Top Notch Profile Of Power Pop Band Big Star Returns To N.C.

In what sounds like it could’ve been a sequence, or at least a deleted scene, from Cameron Crowe’s 2000 semi-autobiographical rock comedy drama ALMOST FAMOUS, teenage Rolling Stone scribe Crowe, along with rock critic legend Lester Bangs joined over a hundred other rock music journalists who have traveled from all over the country to attend the first and last National Association of Rock Writers Convention in Memphis, Tennessee on Memorial Day weekend in May 1973.

A 16-year old Crowe walked barefoot around the Holiday Inn convention center and Lafayette's Music Room in downtown Memphis during the event that included panel discussions, the midnight premiere of Sam Peckipah’s now classic Western PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID (featuring Bob Dylan in a supporting role), and performances by the little-known musical acts Larry Raspberry and the Highsteppers, Skin Alley, and a little local band named Big Star.

The gig was one of the few live appearances of the band who only recorded a few albums (three if you count 1978's Sister Lovers and Big Star leader Alex Chilton sure didn’t), and, despite strong reviews, didn’t catch on with the public at large during their brief existence from the early to mid ‘70s.

But as the legend goes, Big Star (then a trio made up of Chilton, bassist Andy Hummel, and drummer Jody Stephens) rocked the house and, in the words of rock writer Pete Tomlinson, “turned a crowd of drunken freeloaders into drooling disciples.”

Anecdotes about the convention are among my favorite stories about how the Memphis power pop combo, originally fronted by the late greats Chilton and fellow guitarist/songwriter Chris Bell, attracted critical acclaim, but not hit record status in Drew DeNicola and Olivia Mori’s excellent new documentary BIG STAR: NOTHING CAN HURT ME, currently in limited release at indie art houses across the country.

I saw and loved the film when it screened at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival at the Carolina Theatre in Durham, North Carolina last April, so I'm glad it's returning to the Carolina starting on August 19th-August 28th as as part of Magnolia Pictures’ Summer Documentary Series (check the Carolina's website for show-times). 

BIG STAR: NOTHING CAN HURT ME (the title comes from a lyric in their haunting song “Big Black Car” from the before mentioned Sister Lovers album) is a film that rock lovers, documentary lovers, and especially rockumentary lovers shouldn’t miss.

The trailer:

My review for the Raleigh News & Observer:

“Documentary about pop band Big Star plays in Durham” (August 16, 2013)

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/08/15/3107540/documentary-about-pop-band-big.html#storylink=cpy

My interview with film’s co-director Drew DeNicola at the Artery Blog at indyweek.com:

“Filmmaker Drew DeNicola discusses his documentary, Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me” (August 14, 2013)

Alongside the Carolina Theatre in Durham, BIG STAR: NOTHING CAN HURT ME will also have these other N.C. screenings:

Wednesday, August 21st: a one-night showing at Aperture Cinema in Winston Salem at 7:30 p.m. Pop artist/producer Mitch Easter, who’s interviewed in the film, will be on hand for a Q & A after the film. After the screening there will be “An Evening of Big Star” at The Garage (111 West Seventh St.), with local musicians, including Michael Slawter, Doug Davis, Henry Heidtmann, Ken Mohan and Corky McClellan, playing choice Big Star covers. The show starts at 9 p.m. $7 ($1 discount with your ticket from the Aperture's BIG STAR doc screening).

The next night, Thurday, August 22nd, there will be another one-night screening at the Fine Arts Theatre in Asheville. Check their website for show-times.

Lastly, there’s a soundtrack album out for the film, a double LP or single CD that has a great mix of Big Star’s best songs, but in demo, alternate take, and “movie mix” versions. Like the film itself, it's a great primer, but one that has a lot of cool discernible differences to the tracks fans know by ear. The Big Star #1 Record Glow-In-The-Dark Slip Mat (seen above) that you can get with it is pretty cool too. Order the soundtrack here.

So to sum it all up: watch the trailer, read my review and interview with co-director DeNicola, see the movie, fall in love with Big Star, buy the soundtrack and their other albums - then, live a happier life.

Got it?

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Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2013: Day Four

Whew! I'm exhausted but very satisfied from four days of non-fiction film fun at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2013. Please check out my coverage of Days One, Two, and Three.

Here's what I saw on the fourth and final day, Sunday, April 7th:

RUNNING FROM CRAZY
(Dir. Barbara Kopple, 2012)

After the Kennedys, the Hemingways were the “other American family with a horrible curse” as Mariel Hemingway describes them early on in Barbara Kopple’s very affecting and aptly named doc RUNNING FROM CRAZY.

In the film, Hemingway speaks at length about her family’s troubled history in which seven members have committed suicide. Her super model sister Margaux killed herself 35 years to the day that her grandfather, Ernest Hemingway, likewise took his life.

Footage Margaux shot in the ‘80s for a never completed doc about the legendary writer in which she visits and interviews family members is some of the most fascinating of the clips here. Margaux was, like her grandfather, what Mariel called a “heavy liver,” so she emulated his partying lifestyle, a lifestyle that Mariel was repulsed by as we see when she is saddened by the empty bottles of booze that litter her grandfather’s grave.

Except for some brief excerpts, Mariel Hemingway’s film career is not given much screen-time because the focus is on her personal struggle to distance herself from her family’s demons. She has two daughters (one a supermodel) from a previous marriage who she worries about, and a boyfriend, Bobby Williams, that she rock climbs with (a bit with them bickering in their car out in the desert is priceless) so we get to know her concerns in absorbing detail. 

Kopple’s doc is a heartfelt and entertaining examination that doesn’t get too sentimental or fluffy piecey. Mariel never met her famous grandfather (he cut his life short 3 months before she was born), but his personal influence is obviously enormous over her and the rest of the family, as much as his writing is over the literary world. This fine film makes a good case for that I must say.

THE EDITOR AND THE DRAGON: HORACE CARTER FIGHTS THE KLAN (Dirs. Walter E. Campbell & Martin M. Clark, 2012)

“I never wrote an anti-Klan editorial that I enjoyed writing, I write those editorials because in my mind that was a duty.” Says former newspaper man Horace Carter (pictured on the right with the film makers) in this short doc that every North Carolinian should see. Carter was the editor and publisher of the Tabor City Tribune here in N.C. and in 1950 he wrote in his paper that the Klan was “the personification of Fascism and Nazism.” This got a lot of negative feedback in the community and earned Carter a visit from Thomas Hamilton, Grand Dragon of the Association of Carolina Klans.

Luckily, film makers and UNC graduates Campbell and Clark got Carter on camera before his 2009 death to tell his tension-filled tale that led to him getting a Pulitzer Prize in 1953. Photos, archival footage, new interviews, and Morgan Freeman narration make up the doc may be in too much of a History Channel-style, but that may be the most appropriate angle for this material. Full Frame was world premiere of the must see doc, so no word about a theatrical release or television broadcast yet, but I’ll keep you posted.

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO DICK CHENEY
(Dir. R.J. Cutler, 2012)

This solid polished biodoc, which premiered on Showtime last month, tries to get into the mind of the former President, sorry Vice President, and finds that it's a dark defensive place. Director Cutler (the docs THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE, A PERFECT CANDIDATE) gets Cheney to sit down and discuss the highs and lows of his political career, so we get to go through Watergate, the Iran Contra hearings, the 2000 election recount, 9/11, weapons of mass destruction, and the war in Iraq all over again. Yep, mostly lows; all the stuff many of us have been trying to forget for years.

Cutler's one on one chats with the Dark Lord (sorry), are augmented by interview snip-lets by the likes of Bob Woodward, Bob Suskind, and Cheney biographer Barton Gellman along with file photos, and news footage with narration provided by Dennis Haysbert (best known for being the first black President in the world that the popular Fox show 24 took place in). The takeaway from this film is that Cheney doesn't concede to anything. It's apparent that the man, who at age 34 during the Ford Adminstration became the youngest White House Chief of Staff in history, has a ginormously self righteous ego especially when he repeatedly says that he regrets nothing.

Cheney says that he “doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about my faults,” but for the almost two hour running time of this doc we sure do.

BIG STAR: NOTHING CAN HURT ME
(Dirs. Drew DeNicola & Olivia Mori, 2012)

I have to admit I'm way biased about this doc as I'm a big Big Star fan who contributed to the production's Kickstarter campaign a few years back. The feature length debut by Drew DeNicola and Olivia Mori assembles a passionate cast of fellow musicians, rock critics, to tell the story of the power pop band who should've been Beatle-sized superstars in the early '70s but alas the stars did not align.

Big Star, made up of Alex Chilton, who sadly passed in 2009, Chris Bell (died in a car accident in 1978), Jody Stephens, and Andy Hummel, is the favorite of many music snobs so much of the material will be familiar to fans. Non-fans will probably appreciate it too because there's plenty of funny anecdotes and personal insights into the music that make it a worhwhile primer.

With their mix of heartbreaking vocals and shimmering guitars that made such incredibly catchy non-hits as “September Gurls,” “Thirteen,” “Ballad of El Goodo,” and “In the Street,” among many others (well, three albums worth anyway) Big Star is a band that deserves more recognition and this film, which gets released theatrically this summer should help that happen (at least a little, I'm not talking about a Rodriquez-style revival).As a fan I, of course, have criticisms of certain areas being glossed over (though they made the right decision in glossing over the band's 2005 reunion album In Space), but the doc works as a visual overview of Chilton and company's history, encapsulating the precious little original footage shot of the band (only 20 minutes or so exist), with the usual but necessary doc decorations (talking head interviews), photos, etc. in an extremely appealing package.

Before the film, N.C. native, and former Alex Chilton protégé, Chris Stamey and his band The Fellow Travelers played an all too brief set of Big Star classics. You can watch them play “September Gurls” here (other songs from the performance are accessible from that page). 

Well, so that's another Full Frame! Time for me to get some much needed sleep.

More later...

Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2013: Day Three

Here’s what I saw on Day 3 of Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2013 on Saturday, April 6th (Oh, yeah – please visit my recaps of Day One, and Day Two):

A WILL FOR THE WOODS
(Dirs. Amy Browne, Tony Hale, Jeremy Kaplan, & Brian Wilson)

This film, one of several at the Festival that concerned North Carolinians, won the Audience Award for feature films and the Nicholas School for the Environment Award. It’s the touching tale of musician/psychiatrist Clark Wang’s dying wish to have a green burial. Wang had been battling lymphoma for 8 years, and was realistic about the disease ultimately defeating him: “I’d like to use whatever time I have left to help set a pattern in our community of going back to really traditional and natural ways of preserving our dead.” While taking us through Wang’s process involving Pine Forest Memorial Gardens in N.C., the doc examines the green burial movement and the ecological issues at hand. Well made and intentioned, A WILL FOR THE WOODS sure packs an emotional wallop and I’m glad those voting agreed.

A.K.A. DOC POMUS (Dirs. William Hecter & Peter Miller, 2013) 

Most folks don’t know the name Doc Pomus, but they for sure have heard some of the many songs he’s written including such major hits as “Viva Las Vegas,” “This Magic Moment,” “Save the Last Dance for Me,” “Little Sister,” and “Suspicion.” I only knew the man through Lou Reed, who was a big friend of Pomus’s and dedicated his 1992 album Magic and Loss to him, so it’s great to have his story filled in with vintage interviews, footage, and photos, along with testimonials from friends and fans such as Reed, Dr. John, Ben E. King, Joan Osborne, Shawn Colvin and his biographer Alex Halberstadt. Unfortunately Hechter and Miller’s biodoc is uneven with many photographs being shown more than once, and some anecdotes being too vague to much impact. 

But the film overall captures the essence of how a polio-stricken kid from Brooklyn became a larger than life figure through his master song writing. Pomus’ brother, Raoul Felder, whose sound-bites may be the most insightful in the film puts it like this: “I suppose at some level, all greatness comes from pain. I think my brother had everything possible going against him in the history of the world from poverty, to illness, to incapacitation, you could not create a worse scenario for failure except that he wasn’t black. And he did as well as he could in that direction too.”

IF YOU BUILD IT 
(Dir. Patrick Creadon, 2013)

This doc, about an idealistic young couple (Emily Pilloton and Matt Miller) teaching a high school design-build class, has a good inspirational can-do spirit. It takes us with Pilloton and Miller, respectively a humanitarian designer and an architect, as they take their class through 3 phases of a project, first building cornhole boards, then chicken coops, and finally building something for the community: a Farmer's Market pavilion for Bertie county, N.C. That the couple do on grants without a salary says a lot about them and their sincerity to try to fix the “broken school system,” as Pilloton puts it. Even the overuse of sped-up time capture montages or the dropped story strands (a thick-accented teenager named Rodecoe is focused on in the first third then fades away), doesn't detract from the impressive accomplishments of these kids. More power to them.

WHICH IS THE WAY TO THE FRONT LINE FROM HERE? THE LIFE AND TIME OF TIM HETHERINGTON 
(Dir. Sebastian Junger, 2013)

Probably the best straight-up biodoc of the Festival. In her introduction, Full Frame Director of Programming Sadie Tillery sadly recollected that Hetherington, who was killed in an attack in Libya in 2011, was a guest at Full Frame in 2010 promoting his excellent doc RESTREPO. 

That film, which I reviewed the DVD of, was co-directed by the maker of this one, Sebastian Junger. A great friend of Hetherington, Junger appears along with members of Hetherington's family, and colleagues, and Hetherington himself from various interviews, to tell us the noted British photojournalist's story and it's stirring as hell. Despite having a new girlfriend and talking of settling down, Hetherington had a HURT LOCKER-like drive to keep going back to dangerous terrain to do his job. Emotionally gripping footage of the actual attack is included, presented in a manner that's not exploitative. It's one unforgettable piece of a profoundly powerful portrait of a man that everybody should know.

PUSSY RIOT - A PUNK PRAYER
(Dirs. Mike Lerner & Maxim Pozdorovkin, 2012)

With a name like Pussy Riot, most folks have heard of this band, but don't know their story. Lerner and Pozdorovkin's thorough doc rectifies that by giving us the background of the Russian feminist punk rock collective and showing how and why two of their members are currently in prison. On February 21st of last year, five members of Pussy Riot ran into Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior and performed what they called “Punk Prayer - Mother of God, Chase Putin Away!” before being stopped by church security. Three of them, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, were arrested on charges of hooliganism.

While these women go through the twists and turns of legal nonsense, the other members go into hiding so there's no interviews with any of them. The doc is competently constructed and informative but it doesn't have the oomph this material deserves. In the court footage that dominates the film, we see the women, who when we get to hear speak are funny and articulate, sitting in a glass box in the middle of the court room looking indifferent and bored.

As much as I liked getting the story straight and what it says about the sad state of Russian democracy, too often when watching it I felt just like those detained members of Pussy Riot. If only the doc did what they so wanted to do: think outside of the box.

Check back for coverage of Day Four.

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5 Docs I'm Looking Forward To At This Year's Full Frame Documentary Film Festival

Later this week, starting on Thursday, April 4th, thousands of film loving folks, me included, will be flocking to the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina.

This is the 16th year for the documentary film festival, and it looks to be a great one with a roster of titles covering such diverse subjects as Dick Cheney, an aspiring Iraqi filmmaker, Napster, Pussy Riot, the Muscle Shoals recording studio, Mariel Hemmingway’s sanity, activist Angela Davis, and the story of the power pop band Big Star, among many others.

There will also be several older acclaimed documentaries such as Orson Welles’ F FOR FAKE (a favorite of mine), Amir Bar-Lev’s MY KID COULD PAINT THAT (also a fine one), and, for some reason, Larry Charles’ mockumentary BORAT.

Here are 5 documentaries that I’m most looking forward to at Full Frame:

BIG STAR: NOTHING CAN HURT ME 
(Dirs. Drew DeNicola & Olivia Mori, 2012)

Check out this trailer:

FREE ANGELA & ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS

(Dir. Shola Lynch, 2012)

And this one:

GIDEON’S ARMY 
(Dir. Dawn Porter, 2013)

MUSCLE SHOALS
(Dir. Greg ‘Freddy’ Camalier, 2013)

Another cool trailer here:

FIGHT LIKE SOLDIERS, DIE LIKE CHILDREN

(Dir. Patrick Reed, 2012)

More later...