The Last Waltz (Martin Scorsese, 1978)

Directed by Martin Scorsese, The Last Waltz chronicles the final live performance of the Band (Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm).

I watched The Last Waltz because of its reputation and pedigree.

I was not that familiar with The Band, or Bob Dylan - I know the song ‘The Weight’, and a couple of the artists in the lineup. 

It did not resonate with me, but that is a case of personal taste. As a document, it is fascinating. 

The film includes a few moments of self-reflexivity, including starting ‘scenes’ when the camera starts rolling. These moments attempt to create a sense of authenticity, to immerse the viewer. 

The film also attempts to foreground the idea of authorship over the screen space. While Scorsese himself appears, he is a far less assured on-camera presence than he would become. 

The onscreen figure who gets the most focus is Robbie Robertson. One of the earliest scenes starts with Scorsese flubbing an interview segment with Robbertson, who then provides explicit guidance on what to ask.

The other band members get a few moments, but it is Robertson’s voice that has primacy.

One quality it shares with Stop Making Sense is capturing the dynamic of performers - the most memorable is when Clapton’s string breaks, and Robbie Robertson picks up his solo without missing a beat.

While the performances are great, my favourite set-piece was one re-staged after the concert took place - the duet between the Band and the Staple Singers on ‘The Weight’. There is something magical about the way the camera pulls away from the Band, then pans to introduce Mavis Staples. Pure magic.

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Stop Making Sense

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Whip It (Drew Barrymore, 2009)

Grating under her mother’s (Marcia Gay Hayden) thumb, Bliss (Elliot Page) yearns to escape her small hometown and make a new life for herself.

After a trip to Austin, Bliss thinks she has found an outlet in roller derby. As she grows in skill and confidence, Bliss’s greatest challenge is not the competition, but defending this opportunity from her mother’s expectations.

Whip It was one of my favourite movies when I was younger. 

I had not thought about it for a while until a recent conversation I had with a friend about Elliot Page’s casting in The Odyssey.

It got me thinking about his previous work, and I remembered what an impression this film made on me.

Watching it now, it feels like a time capsule. In the pre-streaming era, modest genre pieces like this would come out a few times a year. Some would hit big, but most would leave theatres quickly to become fixtures on TV or physical media. 

It was also one of Page’s big moves after Juno made him a name.

I remember at the time leaving the theatre thinking I was watching the next big sleeper hit. It happened with Juno, right?

While my prediction turned out to be wrong, Whip It has had an afterlife as a cult film. It is not brought up in the first breath, but I have seen it pop on a few lists covering movies about sports, women and teens. 

It is impossible to watch Bliss’s struggles with identity without thinking of Page’s transition. I cannot offer any great analysis of it as an allegory, but that context did give Bliss’s journey some metatextual weight. 

Bliss’s struggle with her mother is fundamentally about their differing ideas on what being a successful woman is. 

What struck me about the movie is how it never treats these struggles as purely ideological differences - this a dynamic between family, between two people with understandable motivations.

While she is an antagonist, Bliss’s mother never comes across as a caricature - she sees pageants as a way to help Bliss achieve a better life for herself than the one she has. 

Marcia Gay Hayden’s Brooke feels like a real person. Her motives are also understandable, and Hayden’s choice to underplay the big moments rather than go for histrionics carries more impact (Hayden also has the power to convey a disappointment that feels cellular).

The film is a collection of familiar beats, but the film is smart enough to subordinate plot mechanics to character. The big example is the reveal that rival Iron Maven (Juliette Lewis) does not use Bliss’s lying about her age to enter the sport to sabotage her. 

This could have been an easy plot turn for the third act, but instead the movie focuses on the real conflict, between Bliss and her mother, or more deeply, Bliss’s conflict about what kind of person she wants to be (what does she ultimately want?).

While the film is savvy in how it plays with conventions, the one place where it feels a little too familiar is the romance with musician Oliver (Landon Pigg).

I believe Bliss’s feelings for Oliver but it still drags. The real romance is between Bliss and roller derby. 

It makes sense to have Bliss realise this, but on this viewing I caught myself checking out during the scenes with the pair connecting. 

It does not help that Page has better chemistry with Alia Shawkat as her best friend (they have such an easy rapport, why hasn’t anyone cast them together in something else?).

On top of her chemistry with Page, Shawkat’s dry wit is welcome, and her character Pash benefits from exploding an archetype.

She is a straight A student who also has a social life. There is a world where this character would be more of an outcast.

While she is just as anxious to escape, Pash is more ready to embrace new experiences - we see her drinking and hooking up without any reservations.

The supporting cast are excellent: 

Daniel Stern is great as Bliss’s warm but checked-out dad; he also has a great rapport with Hayden - he even gets a proper arc, finally taking a stand and giving an opinion.

The derby team are fun - Kristen Wiig, Eve, Zoe Bell and Barrymore herself have a believable group dynamic.

Andrew Wilson, brother of Owen and Luke, gets a rare meaty role as coach Razor, while a pre-cornball Jimmy Fallon has fun as a sleazy announcer.

It is a pity Barrymore has not directed any other features. She shows a strong understanding of tone; the humour never crowds out earnest emotion. The derby bouts feature some POV shots, but are clearly shot and choreographed.

Funny, moving, and featuring some surprisingly gnarly action, if you have not watched Whip It, you are missing out on something special.

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Stop Making Sense (Jonathan Demme, 1984)

One of the most well-regarded concert films, Stop Making Sense is a collaboration between the band Talking Heads and filmmaker Jonathan Demme.

I do not have much experience with concert films. 

I had not really thought about it until I was writing about the Billie Eilish documentary, and realised I had no point of comparison or frame of reference.

When my local Arthouse advertised a series of classic concert docs, I jumped at the chance to expand my knowledge. It also gave a reason to do a deep dive into artists I had never really checked out.

I know a few Talking Heads songs, but outside recognising the big suit, I did not have much context.

The film opens with a piece of showmanship that feels designed to draw the viewer in, to tease fans, and initiate new ones.

We open on a close-up tracking shot of David Byrne’s feet walking onstage with a guitar and a boombox.

The latter is a prop - the beat is provided by an offscreen 808 drum machine - that sets out the band’s uncanny vibe. 

Byrne then complicates this by playing ‘Psycho Killer’ on an acoustic guitar.

The juxtaposition of human musicianship and technology is the skeletal foundation of the band - it almost feels like the film is showing us how the Talking Heads build their sound.

Over the first couple of songs, the band slowly assembles onstage as the set-dressing is re-set around them. As the musicians fill out the space literally and sonically, the film takes time to put faces to each specific voice and sound - it is music as living organism, slowly growing and evolving in front of us.

There is something so joyous and communal about the way the camera-work captures the interplay between the musicians. There is a looseness and spontaneity to these found moments that fill out the song performance.

Watching them live also helped me work out how to describe the Talking Head sound: Recontextualising traditions and norms to reveal their inherent ridiculousness.

The out-sized suit exemplifies the sense of disconnect, of trying to exist in a world you can never fit into.  

The songs are uniformly tight, looser and funkier (to my ears) compared with the recorded versions: ‘Once In A Lifetime’ feels even more discombobulating, the desperate plea of the chorus, juxtaposed with the imposing rhythm section.

David Byrne is the physical embodiment of the band’s sound, both incredibly loose and controlled.

This is easily one of the best first watches I have had in a long time. I was completely locked in, bobbing my head in time, and I caught myself clapping after certain songs.

The audience is rarely onscreen. Demme’s camera roves around the stage, never completely immersive but also never fully drawing attention to itself - a pretty good encapsulation of the band. 

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If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

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The James Bond Cocktail Hour: Fast & Furious (Justin Lin, 2009)

Our hosts reunite to watch the Fast family reunion in 2009’s Fast & Furious.

Check it out at the link below or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Fast & Furious

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Murder, My Sweet AKA Farewell, My Lovely (Edward Dmytryk, 1944)

Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell) is hired by an imposing hoodlum (Mike Mazurki) to find his missing lover.

While on the hunt for this woman, Marlowe is drawn into the orbit of a wealthy family with an interest in keeping Marlowe from finding his quarry…

Following The Big Sleep, I was on a Marlowe kick.

I had heard good things about this film, and after The Big Sleep, I was keen to get a different (and hopefully more straightforward) take on the shamus.

I also had a history with star Dick Powell.

As a child I had a collection of cassette tapes of old detective radio shows from the Forties.

Two of those shows, Richard Diamond and Rogues Gallery, starred Powell. I gravitated toward Richard Diamond because of the humor, but Powell radiated a charisma and charm that made me return to those episodes over the others.

I had no knowledge of Powell’s screen work, or of his early screen persona as a musical comedy star. 

That context is crucial because this film was Powell’s attempt to change his screen image. It succeeded so much that he would thereafter become a leading man of noir.

Visually, this movie is what people think of with classic film noir: lots of extreme angles and chiaroscuro.

The film opens on a dramatic overhead shot of an interrogation room, where a blindfolded Marlowe is surrounded by police officers. It is a mission statement that the film continues to pay off, using the influence of German expressionism to develop a visual language for Raymond Chandler’s evocative prose.

Take Moose’s introduction, in which he looms out of the darkness as a reflection in Marlowe’s office window. It is a foreboding opening that turns him from a simple leg-breaker into a force of nature.

One of the most effective sequences in the film is literal nightmare, in which Marlowe imagines himself running through multiple doors while being chased by a man with a hypodermic needle.

As with the Bogart version, I had to re-watch the movie to pay attention to the plot - it is longwinded, but it at least resolves.

With The Big Sleep, the attraction is the interplay between the characters. The repartee is not as unique as the Hawks film, but it is still effective - and Powell is great.

I will not say his performance is as iconic as Bogart - and as far as star charisma goes, Powell is no Bogie.

But that is no deficit here.

Whereas Bogart seems effortless and always thinking on his feet, Powell seems more human and fallible.

While smart, Powell’s Marlowe is far less confident, and is shown to be more vulnerable. He gets tortured and appears to be genuinely traumatised by the experience. 

His Marlowe also has an air of economic precariousness which adds to that lack of confidence - he does not seem to have a choice to turn down Moose when the giant appears in his office.

Like all good comic performers, Powell underplays the dramatic scenes. And his comic touch works as the exasperated release of a man in over his head. 

He gets a lot of lovely bits of business - his brief dance as he wanders through the cavernous mansion; lighting a cigarette on a Cupid statue; aping Moose’s monosyllabic voice. 

Powell’s Marlowe may go through hell in this movie, but he seems to take joy wherever he can get it. 

While he is not in the movie for long, I was struck by the emotional impact of Moose’s love for Velma.

It is rare to see a stooge take such a central role, particularly as a client, and it gave the movie a unique pathos and tension. 

Played by professional wrestler Mike Mazurki, he is slightly wooden, but in a way that works. The character appears to be slightly punch drunk, and prone to sudden shifts in temper.

There is something terrifyingly pathetic about him. He is a more violent spiritual sibling to Laird Cregar’s similarly obsessive policeman in I Wake Up Screaming.

The finale is an overstuffed series of monologues as the plot is finally explained, but it is made up for by the quiet farce of the final scene: Marlowe, temporarily blinded, is unaware his love interest is in the room as he rhapsodises about how she saved his life.

It is a relatively light-hearted close, but it marks a suitable redemption for our put-upon hero - blundering forward into the unknown with his heart on his sleeve.

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If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

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