​The soul of rock n' roll doesn't live in a stadium--it resides in dive bars, in grungy clubs, in run-down venues where the floors are slick with a layer of spilled booze and stale sweat.  Garage rock is a distillation of the spirit that makes rock n' roll so magnetic, and the recent documentary New Garage Explosion!!: In Love With These Times (full video) attempts to construct a comprehensive picture of the garage movement in America out of interviews and live recordings of some of the genre's major players, from rising stars to lifers. 

More >>

More >>

Sony Pictures Classics

More >>

Cannes, France—

Not that I don't appreciate the privilege of seeing a longer Death Proof—I positively adored it at 87 minutes on the bottom-half of the ill-fated Grindhouse double bill. But whoever encouraged the Cannes Film Festival to advertise its new cut at "2h07" (i.e., 127 minutes)—director Quentin Tarantino, perhaps, or (more likely) the Weinstein Co.'s Stuntman Harv—is practically begging for a long ride on the fuckin' roof of the white Dodge Challenger, sans straps. I mean, the goddamn thing is no fuckin' longer than 113 tops—I fuckin' timed it—but that didn't stop Stuntman Harv from bum-rushing the Death Proof press conference yesterday to say that "you're missing the essence of Tarantino" at 87 (pffff...), and that the new cut, when it's released internationally, "will dwarf Grindhouse—trust me." Fuck, man. Does anyone, even Tarantino, trust Harvey Weinstein at this point?

More >>

Forget praise from the film's subject herself. My fears about North Country, opening Friday, were put to rest by Minnesota cinema connoisseur Rob Nelson in today's City Pages: "Minnesota-movie vets, including Chris Mulkey (Patti Rocks) and Frances McDormand (you betcha), were offered supporting roles as part of what could easily be seen as a show of respect for our cinematic tradition," writes Nelson. "(Boy-from-the-north-country Bob Dylan was tapped to supply a half-dozen vintage tunes.) And, consciously or not, [director Niki] Caro seems to be channeling the independent spirit of Wildrose (1984), John Hanson and Sandra Schulberg's little-seen classic about the struggles of an Eveleth divorcee (Lisa Eichhorn) working among sexist men at the Iron Range's Mesabi Mine." Read Rob's appreciation of The Heartbreak Kid for background (cover image here), and check out this social action organization spawned by North Country and Good Night, and Good Luck, with accompanying group blog. (See also: a hi-def North Country trailer, Ranger reactions, a real Ranger's preview, and other items in MNSpeak's search engine.) Theron and Caro will participate in a video-conference Q&A after a 7:00 p.m. screening tonight (Wednesday) at the Regal Eagan Cinema 16. A screening at Lagoon Cinema on Saturday at 1:30 p.m., sponsored by and benefiting Minnesota Women in Film and Television, will be followed by a panel discussion of sexual harassment in the workplace.

For the rat stories, the stink stories, the great footage of Scream, Rites of Spring, Embrace, Fugazi, and others, tonight's screening of 2005's 930 F Streeet (9:30 p.m. at Bryant-Lake Bowl) is essential punk rock viewing. (Here's Lindsey's review.) Listen to the audio archive of this week's Radio Riot on KFAI as prep: "Dance of Death: Radio Riot D.C. Hardcore Special," co-hosted by former Washington, D.C. resident Felix Havoc, who plays the first Bad Brains demo and other goodies (full archive here). The film itself (like the Minutemen movie, and the opening work-in-progress on Mission of Burma, Inexplicable--click for trailer) rocks enough to make up for being way talky. Only other complaint: For me, the club was a D.C. First Avenue circa 1988-1990, and I wish the film had broached the crucial topic of non-rock/non-live music. The 9:30 DJs, along with their counterparts at First Ave in Minneapolis and (so I gather) at Danceteria in New York (check the old flyers), pretty much created cosmopolitan alt-club culture as we knew it in the '90s, which also happens to be the way most people now listen to music at home--mixing hip hop and punk and ska and goth all on one dance floor...More >>

One of the great films, The Sorrow and the Pity, screens Saturday at noon at Bell Auditorium in Minneapolis. (Here's the City Pages review.) I avoided it for years because of the "I'm not in the mood to see a four-hour documentary on Nazis" joke in Annie Hall, but the movie never gets boring. The subtitled, black and white 1969 doc about French resistance and collaboration during WWII introduces you to vivid personalities of people who were there, and draws you in. (The mix of interviews and rare footage became the blueprint for cinematic histories from Eyes on the Prize to The War at Home.) The picture screens as part of the Bell's "Marcell Ophuls: Open Your Eyes" series (starting this weekend). Here's Matthew Wilder's preview in City Pages (scroll down): "This three-film retrospective is especially notable for the presence of The Memory of Justice [Oct. 22-23], Ophuls's 1976 masterpiece about the Nuremburg trials and the nature of 'crimes against humanity' in the post-WWII world. Memory was assailed in its day for being unfocused, but the filmmaker's roving style, darting from Dresden to Ho Chi Minh City in a blink of the mind's eye, will seem especially apt to today's hypertext generation...More >>

Man two rows behind me, browsing this film's description in the Sound Unseen guide: "140 minutes? Jesus!"

You said it, guy. Two and a half hours is long for a band bio, not to mention a band manager bio. The film originally aired on the BBC in two one-hour parts and, being that this was the director's cut, we got an extra 20 minutes. But even though it was long, the doc was good enough that it suffered only a couple walk-outs. The film connects the dots from a Liverpool boy who dreamed of becoming a dress designer to a young furniture retailer interested in presentation and design to the man who put the Beatles in cute suits. But despite his overwhelming success at cracking the American charts, the Jewish and gay Epstein felt like an outcast until the day he died from an accidental sleeping pill OD in 1967. The film hints at persecution (beatings and blackmail) but fills up on glowing memories from Paul McCartney, George Martin, and Marianne Faithfull. More detailed accounts of the discrimination he faced would've been nice.

Okay, I'll admit it. Even if the movie had sucked, I was determined to stick around long enough to find out whether John Lennon really let Epstein give him a handjob. Alas, there was no explicit story about Brian's paws on John's junk but McCartney seems to think the rumors were false. In fact, he insinuates that if Epstein were going to hit on any of them, he probably would've been the lucky boy. And he's totally serious.

I found out something disturbing earlier this year, while combing through hundreds of local newspapers from 1915-1916 to research the history of the Varsity Theater--tonight's venue for DJ Spooky's "remix" of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (which also opened in 1915). Turns out Griffith's racist totem was hugely popular in Minneapolis, as it was across the U.S., enjoying a long downtown run with prominent advertisements in daily papers. A founding work of cinema, The Birth of a Nation was also an influential piece of white supremacist propaganda, based on the book The Clansman by Thomas F. Dixon, Jr., which heroized the Ku Klux Klan for protecting white women from black men. The ranks of the KKK swelled as a result of the film's success, as did the popularity of "movies" (then still taking quotes). By 1923, the Pioneer Press was reporting the presence of a KKK unit in St. Paul, and a University of Minnesota's homecoming parade had included a KKK float (read more here). Tonight's belated "response" of sorts features the great illbient turntablist Spooky orchestrating a live, three-screen, multimedia re-imagining of Griffith's silent "classic." By now filmmaker's primary claim on history is seen mainly by film students (MN Film Arts' Search and Rescue project recently unearthed a print at the U of M) and others curious about the work's anti-inspiration for Spike Lee, so this event (featuring new imagery and music) might actually be a good way to see the picture for the first time. Showtime at 7:30 p.m. at the Varsity Theater in Dinkytown, with an after-party at the same club featuring Spooky, DJ Nikoless, and Dessa's duo with Jessy Greene, Urban Ivy. See Complicatedfun.com for a complete Sound Unseen festival roundup, and the official festival site for a full schedule.

Besides the film reviews in City Pages, Terri Sutton's essay on rock docs about dead dudes, and the festival's own full schedule of movies and music between Oct. 7 and Oct. 16, Complicatedfun.com has a recommended list of essentials from this year's Sound Unseen program, which kicks off Friday. Among them, Shawn Hewitt at the Entry on Saturday, DJ Spooky's live "remix" of The Birth of a Nation at the Varsity on Monday, and Scene Minneapolis, 1977-1984 at the Oak Street on Thursday, Oct. 13. Expect more on that bizarre DJ Spooky/D.W. Griffith mashup soon...