Anvil! The Story Of Anvil debuted at Sundance 2008, a year that was
huge for documentaries at a festival in years past known for being the
launching pad for indie films. But despite being both a
critical darling and an enormous crowd pleaser, the film has followed
the trajectory of the troubled Canadian heavy metal band it depicts and has been
languishing on the festival circuit ever since.
The documentary opens with testimonial about Anvil's greatness from an
impressive list of
heavyweights: Slash (Guns'n'Roses), Lemmy Kilmister (Motorhead), Lars
Ulrich (Metallica) and Scott Ian (Anthrax), who credit the band with
inspiring their own musical growth if not the creation of heavy metal
itself. The Anvil band members are fully cooperative with the
film-making and are not oblivious to the humor of their situation. Now
in their mid-fifties and still dedicated to a genre of music with both
an extremely dated aesthetic and dwindling fanbase they stay in good
spirits despite very little external validation. We see them go on a
doomed eastern European tour (where one club owner attempts to pay them
in soup), work out deep-seated emotional issues while recording their
13th album and go to Los Angeles to attempt to find a record deal all
with little success.
First-time
director Sacha Gervasi (who wrote the screenplay for Steven Spielberg's
The Terminal) exhibits a keen and gentle eye for his subjects. The
stakes Anvil are up against are always made clear, but we also
empathize with their plight as we see their struggle through the
perspective of their loved ones who are clearly tired of the up's and
down's of the music industry but want to protect the gentle souls
behind the thrashing noise.
Anvil! The Story Of Anvil plays at the Reel Music festival January 9th
and 10th and will then open in limited release April 10th.
Also playing at this year's Reel Music film festival is the Wanda
Jackson documentary The Sweet Lady with the Nasty Voice. Despite one
film being about a failed
Canadian heavy metal band and the other being about a legendary
rockabilly
singer, both films similarly focus less on chronicling every detail of
their
careers and more on how a demanding, creative professions can take a
toll
on a person's family life. Oddly enough, they both also rely on Lemmy
Kilhead from Motorhead as
an expert talking head.
Jackson,
the daughter of a musician, started playing country music on traveling
circuits with the likes of (then unknown) artists like Johnny Cash,
Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley. Presley would
eventually become her boyfriend and encourage her to give into her
rowdier inclinations, which included dressing in slinkier outfits and
adding a snarl to her distinct drawl. It's a point of pride for Jackson
that Presley may have inspired the performative moxie she would become
known for, but that she had a song break the top 10 before he did. And
while other female performers were singing songs like "How Much Is That
Doggy in the Window?" (while practically dressed in burkas), Jackson
was singing about drinking and bed-hopping and taking her style cues
from film star Marilyn Monroe.
While the film pays careful
respect to Jackson's late in life conversion to Christianity, it does
not provide any insight to how she reconciled her once sexy, sin-loving
(and possibly -inducing) image that established her professionally with
her far more conservative life as a gospel singer. Nor does it mention
how she felt about the use of her song "Funnel of Love" in the classic
indie film But I'm a Cheerleader, a send up of religious re-programming
summer camps for homosexual teenagers. The film ends on a oddly bitter
note cataloging the number of people who believe Jackson belongs in the
Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame, including impassioned pleas from Bruce
Springsteen, Elvis Costello and Patti Scialfa. The viewer
is left wondering why a woman who has been such a pioneer in her field
(and still draws huge crowds) should care what a museum in Cleveland
thinks about her.
The Sweet Lady with the Nasty Voice plays
Sunday January 11th.
The Reel Music festival starts January 9th at the Northwest Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium at the Portland Art Museum.
See also:
- James Rocchi's interview with Anvil! director Sascha Gervasi and producer Rebecca Yeldham
Alan Ball has an axe to grind, possibly several axes to grind. After many years toiling as a sitcom writer for shows like Cybil and Grace Under Fire, he won an Academy award for writing the suburban exegesis American Beauty, created the HBO series Six Feet Under, an at times cruelly bleak dramedy about a family-run funeral home, and has now developed True Blood,
a Southern Gothic melodrama television series wherein vampires and
humans reside in strained coexistence. So it makes a certain kind of
sense that Towelhead,
his feature film debut as a director, would contain elements of racism,
child rape, pornography, interracial dating, teen sex and militarism --
all under the umbrella of comedy.
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