Latest news with #Desire:TheCarlCraigStory
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Carl Craig documentary to make Detroit premiere as Movement festival weekend ramps up
In his own lengthy career, Carl Craig has become accustomed to sleeper hits — music that simmers off the radar before catching fire to wide acclaim. So the fast rise of a new documentary chronicling his work has been a refreshing surprise for the influential Detroit DJ and producer: 'Desire: The Carl Craig Story,' which is amid a prolific U.K. run, showcases the life and career of one of the most celebrated and innovative figures in the long history of Detroit techno. The 90-minute film was spearheaded by New York director Jean-Cosme Delaloye. 'My career is one where I do something and it takes a while before people get it,' Craig says, citing projects such as 1992's 'Bug in the Bassbin.' 'So when they told me the amount of screens showing this, it kind of blew my mind. Because that sounds like a hit record. It doesn't sound like the track under the counter at the record store.' The film will have its Detroit premiere Thursday — his 56th birthday — at Michigan Central's Newlab center, including a post-screening discussion with Craig led by WDET-FM's Ann Delisi. A reprise showing is scheduled Friday evening. Both are part of the bustling buildup to Movement weekend, the Memorial Day tradition that Craig helped launch with the Detroit Electronic Music Festival a quarter-century ago. (Craig is performing Saturday on the fest's Stargate Stage in a set with Moodymann, a Detroit friend and collaborator who's featured in the doc.) 'Desire' sheds light on an artist whose public persona has remained rather enigmatic through the decades, from his early Detroit family life to the globetrotting career that really took off after a 1989 London nightclub stint with Derrick May. It's an exploration of his eclectic influences — like deep jazz and the rhythms of copying machines at the shop where he once worked — and the path Craig trailblazed with his resulting work. Craig was connected to Delaloye in 2020 by Swiss DJ and Detroit techno devotee Mirko Loko, 'one of my brothers from another mother,' as Craig calls him. Delaloye was a veteran documentarian whose work had largely spotlighted political matter and social issues. Now he was seeking a topic outside that established zone. 'Mirko said, 'You know, you should follow Carl,'' Craig recounts. 'The plan at the beginning was they would follow me around for a year, and that would be the documentary. But as time moved on, the ideas changed. The creative juices moved around.' So what started as a project that was merely 'journaling my life' evolved into a film with a far wider scope. 'It's more celebrating the music and the people influenced by the music,' Craig says. 'I love how it came out. It's 90 minutes of excellence, to me, and it's great to see my life on the screen.' The documentary had its world premiere at the 2024 Tribeca Festival, and earlier this month made its U.K. debut in 80 cinemas, including an IMAX presentation. Craig was in that Tribeca audience last June for his first look at the film. He'd never seen himself on the big screen. 'I'm watching myself up there, watching my parents, close friends and mentors (on-screen). It was like watching my life unfold in front of me,' he says. 'I don't have to wait for a tragic accident or something where my life flashes before my eyes. I've already seen it.' As much as 'Desire' is a celebration of Craig, it's an ode to the city that made him. 'Detroit has a reputation that I think a lot of people in the United States don't understand,' Craig says. 'Detroit has this mystical reputation (overseas) for all this great music that's come from here — great and long-lasting talent, from Motown to Juan Atkins, Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson, Eminem, Aretha.' He hopes Delaloye's documentary — what Craig calls a love letter to Detroit — can do its part in shifting perceptions. 'Americans need to see that there's this respect for Detroit,' he says. 'People love it. The scene is revered, the music is revered. It's like a Valhalla for people when it comes to music.' Contact Detroit Free Press music writer Brian McCollum: 313-223-4450 or bmccollum@ Detroit documentary premiere 5:30 p.m. Thu. ($25), 5:30 p.m. Fri. ($15) Newlab at Michigan Central 2050 15th St., Detroit Sat.-Mon. Hart Plaza, downtown Detroit Single-day tickets ($205.66 general admission, $277.83 VIP) and three-day passes ($365.45 general admission, $499.47 VIP) available through See Tickets. Festival parking info and other details at This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Carl Craig film to make Detroit premiere as Movement festival ramps up
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Scotsman
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Film reviews: The Surfer Ocean with David Attenborough Desire: The Carl Craig Story
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... The Surfer (15) ★★★★ Ocean with David Attenborough (PG) ★★★★ The Uninvited (15) ★★★★ Desire: The Carl Craig Story (15) ★★★ If surfing is a state of mind — to paraphrase Patrick Swayze's guru-like surfer in action classic Point Break — then Nicholas Cage's new film The Surfer explores what might happen if said mind is thoroughly unhinged. Dispensing with his own Zen-like surfing-as-a-metaphor-for-life speech in the opening minutes, Cage's titular character — we never learn his real name — soon finds himself battered not by the waves, but by land-bound forces he can't control as his efforts to buy his former childhood home overlooking a primo Australian surfing beach run headfirst into his own precarious financial situation and a cult-like group of psycho locals intent on making Cage's outsider suffer when he nonchalantly tries to surf their break with his teenage son. Nicolas Cage in The Surfer | Contributed At first the hostility seems like a bit of macho posturing on both sides. But it soon takes on more sinister intent as Cage's reality appears to fracture and he spirals into vagrancy and violence, trapped like the very rat he at one point tries to force on his tormentors, whose own real-life jobs add additional levels of satire to this increasingly surreal psychological horror freak-out when they're revealed late on. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Like director Lorcan Finnegan's 2019 film Vivarium, The Surfer turns out to be something of a puzzle box movie, one fuelled — like Vivarium — by the stresses of buying property, but which also cannily riffs on the 1971 Australian New Wave classic Wake in Fright to explore a crisis in masculinity in a rapidly changing world. The material certainly brings out the best in Cage, whose acting pyrotechnics are put to disturbing use dismantling his middle-aged character's outwardly successful life piece by piece. Ocean With David Attenborough | © Silverback Films and Open Planet Studios Ocean with David Attenborough finds the 99-year-old force of nature squaring up for a fight in an epic documentary that simultaneously extols the wonders of the ocean and underscores the urgent action required to protect it. At the heart of the film is his conviction that the oceans of the world hold the key to alleviating the climate crisis, with scientific evidence pointing to the crucial role marine life plays in capturing carbon and producing oxygen, and coastal regions thriving when sustainable fishing is enforced. The problem is the industrial levels of destruction happening every day thanks to trawlers dredging up the ocean floors and destroying delicate ecosystems as part of the global fishing industry's ongoing efforts to maximise its catches amid ever dwindling levels of fish and shellfish. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Footage — presumably covert — of the damage being wrought is properly enraging, but Attenborough is no pessimist. His ability to lay out a clear-headed strategy for recovery by pointing to past environmental actions that have successfully demonstrated humanity's capacity to move away from destructive behaviour, not to mention all the scientific evidence regarding the ocean's own regenerative properties when left alone, offer solid reasons for hope. Meanwhile, the usual glorious images of the natural world we're all familiar with from his decades-long broadcasting career look even more resplendent on the big screen. Veteran movie actor Lois Smith has racked up credits with everyone from James Dean and Elia Kazan to Steven Spielberg and Wes Anderson, so when she turns up in The Uninvited as a forgotten actor called Helen who gatecrashes a Hollywood party in a confused state thinking that she still lives in the home she once owned in her heyday, her presence packs a poignant punch. It also catalyses a dark night of the soul for the party's attendees, not least hosts Sammy (Walton Goggins) and Rose (Elizabeth Reiser), whose marriage is soon revealed to be hanging on by a thread as the presence of the elderly Helen stirs up resentments about their respective careers (Sammy's an agent, Rose is an actor and mother), as well as existential questions about the ephemeral nature of fame and success in an industry that pays too much attention to such metrics. Writer/director Nadia Connors (who's married to Goggins in real life) offers a sharp insider view of this privileged, but frequently over-leveraged, tier of the film industry, feeding Reiser most of the best lines to underscore the casual misogyny of the business for women over 40. Rufus Sewell (as a megalomaniacal director client of Sammy's) and Pedro Pascal (as an old flame of Rose's whose movie stardom eclipsed her career) bring additional weight to the drama, but it's Smith who anchors it in something meaningful. Desire: The Carl Craig Story does what its title promises: serves up an intimate portrait of the pioneering Detroit techno producer whose work has been key to shaping dance music over the last 30 years. The film shows how he built on the legacy of the previous generation's Derek May to help broaden what dance music could be, his influence spreading to the club scenes in Britain and Europe just as EDM was starting to become a global phenomenon. Intercutting talking head interviews, tour diaries and a wealth of archival footage, it doubles up as a lively insight into an under-covered area of music history.
