Latest news with #BehindtheMusic
Los Angeles Times
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘Pavements' takes lovable liberties with the facts, delivering a '90s indie-rock band in full
By way of introduction, 'Pavements,' director Alex Ross Perry's experimental hybrid documentary about the '90s indie-rock paragons Pavement, refers to the group as 'The World's Most Important and Influential Band,' a label that seems intended to embarrass them and their self-effacing lead singer, Stephen Malkmus. Pavement was never U2 or Nirvana. Nothing about them suggests a term as grandiose as 'important,' much less stirs the soul like Kurt Cobain, whose nakedly personal lyrics are a far cry from Malkmus's high-end refrigerator magnet poetry, with its witty wordplay and off-kilter juxtapositions. And yet, let us whisper this part as quietly as possible: Perry sincerely believes in Pavement's era-defining greatness. And with 'Pavements,' he's made a film that nobly and triumphantly searches for a way to capture the band's essence. That doesn't mean he finds it easily, because the rough edges of this story could never be buffed out into a biopic like 'Bohemian Rhapsody' or an hour-long episode of VH1's 'Behind the Music.' What Perry has achieved here is perhaps best expressed by the name of Pavement's 1992 breakthrough album, 'Slanted and Enchanted.' It's hard to guess how non-fans might find their way through 'Pavements,' because even devotees will need to find their footing in this conceptual cat-herding project, which patches together a thumbnail history of the band through several distinct angles at once. In the present day, Perry documents the lead-up to the band's robust 2022 reunion tour, only the second time they've hit the road together since their unceremonious breakup in the year 2000. (Scott Kannberg, Pavement's second guitarist and vocalist known as 'Spiral Stairs,' remembers being so cash-strapped before a 2010 reunion that he was about to take a job as a Seattle bus driver.) Though Malkmus has maintained much of his lean, boyish West Coast cool, even edging toward late middle age, the quintet looks older and wiser, no longer burdened by their uncomfortable relationship with success. Pavement burned out like any other rock band, but a conventional rise-and-fall treatment wouldn't suit them. Folding their history and legacy on top of each other like the layers of a choux pastry, Perry and his editor, the documentary filmmaker Robert Greene, combine the tour footage with three other events, each building a piece of whimsical mythology. First, there's Pavements 1933-2002, an international exhibition that features artwork, Malkmus' old notebooks and other ephemera, like a clipped toenail from original drummer Gary Young. Then there's two staged endeavors, an off-Broadway musical called 'Slanted! Enchanted!' and a faux-Hollywood biopic titled 'Range Life,' featuring a cast of recognizable young faces, led by 'Stranger Things'' Joe Keery as Malkmus. Pavement never quite penetrated the mainstream, but Perry frees himself to imagine the band as a platinum-selling cultural force, even if he has to rewrite their history by hand. Though 'Pavements' doesn't like to linger in one place very long, it does patch together a rough chronology of the band's history from its suburban roots in Stockton, Calif., to its primordial iterations at the University of Virginia to the early singles and EPs that led to five full-length albums that spanned the 1990s. Perry and Greene let specific cultural moments speak for themselves: a humbling tour opening for Sonic Youth, Malkmus taking shots at Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots in 'Range Life,' Beavis and Butt-Head making fun of the video for 'Rattled by the Rush' and a miserable afternoon slot at Lollapalooza 1995, when one bored crowd in West Virginia started slinging mud at them. But 'Pavements' does its best to yada-yada through the bullet points and spend as much time as possible spinning fantasies. To that end, the behind-the-scenes clips that Perry offers of his Pavement musical are the most delightful in the movie, just for the counterintuitive thrill of watching theater kids sing and dance through a catalog that would seem to defy their essential earnestness. To hear a low-key, evocative track like 1997's 'Fin' performed by a stage full of pristine vocalists validates Perry's belief that Malkmus' songs 'can transcend their original form.' You find yourself laughing over a montage of fresh-faced zoomers trying their hand at lyrics like 'You can never quarantine the past,' and then you might admit, with equal astonishment, that it actually sounds great. By contrast, the movie-within-a-movie, 'Range Life,' isn't a movie at all, but a ruse that turns into an elaborate parody of Method acting. Perry frees himself to explore the process of simply preparing for a role in the abstract, not unlike Greene's 2016 documentary 'Kate Plays Christine,' which followed a real-life actor, Kate Lyn Sheil, as she researched the tragic life of newscaster Christine Chubbuck, who killed herself on air. To play the famously enigmatic Malkmus, Kerry goes to great and often hilariously absurd lengths to pin the man down, including a couple of visits to the Whitney Museum, where Malkmus once worked as a security guard, and on a quest to take a photograph of the singer's tongue to better capture the mechanics of his 'vocal fry.' Gazing at an iPhone shot of the inside of Malkmus' mouth, Kerry solemnly remarks, 'All the work that I've been doing comes from this place.' At a little over two hours long, 'Pavements' can feel a little like the band's notoriously misshapen 1995 opus 'Wowee Zowee,' a double album with only three sides. Yet the perfectly imperfect shape of 'Pavements' is similarly tailored to those who appreciate the band's creative unruliness. It also feels like an apt companion to Perry's last fiction feature, 2018's 'Her Smell,' which strongly alludes to the life of Hole lead singer Courtney Love and pays off a chaotic two-hour drama with a breathtakingly lovely final act. Hole and Pavement shared that main-stage lineup at Lollapalooza '95 — Love got to play at night to a more engaged crowd — and between these two films, Perry has told a prismatic story of the 'Alternative Nation' decade, when figures as disparate as Love and Malkmus were affecting the same generation. They may not have overlapped comfortably, but Perry picks up on their harmonies. Yet there's still a vast distance between Love's raw, arena-friendly confessionals and Malkmus' jagged phrasing and artful deconstruction. 'Pavements' is essential nonsense, preserving the band's enigmatic allure through the same mix of irony and misdirection. It slips pleasingly through your grasp.
Yahoo
06-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'Saturday Night Live' pays tribute to Val Kilmer after former host's death at 65
Saturday Night Live took a moment out from the comedy to pay tribute to former host Val Kilmer. A photo of the Batman Forever star, who died of pneumonia at age 65 on Tuesday, flashed onscreen just before the goodnights at the end of Saturday's show, hosted by Jack Black. Kilmer hosted SNL on Dec. 9, 2000, with musical guest U2. During the episode, the actor gamely parodied two of his most iconic roles: Top Gun's Ice Man in a sketch about the aging ex-Navy fighter pilot thinking he was going back to the danger zone as a commercial airline pilot, and The Doors' Jim Morrison in a take on VH1's Behind the Music in which the late rocker starts a supergroup in heaven called the Great Frog Society, with Jimi Hendrix (Jerry Minor), Janis Joplin (Molly Shannon), Keith Moon (Horatio Sanz), Buddy Holly (Jimmy Fallon), and Louis Armstrong (Tracy Morgan). During the 2000 episode, Kilmer also played Jeb Bush in a political soap opera sketch called "Palm Beach," a giggly actor who plays a gynecologist in "Veronica & Co," a talk show hosted by Shannon as a European supermodel, and did an impression of Burt Bacharach in returned years later for a memorable cameo in the Lonely Island's infectious 2011 digital short, "Best Friends," starring Andy Samberg and Katy Perry. The Tombstone star popped up as a brilliant lunatic who forces his way into a friendship with the pair and a handsome drug addict, played by Matt Damon. On Thursday, Kilmer's Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick costar Tom Cruise paid tribute to his onscreen rival. "I'd like to honor a dear friend of mine, Val Kilmer," Cruise said, while onstage at CinemaCon in Las Vegas to promote Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning. "I really can't tell you how much I admired his work, how much I thought of him as a human, and how grateful and honored I was when he joined [the] first Top Gun and came back for Top Gun: Maverick. He gave a lot to all of us with his performances." After asking the audience to observe a moment of silence to honor the late star's life and body of work, he finished by saying, "Thank you, Val. I wish you well on your next journey." Saturday Night Live airs Saturdays at 11:30 p.m. ET/8:30 p.m. PT on NBC and Peacock. Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
New York Times
13-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius)' Review: Struggling to Transmit
Partway through this new Questlove documentary about Sly Stone, his band, the Family Stone, and the joyous, urgent funk they made, I got a little sad. Not for Stone, per se, and not for fame's warping effect on his personality and relationships or for the serious drug addiction that maybe helped him cope with being that recognizable. (If 'psychedelia' was a look, he looked it: piles of hair often cherried by a hat; capes, tight leather and denim; shirts, vests and jackets that never ever seemed to close.) I got sad because I could predict the notes the movie would hit — collapses, breakups, recriminations, redemption. I could make that prediction because of all the 'Behind the Music' I've watched. This movie, 'Sly Lives!,' tells Stone's life as one of those '… and then it all fell apart' stories. Ahmir Thompson, the director better known as Questlove, proceeds with more care — with ardor even — than that series, which ran for about 17 years on VH1 and developed a formula that itself became an addictive experience. You don't know 'binge watch' until you've lost an entire day on that show's roller coaster. 'Sly Lives!,' which is streaming on Hulu, traces the arc of a vital career, and down is where, for a time, it led. Stone is an artist partly responsible for making 'too much, too fast,' in the rock 'n' roll universe, feel inevitable now. And if George Clinton happens to surprise you with the news that he and Stone had been using crack and were arrested in 1981 for possession, withholding that discovery constitutes minor cultural malpractice. Yet how does a filmmaker devise an alternative to the old rise-before-demise template? Failing that, how does a filmmaker enliven the journalism of the format with insight, feeling, personality, an argument? Questlove would like 'Sly Lives!' to brush the dust from Stone's pop pedestal, to celebrate his music as sui generis polymathic synthesis and as hip-hop's bedrock, to imply that his ethos, zeal, caution and nerve persist in his scores of studio-wizard and rhythm-vision progeny: for starters, Stevie Wonder, Prince, Lenny Kravitz, Outkast, Erykah Badu, Meshell Ndegeocello, LCD Soundsystem, Kendrick Lamar, Childish Gambino, Steve Lacy. But the movie gets lost in the gulf between standard, if illuminating, biography and roiling existential crisis. For 'Sly Lives!' is a title with freight. 'The Burden of Black Genius' is what follows in a parenthetical, but 'Black' gets a strikethrough. The film opens with its director asking for a definition of 'Black genius' from Clinton, D'Angelo, Chaka Khan, Q-Tip, Nile Rodgers, Jimmy Jam, Terry Lewis and the guitarist Vernon Reid. Thought bubbles ensue. André 3000's endorsement of Black genius as a phenomenon he loves 'when it happens' is as near an answer as anyone gets. And Stone, who's 81 now, evidently couldn't be cajoled into comment. He was born Sylvester Stewart and reared in Vallejo, Calif. His musical life began in the church and was fortified by playing records on the radio station KSOL and producing songs for other Bay Area acts at Autumn Records. He stopped studying music in college and, in 1966, formed a band of his own with his siblings, Rose (keys) and Freddie (guitar), alongside Cynthia Robinson (trumpet), Jerry Martini (sax), Greg Errico (drums) and Larry Graham (bass). (They all provided vocals. But one of the film's quieter achievements is the reminder that Stone was the pre-eminent funk singer — growls, yelps, wails; pulpit and pelvis.) Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The National
26-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
Review: Boyz II Men turn back the years in Abu Dhabi's Saadiyat Nights concert series
Who needs extra production when a group has all the vocal fireworks? The understated stage setup was both appreciated and savoured as US R&B group Boyz II Men made their Abu Dhabi debut on Saturday, performing as part of the Saadiyat Nights series. Backed by a dimly lit four-piece band and unfussy background visuals, the trio's near 90-minute display of vocal dexterity and flawless harmonies felt almost revolutionary in a current music landscape seemingly dominated by electronically processed vocals. It was also a reminder why the Philadelphia group – whose surviving members are Nathan Morris, Wanya Morris (not related) and Shawn Stockman – were one of the biggest vocal groups of their time, with a slew of big-selling hits. I mention 'vocal groups' because, as their episode in Behind the Music revealed, Boyz II Men's remarkable rise was halted by shifting musical trends. The industry pivoted from similar R&B-rooted African American acts to heavily promoting pop boybands such as the Backstreet Boys and Nsync; a shift the group suggested was driven, in part, by systemic racism within the music business. While internal struggles and shifting industry trends left the group in the wilderness for more than a decade starting in the late 1990s, their re-emergence was driven by a renewed desire to celebrate their hard-won legacy. Contemporary pop artists such as Bruno Mars and Justin Timberlake, who have drawn vocal inspiration from their era, have also helped shine a light on their enduring influence. As a result, Boyz II Men have found themselves packing concert venues from the US to Australia. Hence, their Abu Dhabi concert was as much a well-earned lap of honour as it was a showcase of a band revitalised. The ethereal Believe Us demonstrated the wondrous power of a perfectly executed three-point harmony. The same can be said for Water Runs Dry, where Nathan's rich baritone was expertly layered with the fluid harmonies of Wanya and Shawn. Such control and precision extend to their more dramatic moments, with modern R&B rarely offering a vocalist as commanding as Wanya, his booming tenor literally brought the crowd to their feet during storming performances of On Bended Knee and I'll Make Love to You. While Shawn's icy falsetto resonated in It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday – an elegiac ode to the departed. Crowd pleasers as ever, they sparked a mass karaoke sing-along in the heart-warming One Sweet Day, complete with lyrics displayed on the screen – mirroring the reaction their collaborator Mariah Carey received only a year earlier when performing the song during her solo concert on the same stage. Finishing their set where it all began, with a heartfelt and suitably poignant rendition of End of the Road alongside their debut single Motownphilly, Boyz II Men left the stage with a lasting reminder of a legacy that may have felt underappreciated at times but remains undeniably timeless. February 1: Omar Khairat The Egyptian singer will perform a collection of his enchanting and original symphonies. Tickets start at Dh250. February 15: Christina Aguilera The American singer is returning to the UAE capital for the first time in 17 years. Tickets are sold out. February 21: Gwen Stefani The American singer will perform solo hits like What You Waiting For and Hollaback Girl, alongside No Doubt classics such as Don't Speak. Tickets start at Dh295.
