Latest news with #AlexRossPerry
Yahoo
22-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'Pavements' director Alex Ross Perry spins fiction into one of the year's most fun and must-watch music films
We've seen music documentaries parodied in then past, but nothing's like Alex Ross Perry's Pavements (on Mubi). Part mockumentary, part parody and part biopic, with a jukebox musical production thrown into the mix, it's a particularly fitting execution to reflect the band Pavement. Perry blends different real, fake and satirical elements about the band for this brilliantly chaotic and satisfying film. The Pavement biopic "Rage Life," starring Joe Keery as Stephen Malkmus, isn't real. The stage musical "Slanted! Enchanted!" isn't either. But it also makes for one of the most riveting music films, honouring the legacy of the '90s indie band with a witty intro presenting Pavement as the "most important" band in the world. While it all feels like quite a lofty undertaking, this was the first and only idea Perry presented for Pavements. "There wasn't a version of this before the maximalist version and there was never going to be, ... it was as simple as that," Ross told Yahoo Canada. "My approach was, immediately, it's a documentary that takes place in a fictional world where Pavement are the most successful band of their generation, which is borrowing an opinion shared by their fans, but turning that into a fact." "And in this world, the band is so successful that every form of ancillary legacy storytelling and financial investment in building a museum or making a movie is theirs, and that will be the movie, and that was kind of just a fully formed ... idea." An absolute highlight is Keery, who we see going through method acting-style preparation to play Malkmus. "His work is just undeniable," Ross said. "He's so charming and funny and self-effacing and satirical and committed, and it's risky. He's putting his own name on the line to play this version of himself in a kind of outlandish way. And I found that his agreeing to do the movie and his willingness to play along and f—k around, for lack of a better term, was just so inspiring." "It just felt like this guy who probably gets asked a thousand things just had a lot of trust in me and in this strange project to do something entirely unique. And actors tend to want to do things that are entirely unique." The power of editing In order to a balance each moving piece of the puzzle, Ross credits editor and producer Robert Greene. "Robert Greene, who's the film's editor, and this is our fifth movie together, edited this movie in a way that no one else could have," Ross said. "His ability to both make something that is alive and playful and dynamic, also telling what we feel in a cohesive story, in two hours, and also doing all of this about his favourite band of all time. They're so close to his heart that he's the best and worst person to make something like this, because he loves every single thing about them, and somewhere out of that emerged exactly what we got." But with Greene's skill also came the ability for Pavements to appeal to both Pavement fans and those who have never even heard of the band, something proved at a screening in Toronto during the Departure festival where you saw Pavement newbie getting increasingly invested in this band. "Something that is simply for die-hard fans, it's just not enough," Ross said. "Oftentimes when I watch something about a subject that I am a die-hard fan of, it is clearly only made for me, and it's not the kind of thing I can, for example, convince my wife to watch." "It's just very clear to people when a movie is going to invite you in versus keep you at arm's length as an audience member who may or may not have the correct prior knowledge to really get everything out of the film. And all we ever talked about was that is the only goal we need to be reaching for. ... Maybe you've never heard of them at all and the movie just is its own thing."
Irish Times
13-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Four new films to see this week: Pavements, Armand, Superman and Modigliani – Three Days on the Wing of Madness
Pavements ★★★★☆ Directed by Alex Ross Perry. Featuring Pavement, Rebecca Clay Cole, Gary Young, Joe Keery, Nat Wolff, Fred Hechinger, Logan Miller, Griffin Newman, Tim Heidecker. No cert, limited release, 128 min Hybris documentary on Pavement, famously eccentric 1990s indie band, from the director of Listen Up, Philip and Her Smell. The film improbably juggles four separate projects (a documentary, a musical, an art exhibit and a fake biopic) into one shaggy, self-aware, mostly made-up opus. It shouldn't work, yet this overstuffed eclair stays sweet. Perry and editor Robert Greene (using split screens and collage techniques) build a dizzying kaleidoscope of timelines, earnestness and glee. What emerges is a film that's as formally adventurous and oddly affecting as the soundtrack. Will appeal to the band's growing Gen Z following. Full review TB Armand ★★★★☆ Directed by Halfdan Ullmann Tondel. Starring Renate Reinsve, Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Endre Hellestveit, Thea Lambrechts Vaulen, Oystein Roger, Vera Veljovic. No cert, limited release, 117 min The feature debut from Halfdan Ullmann Tondel – grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann – finds an emergency parent-teacher meeting bubbling into an unnerving psychological crucible. Set within the bland, institutional corridors of a Norwegian primary school, the film chronicles a single afternoon that stretches into a surreal purgatory of suspicion, guilt and something like the compellingly demented choreography of Climax, Gaspar Noé's dance horror. Pal Ulvik Rokseth's cinematography adds claustrophobic weight to labyrinthine passages and isolated nooks. This singular film rightly won the Caméra d'Or for best first feature at Cannes film festival in 2024. Full review TB READ MORE Superman ★★☆☆☆ Directed by James Gunn. Starring David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan, Nicholas Hoult, Edi Gathegi, Anthony Carrigan, Nathan Fillion. 12A cert, gen release, 120 min Boring, cacophonous return to the Superman pool that, not bothering with any origin stories, throws us straight into broadly comic chaos as Hoult's Lex Luthor seeks to take over the world again. Hilarious references to 'punk rock' are misplaced in an enterprise that cost north of $200 million. The cartoonish closing battles make it clear that, not for the first time, Gunn is striving for high trash, but what he achieves here is low garbage. Utterly charmless. Devoid of humanity. As funny as toothache. Corenswet has so little worthwhile dialogue that his lead performance is hard to rate. Full review DC Modigliani: Three Days on the Wing of Madness ★★★☆☆ Directed by Johnny Depp. Starring Riccardo Scamarcio, Antonia Desplat, Bruno Gouery, Ryan McParland, Al Pacino, Stephen Graham, Luisa Ranieri, Sally Phillips, Philippe Smolikowski, Hugo Nicolau. 15A cert, limited release, 108 min Disappointing news for warring factions that hope Depp's study of Amedeo Modigliani turns out to be either masterpiece or dud. Three Days is no great shakes, but it is rarely embarrassing, either. Adapted from a play by Dennis McIntyre, the film goes among Modigliani (Scamarcio, strong) and his pals in an idealised Paris at the height of the first World War. The more it goes on the clearer it becomes that, though Depp no doubt admires Modigliani's work, his real passion here is for the eternally intoxicating fantasy of Parisian bohemia. Fair enough. The glamour remains. Full review DC
Yahoo
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Videoheaven' Required Maya Hawke's Voice, a Decade of Close Viewing, and Seinfeld Jokes
There's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment in 'Lethal Weapon 3,' a tracking shot, that isn't meant to draw any kind of attention to itself. But it did draw the eye of director Alex Ross Perry and appears as part of his essay film, 'Videoheaven' because in the background of the shot, there are not one, but two video stores. Perry and editor Clyde Folley have watched movies and television shows for a decade now, hunting out depictions of video stores in cinema. 'Videoheaven' isn't just charting their rise and fall across the American commercial landscape, but the ways in which the cultural reception of video stores in films and TV shows allowed cinema to speak to and about itself, and to position us as viewers and consumers in a moment in history. More from IndieWire Ebon Moss-Bachrach: Mark Ruffalo Made Me Less 'Anxious' About Working with CGI for 'The Fantastic Four: First Steps' Henry Golding Wanted to Do Something Totally Different - Nacho Vigalondo's Sci-Fi Love Story Fit the Bill The resulting documentary – narrated by Maya Hawke from a script Perry wrote with deep fondness whether she's talking about her father's work in 'Hamlet,' the significance of Troma posters, her own throwback video store scenes in 'Stranger Things,' the social peril of picking out tables as demonstrated in multiple episodes of 'Seinfeld,' or the soft power of the video store clerk — is a beautiful balance of films and shows that tackle the video store as a setting head-on and those that simply reflect what it was like to live in a now-vanished world where they existed. Creating it required, simply, the time to watch a lot of movies. 'I'm confident no one has ever noticed that [shot from 'Lethal Weapon III'] except for me,' the writer/director behind 'Pavements' and 'Her Smell' told IndieWire. 'Between 2014 and November of last year when we were conceivably finishing 'Videoheaven,' either I watched this movie, Clyde watched this movie and texted me, a friend of ours watched it and said, 'I got one for you,' I saw a clip of it on Instagram… everything came piecemeal, which is the benefit of doing something for so long.' 'Videoheaven' has about 200 sources from films, TV shows, commercials, news reports, and related media. But acquiring that material is not the same time as creating a narrative and every single clip was up to Perry's and Folley's discretion about where, how, and why it should be used in visually demonstrating the message of the documentary. Perry knew from early on that he wanted to start with the clip of the 'To Be Or Not To Be' soliloquy in Michael Almereyda's 2000 version of 'Hamlet,' which takes place as Hamlet (Ethan Hawke) experiences choice paralysis in the aisles of a Blockbuster. But beyond that, there was no roadmap. 'We don't know what the next thing you see is. It could be literally one of 200 things. And the challenge for us is looking at every single clip and saying, 'What visual goes hand in hand with what our narration is saying right here.' But also, what do you show people at minute three that they know there's 160 more minutes? Because it could be anything, but it has to be something that is the exact right clip,' Perry said. The process of building and swapping out clips happened slowly, in Folley's and Perry's spare time as they worked on other projects, but Folley told IndieWire that ended up being a benefit to their work. 'Something that's really unique about this project is that, ostensibly, we didn't have deadlines for a very long time. We didn't have producers breathing down our necks. We didn't have money people to answer to. It's just one of those things where it took as long as it took and then it just started feeling, at some point, more like a movie,' Folley told IndieWire. The project started as a hard-drive of around 60 notable examples of video stores in film, given to the 'Videoheaven' team by film scholar Daniel Herbert, and a script idea. Folley spent a couple of years, in moments of free time, putting together rough assemblies and guessing at what clips might work well against his scratch VO track of Perry's script. Two or three years into the process, the team started to watch the latest four hour assemblies in Folley's apartment and use weekly edit sessions to refine it. 'We would just huddle around my desk and work on this. It really felt a lot like chiseling away at this larger stone before it becomes the statue,' Folley said. Films like 'Be Kind, Rewind,' and 'Watching The Detectives,' which are set in video stories, required lots of time and effort to find the essential clips, both video-only and audio-included, that would fit inside of 'Videoheaven.' But sometimes the process of chiseling away at the statue could be incredibly streamlined. 'Literally mid-stride between last week's session and next week's session, I see online [that] they went to a video store in last night's episode of 'Yellowjackets,' here are the tapes they talked about. I send it to Clyde and to Drew, our downloader… and that episode was in our timeline probably within 10 days of it airing,' Perry said. Perry and Folley's refining work wasn't just at the level of clip selection, of course. The team needed to make sure that the film said absolutely what it needed to say in the right tonal mix between academic interest and pop history. ''Los Angeles Plays Itself' has like one and a half feet in the academic and 'Room 237' has two feet in the pop. And I wanted to straddle the difference,' Perry said. Once 'Videoheaven' went from having temp narration to Hawke's voiceover, it started to feel even more like the bones were in place. A festival acceptance at Rotterdam gave it a helpful deadline to meet. It's a mark of the finished film's success that Folley observed that he keeps referencing points the film itself is making when talking about the making of it. 'The movie says so much,' Folley said. 'I feel like there's not a lot that's just left on the table.' Even so, Perry told IndieWire there's an alternate world where they're still working on 'Videoheaven,' because the act of making it was such a pleasure. 'I just can't overstate the joy of working on something with no pressure, no external necessity, no money on the line, no deadlines, no anxious producers, and no reason to finish it other than because we think it's the best version it could be, and that purity is entirely — I mean, you can't do that at a profession level. That's called a passion project. That's called being an artist.' 'Videoheaven' is now playing at the IFC Center in New York City. Best of IndieWire The Best Thrillers Streaming on Netflix in July, from 'Vertigo' and 'Rear Window' to 'Emily the Criminal' The Best Lesbian Movies Ever Made, from 'D.E.B.S.' and 'Carol' to 'Bound' and 'Pariah' All 12 Wes Anderson Movies, Ranked, from 'Bottle Rocket' to 'The Phoenician Scheme'
The Guardian
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Pavements review – US indie rockers and their dream director run four ideas at once
If ever a film-maker and a band were a match in indie heaven it is lo-fi writer-director Alex Ross Perry and 90s band Pavement, from Stockton, California (described here as 'the Cleveland of California'); the latter made critically adored albums throughout the 1990s with comparisons to the Fall and Lou Reed, while never signing to a major label. Now Perry has made a film about Pavement and it seems to be his intention here to avoid, strenuously and at all costs, obviousness – and perhaps the most clunkingly obvious thing for any newbie to ask about is the name. Pavement as opposed to Sidewalk because of a Brit affectation? No: just a functional name chosen almost at random and one that sounded right. Intriguingly, but finally a bit frustratingly, Perry is running four ideas at once, a kind of cine-quadriptych with the plurality signalled by the title. Firstly, it's a documentary about Pavement's return to live performance in 2022, complete with milky, blurry analogue video flashbacks to their 90s heyday. Secondly, an account of a touring museum exhibition about the band. Thirdly: a study of a jukebox musical project about Pavement called Slanted! Enchanted! after one of their albums, which had a three-day off-Broadway workshop presentation. And finally, a conventional fictional dramatisation of the band's history, entitled Range Life, of which we see a few clips, with Joe Keery as lead singer Stephen Malkmus, Nat Wolff as guitarist Scott Kannberg, Fred Hechinger as singer Bob Nastanovich and Jason Schwartzman as Matador Records chief Chris Lombardi. But it isn't entirely clear whether Range Life really exists as a standalone film, or how to judge or imagine its independent existence. We get a scene showing the actors doing an onstage Q&A after a screening, and it doesn't look like a fictional spoof. In the end, I wanted to see just one of these strands developed to feature length, perhaps especially the hilarious-sounding stage musical idea with Pavement tracks reinvented as showtune zingers. As it stands, Pavements doesn't have the clarity and punch of, say, Ondi Timoner's psych-rock documentary Dig!, or the dramatic cogency of Perry's recent 90s rock drama Her Smell. It is a palimpsest of approaches: four concepts placed on top of each other, but none can be seen clearly. For me, Perry's masterpiece is still his 2015 drama Listen Up Philip. But this film might well provide something for the Pavement fanbase. Pavements is on Mubi from 11 July.
The Guardian
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Pavements review – US indie rockers and their dream director run four ideas at once
If ever a film-maker and a band were a match in indie heaven it is lo-fi writer-director Alex Ross Perry and 90s band Pavement, from Stockton, California (described here as 'the Cleveland of California'); the latter made critically adored albums throughout the 1990s with comparisons to the Fall and Lou Reed, while never signing to a major label. Now Perry has made a film about Pavement and it seems to be his intention here to avoid, strenuously and at all costs, obviousness – and perhaps the most clunkingly obvious thing for any newbie to ask about is the name. Pavement as opposed to Sidewalk because of a Brit affectation? No: just a functional name chosen almost at random and one that sounded right. Intriguingly, but finally a bit frustratingly, Perry is running four ideas at once, a kind of cine-quadriptych with the plurality signalled by the title. Firstly, it's a documentary about Pavement's return to live performance in 2022, complete with milky, blurry analogue video flashbacks to their 90s heyday. Secondly, an account of a touring museum exhibition about the band. Thirdly: a study of a jukebox musical project about Pavement called Slanted! Enchanted! after one of their albums, which had a three-day off-Broadway workshop presentation. And finally, a conventional fictional dramatisation of the band's history, entitled Range Life, of which we see a few clips, with Joe Keery as lead singer Stephen Malkmus, Nat Wolff as guitarist Scott Kannberg, Fred Hechinger as singer Bob Nastanovich and Jason Schwartzman as Matador Records chief Chris Lombardi. But it isn't entirely clear whether Range Life really exists as a standalone film, or how to judge or imagine its independent existence. We get a scene showing the actors doing an onstage Q&A after a screening, and it doesn't look like a fictional spoof. In the end, I wanted to see just one of these strands developed to feature length, perhaps especially the hilarious-sounding stage musical idea with Pavement tracks reinvented as showtune zingers. As it stands, Pavements doesn't have the clarity and punch of, say, Ondi Timoner's psych-rock documentary Dig!, or the dramatic cogency of Perry's recent 90s rock drama Her Smell. It is a palimpsest of approaches: four concepts placed on top of each other, but none can be seen clearly. For me, Perry's masterpiece is still his 2015 drama Listen Up Philip. But this film might well provide something for the Pavement fanbase. Pavements is on Mubi from 11 July.
