Movies about Music

I would say that the majority of movies I put on our Netflix queue have to do with music. It's pretty hit-or-miss with them because what looks like a festival documentary (Bonaroo 96) turns out not to have real live footage, but montages of the weird naked hippies at the festival while the music plays in the background. Or band documentaries, like the one on Beulah (one of my favorite bands) that are nothing more than cam-corder footage from inside their van. However, I had a couple big scores in the last week.

The first was the Chorus. I thouroughly enjoyed it. One of the things that popped out to me was the Math teacher. He sucked at teaching math, but I totally related to how he just couldn't stay away from the chorus. He wanted to be around music and wanted to help out. He was just frantic about being close to music, because there wasn't any other music to speak of.

Also, movies/books about boyhood really get me right here (I'm making a gesture as if being stabbed in the heart) when they tackle the theme of what I call "the dichotomy of boyhood." What I mean is that I think we, as boys, have this inate dichotomy where we want to be Superman, firemen, cops and save/help people, but we also fantasize violence and killing. Young boys adore their female cohorts, but despise them as well. We love to build things, but delight in explosions and demolition. I think this movie touched on this in a subtle but thought-provoking way and it makes me nostalgic in that way that you can get nostalgic about even the darker parts of your life.

Also, surprisingly, I really got to like the name Boniface.


I also rented a movie about the making of Nirvana's "Nevermind" album. It's from a series called "Classic albums" and it was super in-depth and technical. A lot of it was filmed at Butch Vig's (producer) sound board as he literally deconstructed each song and showed the viewer things like what this song would have sounded like had the voice not been doubled, or what it would've sounded like if the song had drums instead and why and so on.

He explained, in a way that both JIll and I understood, how one song was not working out, so Kurt went over, sat on the couch with an acoustic, and said, "It should sound like this." Butch Vig ran and brought the mics out to him and had him just play it. What Vig explained so well was how it became a problem to record the drums, bass, and cello because Cobain had not recorded the song to a click track, so the tempo is all over the place. His guitar was also not in tune, the the bass and cello had to be tuned strangely. Fantastic.

I have often blogged about wanting musical writing/journalism and movies to be more technical and this one didn't dumb it down at all. This movie will convince you why this was one of the most important pieces of art ever.