JASON BECKER: NOT DEAD YET. Originally published on Take One.
Lou Gehrig’s Disease knocks you down hard and fast, or at least it should do. With JASON BECKER: NOT DEAD YET, Jesse Vile’s debut direction gallantly attempts to lift the lid on the degenerative condition using the anomalous case of virtuosic Hair Metal axe-man Jason Becker – given three years to live in 1990, yet still going strong (if paralysed) twenty-two years later. As the director concedes beforehand, “a lot of people think this is a film about heavy metal, but it’s not”; it actually riffs on community, the appetite for life and Becker’s remarkable ebullience in the face of a terminal illness.
You’d be forgiven for assuming the film might oversentimentalise or sensationalise the situation: “Gosh, isn’t he an inspiration for us all?” etc. But at one point, Becker declares that he doesn’t want to go into anything deep or heart-warming; he doesn’t want to be a hero, maybe just “the gross Dad in Family Guy”. Ricocheting from original camerawork and interviews to TV footage, archival films and cartoon drawing, the film avoids overwhelming you with emotion. Yes, Vile confronts your typical existential ideas, but does so in an amusing fashion, not punchy or disorienting.
The opening scene shows home footage of a teen Becker jamming a hoedown ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. Locks of wavy black hair, fingers noodling away on a guitar, we’re swept through a youth of obstinate musical mania: Dylan, Clapton solos and a little later, Bach fugues. “He wanted everything to be perfect already”, says his mother, and there was no doubting he was a prodigy. Superstardom came fast: he soon joined Marty Friedman’s neoclassical metal outfit Cacophony, rush-released a solo album and subsequently bagged the most lucrative gig in rock, lead guitar in the David Lee Roth Band. But having recorded ‘A Little Ain’t Enough’, he was diagnosed, and his dreams of touring shattered.
A nightmarish scenario, then, but our protagonist had no intention of giving up. Unable to move and speak, he continues to live with an effervescent determination, and the film examines this workaholic dimension intimately. First there was ‘Perspective’ – an album made in the early 90s using Becker’s eye and chin movements – and now there’s an “eye sign language” developed by his father. He still writes music, it’s just someone else has to write it down. Aside from his unflinching humour, the film’s most touching aspect is perhaps the collective of helpers (ex-lovers, friends and family) who surround him. Together they’ve created an uplifting and closely-stitched documentary, bolstered with an extraordinary spirit.
GRANDMA LO-FI: THE BASEMENT TAPES OF SIGRIDUR NIELSDOTTIR. Originally published here.
Shot over a period of seven years on bleary Super8 film, GRANDMA LO-FI: THE BASEMENT TAPES OF SIGRIDUR NIELSDOTTIR gives an amusing insight into the working mind and thought processes of a septuagenarian garage rockstar.
With a creative mindset redolent of R Stevie Moore in the States, Níelsdóttir was an oddball icon, treasured on the Icelandic underground scene for her preposterously fruitful output (59 albums and 687 songs in 7 years), charming persona and undying imagination. Compiled by a trio of directors, this quaint film accurately captures the hearty, satisfied enigma.
71 may seem like an odd age to kick-start your musical career, but as Níelsdóttir leads us down through her unpretentious Reykjavik basement in knitted cardigan and yellow bonnet, it’s obvious she couldn’t give a toss. She did what she enjoyed, and that was that. Music became her companion, and production a liberating exercise. Concocting a peculiar, often extemporaneous potpourri of CASIO twinks, nonsensical lyrics and atypical instrumentation, it quickly becomes clear she wasn’t exactly a musical genius, but it’s her tireless spirit which really stands out. And her humour, too – the complex symbolism behind her musical contraptions, for instance: crumpled tin foil for camp-fire, and cream whipper for helicopter. Releasing songs, she claimed, was just like sending your children out into the world.
In spite of its 65-minute run-time, the three film-makers still manage to (briefly) trace the doyen’s life-story, using guest appearances from a coterie of young musicians such as Hildur Guðnadóttir and members of Múm. They say there was a sixty year gap since her last music practice, playing piano at age 11, but her passion for it had obviously lingered. And as we speedily drift from her life in Denmark during the Nazi occupation to her eight years spent in Brazil, it quickly becomes clear that family and fauna are the themes closest to her heart. In fact, it seems that when she’s not making music, she’s croaking, neighing or purring.
Perhaps the most remarkable asset of the direction is its elegant use of stop-motion animation. Níelsdóttir had become obsessed with collage-making and drawing in the couple of years prior to her death, and this artwork of hers has been superbly incorporated. With added colour and wit, this leaves GRANDMA LO-FI as a fitting and watchable tribute to a woman who was in perfect harmony with an unnecessarily pernickety world.
CONFESSIONS OF A CHILD OF THE CENTURY. Originally published here.
In CONFESSIONS OF A CHILD OF THE CENTURY, time-honoured badboy and reputable polemicist Peter Doherty takes on the role of Octave, a 19th century version of his faltering and outré self. As Sylvie Verheyde’s period drama unfolds, one sees this hedonistic libertine “stricken by the disease of the century”, his heart set on decadence, enduring fleeting love and despair, and garbling his way through oft-unintelligible voiceovers. Veering from baleful outpours to winsome enthusiasm, there’s room for pleasing pretention, but in truth, he delivers a performance at points mushy and groggy, like some sort of second-rate bratwurst.
This adaptation of de Musset’s romantic novel makes for an adaptation of two halfs: passionate, then passionless. The opening five minutes yield an elongated kiss scene, broken up by shots of his wife Elise (Lily Cole) playing footsy with another man, the ensuing duel and their arguments about fidelity. We’re gripped as he despairs like one of the many victims of Zola’s Nana: “to lose her was to destroy all”; how can he love another woman? There is also something enjoyable about the acts of pre-revolution philosophising and moralising on the odious bourgeoisie, and the debauched scenes of dining, vomming and volupté which follow. But suddenly, his father dies, and “the greatest libertine in all of Paris” decides to change his ways. He ponders society and solitude, good and evil, and past and present.
So far so good, and it’s only when he bumps into the decade-older Brigitte (Charlotte Gainsbourg) that the film slowly begins to deteriorate. Gainsbourg is an incredible actress, we know this much, and Doherty isn’t bad himself, but there’s a distinct lack of chemistry and, in its place, an overwhelming abundance of acting-school amateurism as they fall in love very, very slowly. They do elope in the end, but by this time, the narrative too has become weedy, claustrophobic and – in all honesty – rather mind-numbing. There’s a glimmer of hope in the role reversal which sees Brigitte become the one sans but, but the denouement is predictably gloomy; the repeated “I’m leaving you”s are entirely superfluous. There’s the odd effective scene – Doherty breaking a pillow, Doherty hallucinating sex with other women and Doherty faking his own suicide – but these only add to the shame that this film has ended up so middlebrow after what seemed like such a promising premise.
