relationship with Roeg made things easier or harder, I couldn't say, but it's possible Bowie welcomed the opportunity to keep his clothes on in Just a Gigolo. 

 

There's one exception, though, and it's a good one. When Paul and Cilly take advantage of her wealthy patron's mansion while he's away, the Prince (Curd Jürgens, Smiley's People) surprises them with an unannounced return. When he enters the room where Bowie is taking a bath, it's hard not to fear the worst for the pale, thin fellow in the tub, except the Prince doesn't find him the least bit threatening, and they end up having a friendly chat. 

In his dishy commentary track, assistant director Rory MacLean, who describes Hemmings as "a drinker and a womanizer," notes that there were several crew members jammed in to that small room, so kudos to all concerned, especially Bowie, because you'd never know it. The entire sequence also reinforces the idea that Cilly is just as much of a prostitute as Paul, since her interest in the Prince is purely mercenary.

All told, the '70s weren't exactly the busiest time for David Bowie's acting career, though The Man Who Fell to Earth has come to define it, and who can blame him when he released 11 stunning studio recordings between 1970 and 1979. And that's on top of world tours, magazine cover stories, television appearances, and all the other minutia involved in maintaining a rock star career. Of all the film projects with which he was involved at the time, the sexiest wasn't a narrative feature at all, but D.A. Pennebaker's 1973 documentary Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Ziggy may have been a character of a kind, but he was Bowie's sole creation, and the stage, in a manner of speaking, was his bedroom. 

In the ensuing decade, he would kick things up a few notches, starting the '80s off with Uli Edel's Christiane F, in which he cameos as himself, and ending with Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, in which he plays a scruffy Pontius Pilate opposite Willem Dafoe's glistening, decidedly non-virginal Jesus. Early on in that run came Bowie's most overtly sexual film, 1983's The Hunger, in which Tony Scott reinvented Jean Rollin's hazy vampire erotica for the multiplex (that's a compliment, by the way). From alien to gigolo to glorious goth fantasy, he had finally found the perfect fit for his not-quite-of-this-earth affect and Valentino-like sex appeal. In the end, though, the sexiest Bowie character was always Bowie himself.

Just a Gigolo on-set portrait by Christian Simonpietri, The Man Who Fell to Earth still from British Lion Films, and The Hunger still from Perspex. 

A Band Called Death: An Overdue Documentary

This preview originally appeared on The Stranger's Line Out music blog, which disappeared several years ago. I recovered it via The Wayback Machine.

Film

A Band Called Death: The Documentary

by Kathy Fennessy • May 16, 2012 at 11:49 am

• Drag City

"Ahead of punk, and ahead of their time."

--Jack White to The New York Times in 2009

If a documentary about Akron duo the Black Keys seems premature--because it is--a documentary about Detroit trio Death is long overdue.

Though most people wouldn't discover them until three decades after the fact, the band of real-deal brothers provides the missing link between the virtuosic rock & roll of Jimi Hendrix in the 1960s and the righteous hardcore of Bad Brains in the '80s. In other words, they were proto-punk, just like their Motor City brethren in the MC5 and the Stooges.

If those white players incorporated jazz and blues into the mix, Death also combined genres in a way that confused '70s listeners, which seems weird in retrospect, since Detroit's Parliament-Funkadelic could also rock up a storm—and even sang about it here—but you could dance to their material.

Death, on the other hand, were capitol-letter ROCK. Not just in the proto-punk sense, but in the Ted Nugent/Alice Cooper sense, to name a couple of one-time Detroit rockers (a gig by the latter, in the wake of Love It to Death, served as a major source of inspiration). It's also worth noting that singer/bassist Bobby Hackney recalls Phil Lynott—a Thin Lizzy/Death tour would've torn shit up good.

Now, almost 40 years after they recorded their first singles, Bobby and Dannis Hackney return in A Band Called Death. In 2009, Drag City issued the singles as ...For the Whole World to See. Buy it! It's essential...especially if Chains and Black Exhaust ranks among your favorite compilations. Since then, they've started gigging again, including a stop at 2011's SXSW. Sadly, founder David Hackney missed all the delayed recognition: he succumbed to cancer in 2000 at the age of 36.

Alas, not everyone shares my affection for the group (the trailer came to my attention via Dirtbombs front man Mick Collins' Twitter feed). In this Line Out thread, a commenter claims that they were "fashionably co-opted, overrated bullshit. Nobody really listens to these guys; they just love to make sure you know that they know." Line Out contributor Derek Erdman agreed; Travis Ritter did not. I haven't picked up the second Death collection, but the first made my 2009 top 10. It sounds just as good today.

The premiere of Jeff Howlett and Mark Covino's A Band Called Death takes place at LA Film Fest (June 14-24). Photo credit: By Death - Original publication: Publicity photo / Immediate source: www.vancouversun.com, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50569349.

Don't Drink, Don't Smoke, What Do You Do? Punk the Capital Looks Back at the DC Scene

PUNK THE CAPITAL: BUILDING A SOUND MOVEMENT

(James June Schneider and Paul Bishow, US, 2020, 88 minutes) 

"We dared to suck. In other words, we weren't afraid to be horrible."

--Randy Austin (Overkill) 

The DC punk scene (1976-1984) takes the spotlight in James June Schneider and Paul Bishow's long-gestating, crowd-funded documentary. 

To Patricia Ragan (Punk), "DC was just such an empty pit of misery. It was such a small community, I didn't see anything good coming out of it," but a scene coalesced in the 1970s, giving rise to bands like Overkill and the Slickee Boys. And it wasn't the only scene, since Go-Go, which emerged in the 1960s, was also making waves. As Jeff Nelson (Teen Idles, Dischord) puts it, "When you're working in isolation, sometimes you come up with the best stuff." When Bad Brains emerged, they tore the whole thing wide open. 

As guitarist Darryl Jennifer explains, the band heard the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, and decided they wanted to do something similar--except faster. 

To Kim Kane (the Slickee Boys), "They made the Ramones seem like they were asleep." Archival footage doesn't just show them racing through "At the Movies" (among other songs), but singer H.R., sporting a sharp grey suit, concludes by executing a perfect backflip--without his dreads, he looks a lot like Jean-Michel Basquiat. 

Ian MacKaye (Teen Idles, Dischord) credits Bad Brains with the promotion of Positive Mental Attitude, aka PMA, a concept alleged conman Napoleon Hill introduced in his 1937 best seller Think and Grow Rich. If one thing set the DC punks of the 1970s apart from most others, like their UK counterparts, it was their embrace of positivity over negativity, though the scene would grow more aggressive as punk gave way to hardcore in the 1980s. 

That isn't to say they were all about peace and love. Nelson caught MacKaye's attention by setting homemade explosions off on the school grounds, while MacKaye and Henry Rollins bonded over skateboarding and Hendrix. The three would form Teen Idles before moving on to other outfits, like SOA and Minor Threat. Not mentioned: Calvin Johnson was part of the same crowd, even if he's most closely associated with an Olympia-based band (Beat Happening), label (K Records), and radio station (KAOS). 

Like many scenes, the DC iteration coalesced around sympathetic organizations, such as Yesterday and Today Records, a music store that employed several punk musicians, and Madams Organ (R.I.P.), an art collective and group house, where Bad Brains lived for a time and wrote "Banned in DC." The latter also served as a gathering place for Yippies, meaning longhairs, no-hairs, drug users, and straight-edge kids mixing and comingling--and not always happily.  

The 1,200-capacity 9:30 Club debuted in 1980, just prior to the departure of Jimmy Carter and the arrival of Ronald Reagan. Naturally, the music grew harder and louder, but that's also the point at which Bad Brains moved to New York and Rollins traded SOA for Black Flag. That could have been that, except there were plenty of other bands, many of whom would find themselves on Dischord Records, home of the compilation Flex Your Head, the Faith/Void split, and Minor Threat's genre-defining Out of Step.

Instead of splintering, the scene blew up, making fans across the world, including Jello Biafro (Dead Kennedys) in the Bay Area, Tim Kerr (Big Boys) in Austin, and musician-turned-politician Joe "Shithead" Keithley (DOA) in Vancouver, all of whom appear in the film. 

The MacKaye-associated concept of straight edge--"Don't drink, don't smoke, don't fuck"--also caught on. Whether Minor Threat fans knew it or not, the lyrics to "Out of Step" were contentious even within the band, since Nelson felt that the lack of the word "I," as in "I don't drink," made it sound as if MacKaye was issuing orders rather than explaining a philosophy.  

As hardcore grew in popularity, audiences became whiter and less tolerant. Participants who leaned towards the egalitarian end of the spectrum got out while the getting was good. It's outside the purview of the film, but the transition laid the groundwork for riot grrrl, which stood in opposition to most everything hardcore's more extreme proponents represented. 

Schneider and Bishow spent 15 years assembling their film's interviews, photos, posters, and Super-8 performance material (much of it shot by Jeff Krulik of Heavy Metal Parking Lot fame). There are several women speakers, like graphic designer Cynthia Connolly (Dischord), though most were behind-the-scenes players rather than performers. It's a subject they could have explored in more depth, though the the overwhelmingly male--downright homoerotic--nature of hardcore merits some rather humorous attention in Don Letts's Punk: Attitude (2005), which features footage Bishow shot in DC. In fact, they wouldn't make for a bad double bill. 

The documentary ends in 1984, so don't expect any mention of Unrest, Fugazi, or Pussy Galore (a band that also relocated to NYC), though Ian Svenonius (the Make-Up) makes a brief appearance--and Half Japanese appears in archival footage. It's a matter of personal taste, but for me, that's when things really got interesting, strictly from a musical perspective. 

Endnote: For a list of virtual and in-person screenings, please click here. The list includes Seattle's Grand Illusion Cinema, starting on May 21. Much like the DC punk scene, the Grand Illusion is a DIY affair, and they've stuck around through thoughtful, wide-ranging material programmed, promoted, and projected by people who are in it for the love of movies, not money.

Photo credits: H.R. by James June Schneider, Slickee Boys and Out of Step album cover (designed by Cynthia Connolly) from Discogs, Teen Idles from Still Got It, and Connolly (Erik Gibson) from Arlington Magazine.

Flash Gordon Stands for Every One of Us

FLASH GORDON

(Mike Hodges, 1980, rated PG, USA, 111 minutes) 

Once upon a time, comic book movies weren't always such serious affairs. 

Granted, there have been exceptions along the way, like Taika Waititi's superhero buddy comedy Thor: Ragnarok, but far too many have been suffused, both visually and thematically, with sturm und drang. It isn't the worst thing in the world. Christopher Nolan's Batman entries have their charms as dark-hued quasi-political intrigues, but he aims to make his characters as believable as possible, which is fine as far as it goes, but it can be fun to watch fictional figures who aren't exactly psychologically complex do stupid shit purely for our entertainment. And that's the gist of Mike Hodges' Flash Gordon, out now in a 4K Collector's Edition overflowing with extras from Arrow Video.   

In this brightly-colored bauble, Flash isn't a hero because he's smarter or stronger than everyone else. As Hodges notes in his excellent commentary track (one of three, including Brian Blessed's boisterous contribution), "He's a bit thick, actually." Indeed, he's dumb in a likeable, surfer-dude way, and he gets into trouble precisely because he's an idiot, but his upbeat attitude operates as a kind of super-strength. He believes he can extricate himself from every situation, and so he does. The power of positive thinking! 

Hodges introduces Flash as a musclebound lunkhead who wears his name emblazoned on his chest, not because he's a superhero, but because he might forget it otherwise. This is the first sign that Hodges (Get Carter, Pulp) knows that he's engaged in a very silly enterprise, so instead of classing it up or attempting to make some kind of larger point, he leans into the ridiculousness of it all. 

Flash, like Marine-turned-actor Sam J. Jones, is a professional football player. There's a key difference, though. Hodges' Flash is a quarterback for the New York Jets, while Jones didn't make the cut when he moved to Seattle, post-military career, to try out for the Seahawks, but he did end up playing for their semi-pro practice team, the Flyers, in 1976.  

For some reason that I've already forgotten, the bleached-blond bumpkin ends up on a charter plane with the spunky Dale Arden (Melody Anderson in her big-screen debut). When Ming the Merciless (Max von Sydow in expectedly fine form) creates a storm on Earth in order to fuck with our dull, faded planet and its free-thinking inhabitants--fascism alert--the pilots are sucked out of the cockpit. Or that appears to be the case. One minute, they're there; the next minute they're gone. The script from Seattle author Maria Semple's father, Lorenzo Semple Jr. (The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor), often feels as if it were written by a hyper-intelligent toddler with a short attention span. That's a compliment, by the way.

When Flash crash-lands the plane into the laboratory of discredited scientist Dr. Zarkov (Fiddler on the Roof's Topol), he tricks them into entering his homemade rocketship by telling Flash it's a phone booth he can use to call for help. I mean, this guy is a total rube! After Zarkov follows them into the vessel in an attempt to kidnap or kill them--I was never quite sure of his intentions, but they did destroy his workplace--Flash accidentally activates the ignition, and off they head into a series of space adventures. 

Once the trio arrives on Ming's red planet, Mongo, the plot mechanics click into place. For all the fights and other action set-pieces, including a loopy football game and a death-defying duel atop a spike-filled platform, Hodges has melodrama in mind. If Star Wars, which had appeared three years before, was a western in space, Flash Gordon is a SPACE OPERA filled with elaborate costumes, creative in-camera effects, and a hard-rock score from Queen that opens and closes the thing with a blistering bang. 

From the opening sequence, Hodges sets up the expectation that romance will bloom between Flash and Dale, but first they'll have to fend off the advances of the merciless Ming and his slinky daughter, Aura (Russian-Italian actress Ornella Muti), once the former sets his sights on Dale and the latter sets hers on Flash. It's worth noting at this point that Aura's diminutive sidekick (played by the great Deep Roy) is named Fellini, a nod, perhaps, to all of the Italian talent behind the British-based scenes.  

The rest of the film revolves around the attempts of two entitled people to make mates out of their two powerless captives. As Ming would have it, "I like to play with things awhile before annihilation." His play includes rape, which Dale foils by switching outfits with a slave girl just before Ming tries to have his way with her, but Hodges makes sure to let us know that Ming needs a little help in the bedroom department. As Aura, who knows more about her father's sex life than a daughter should, enlightens Dale, "My father always drinks a power potion before he makes love."  

Beyond Dale's intelligence and Flash's relentlessness, Ming's complicating factors include Zarkov, who undergoes a brainwashing process in a brilliant montage sequence incorporating every major event from his past, and Prince Barin (Timothy Dalton), Aura's dashing suitor, who hails from a green planet where everyone dresses like Robin Hood. Not to give too much away, but Flash's aw-shucks charm wins these antagonists, and most others, over to his side in order to defeat Ming who intends to turn Dale into a baby-making machine, wipe out most of the Earth's population, enslave the survivors, and install his human-alien spawn to run the place. Whew.  

And that's the gist of the thing, which might be enough, except Hodges stacks the deck with scene-stealing supporting players Brian Blessed as barrel-chested Hawkman Vultan, Peter Wyngarde as Eyes Wide Shut-like henchman Klytus (Wyngarde expressed displeasure that he never got to reveal his famous face), Richard O'Brien (The Rocky Horror Picture Show) as a young Arborian, and John Osborne (Look Back in Anger) as an Arborian priest. Robbie Coltrane also makes a brief appearance in the prologue. Hodges didn't seem to care that few of these fellows would be recognizable to American viewers. Producer Dino De Laurentiis gave him a surprisingly free hand, and it shows. 

In Hodges' commentary track, which dates back to 2010, he admits that Flash Gordon is "crude by contemporary standards," but found it "incredibly fun to do," adding, "Dino De Laurentiis really thought it was a serious film, which I found puzzling." In the end, it was, as he puts it, "a soufflé" and "a tongue-in-cheek film." And that's the best way to look at it, though he was as serious as a heart attack about the evils of fascism. It's exemplified in the plot and the dialogue ("Hail, Ming!") as much as in the red and gold Mongo costumes which draw from Chinese, Russian, and German military fashion during their most repressive regimes--with a shiny, black S&M twist. 

If Flash Gordon isn't considered a great film, even by the people who made it, it could have been a very different one. Next to Hodges' commentary track, the most fascinating extra centers on the efforts of original director Nicolas Roeg to get the project off the ground. In light of his famously wiggy adaptation of Walter Tevis's The Man Who Fell to Earth, Roeg's version probably would've been slower, stranger, and a lot less goofy. It might also have been better, but we'll never know for sure. 

 

De Laurentiis didn't like the way things were going, so he fired everyone involved, except for cowriter Michael Allin (Enter the Dragon, Truck Turner), a close friend and collaborator of Roeg's who felt guilty for staying, but probably found the paycheck fairly irresistible--and who can blame him. 

Allin dismisses the film now, not simply because he feels it doesn't represent his best work, but because he believes De Laurentiis treated Roeg disrespectfully. Oddly enough, though, it wasn't either director's idea to bring Queen on board. Hodges credits De Laurentiis for that winning move. Although Flash Gordon didn't represent my introduction to a band that had already been kicking around for a decade by the time of the film's release, it led me to pick up their Greatest Hits, and I've been a fan ever since.  

Aside from Queen's chart-topping release, 1980 marked the arrival of box office champ The Empire Strikes Back, the first of innumerable Star Wars sequels and spinoffs. In Hodges' space opera, which would see release almost seven months later, the movie ends after Flash saves the universe. But then. A brief epilogue suggests that Ming might not be as dead as he seems. De Laurentiis was certain he had a George Lucas-like franchise on his hands, but the box office returns weren't robust enough to justify the expense. Plus, he would've had to find another director. Hodges had his fun, but he was ready to move on.

 

The director went on to make four features between 1983 and 1989 that didn't exactly set the world on fire, before scoring a leftfield hit in 1998 with Croupier starring Clive Owen. Just as 2007's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead briefly reignited Sidney Lumet's career, Croupier did the same for Hodges'. He and Owen would reunite in 2003 for the more downbeat I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, and then he disappeared from theaters again. 

Hodges turned 88 this year, and it's unlikely he'll make another feature film. Stranger things have happened, though, like the fact that this maker of gritty British crime pictures was even hired to direct a major comic book movie in the first place. And yet he pulled it off. Here's to him.  

Photo credit: Portrait of Mike Hodges taken during the 2004 Sundance Film Festival (Carlo Allegri / Getty Images). All others: Universal Pictures.

Flash Gordon is available on Arrow Video/MVD Entertainment as a Limited or Standard Edition 4K UHD and a Limited or Standard Edition Blu-ray.