Week two of SIMON SWEETMAN's Telecom New Zealand International Film Festival daytrip consisted of mixed pleasures: Thank You For Smoking and You’re Gonna Miss Me considerable highlights; Wah-Wah and loudQUIETloud: A Film About The Pixies less so.


MY FINGERS were crossed that the second week of the festival would be a lot better for me; music-related docos were on offer – stock and trade for me. But it was still a mixed bag.

Before the music documentaries I took in Wah-Wah; I did this largely because I like Richard E. Grant. I’m no huge fan of his acting (beyond the virtuoso and visionary debut that is Withnail & I) but I am a fan of his writing; his film diaries are filled with great gossip and behind-the-scenes revelations. Importantly they are filled with him – you get the feeling that you get to know Richard E. Grant through reading his diaries. And he seems like a nice guy. It’s interesting that he felt it was seminal meeting Steve Martin, in a way they are similar. Both were great actors to begin with – but it’s their writing from which we get to hear and feel their real voice. All of this being said, Wah-Wah seemed (ironically) contrived. Based on Grant’s African childhood, the fictional recreation didn’t seem to ring true – even though this is very clearly a childhood reminiscence. The stiff tone made this an okay film, rather than a great film. I bet the written treatment was superb though; I recommend reading Grant’s prose if you haven’t already. Still, perhaps I’ll go see this again outside of the festival – when less pressure is stacked against it.

One film I’ll certainly be going to again outside of the festival is Thank You For Smoking. Not many people have said anything too negative about this film, and with good reason: it’s an excellent, pitch-perfect dark satire. The ace in the hole of course is Aaron Eckhart – a generally never-less-than-superb actor, who seems to revel in playing assholes. Like Richard E. Grant’s visionary, virtuosic display in Withnail, Eckhart kicked things off with that vile role in In The Company Of Men. So convincing was he, as a charmless corporate swine that Eckhart reported a woman chased him down the road brandishing a swinging handbag – a full 18 months after the movie had screened. It’s that ability of seeming so within the character as to not be acting, and no twee reliance on a modern “method” either, that has garnered Eckhart a cult of fans. Thank You For Smoking’s other strength, beyond its main star, is its subject matter – and of course within that, the timing of the subject matter. Now that the world outside is a giant ashtray and smokers might as well change their surnames to Bin Laden, it is spot-on timing to have a black-comedy, a social satire poking a stick in that general direction. It’s a film not to be missed. But you knew that already, right?

Now for the music.

loudQUIETloud: A Film About The Pixies suffers from one huge problem – The Pixies are not interesting. Don’t get me wrong, the band is responsible, whether by fluke, calculated design or the sheer serendipity of right-place/right-time, of creating some of the most memorable music of my adolescence. And this is an opinion so widely agreed with that we have films like loudQUIETloud – an easy pitch, but averagely executed. The closest the film comes to describing the band’s mercurial sound is the masthead of a title. Apart from that, we see a bored, middle-aged – vaguely contented – band of former merry pranksters. Kim Deal and Frank Black still don’t really speak – so to get around that they... don’t speak. It makes for poor on-stage chemistry. The 2004 reunion pleased everyone that had ever owned a Pixies album and felt the band was hard-done-by post-Nirvana. But it doesn’t mean The Pixies are a great band to watch and learn about. The whole point of this motley crew was that they made great music and it was best not to know the real man behind Black Francis’ (as Frank Black once was) warped, Sci-Fi and Pidgin-Spanish-obsessed mind. Kim Deal was one of the antecedents of the Riot Grrrl movement; it’s best not to know she’s an ex-junkie-turned-midget-nana. And this film, like the self-titled retrospective DVD released a couple of years ago, skims the surface, trawling for more, incapable of finding anything of any real merit.

The band’s songs still crank – and even if there’s no discernible chemistry on stage (it’d be hard to when the band’s two voices – in both a physical and literal sense – are barely speaking to one another still) but if you want to be introduced to, or reminded of, the sheer brilliance of The Pixies. Start at Surfer Rosa or Come On Pilgrim and carry on from there. They have a handful of albums and EPs that are necessary for any serious music fan to hear and re-hear. And films about the band miss the point; miss capturing the magic and mistake reverence as prime rationale for documentary making.


Thank God (or some such deity) for You’re Gonna Miss Me; as far as I’m concerned this was – for me, in the films that I saw – the festival’s absolute saving grace. Roky Erikson is the cult singer/songwriter/guitarist behind The 13th Floor Elevators; one of the hip psychedelic bands of the late 1960s. He fried his brain and disappeared from the scene, Syd Barrett-style (R.I.P Syd, by the way). Erikson made some sporadic forays back in to music with increasingly idiosyncratic releases, becoming a fringe artist for a, I guess you’d have to say, pre-post-punk (if that makes sense?) movement. And of course all the right people (Sonic Youth, Beck, Pixies) think he’s still cool. And the Elevators’ music has certainly stood up well over time – just listen to their most famous song (this film’s title), it’s a masterpiece that mixes Screaming Jay Hawkins’ mad blues holler with The Animals’ driving white-boy rhythm’n’blues and Brian Jones-era Rolling Stones. It’s sub-Beefheartian blues and rock (in the best way possible); not quite as out there as Zappa, far more accessible than so many other “outsider-rock” acts; and perhaps most likely – the obvious antecedent for The Brian Jonestown Massacre; easily the MVPs of last year’s film festival thanks to their film-stealing cameo in the Dandy Warhols doco, DiG!.

But this documentary covers the Elevators for about 20 minutes, gives the viewer enough background (if you need any more, go buy the Lenny Kaye-compiled Nuggets boxset, for a full overview of not just their sound, but the sound). The rest of the documentary takes in the fact that, not properly cared for, Erikson’s fragile state of mind (he’s schizophrenic, with residual drug-induced psychosis) cannot possibly improve. In his 50s he’s living at home with mum in a junk-filled house that even John Waters couldn’t have slapped a couple of flamingos outside the front door to “improve”, as it were.

And he collects and catalogs junk-mail, logging every item – among other eccentricities. The centre of the film is that Roky’s youngest brother wants to help him – wants to get to know his brother once again and restore some of his former faculties. This fly-on-the-wall film account is moving, bizarre and occasionally downright intriguing. It’s beautiful though – covering the human spirit, the confusion of the human mind, the conflicts of an artistic person at a total loss to be able to create and with a total need to do exactly that; and so much more. Essentially – this ostensibly music-related documentary – manages, unlike the film about the Pixies, and unlike this festival’s other music films (though the Hardcore and Metal films were fine for fans of those genres) to actually transcend that limited scope. Finally, this is a human story. And like last year’s The Devil And Daniel Johnston it is a must-see epic of documentary-making; perfectly realised, immaculately conceived and ultimately as baffling as it is celebratory. Pathos and passion collide.

Basically it made up for any of the drek I watched.

See also:
» Festival by Day: Week One