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
Awesome music!Sounds great and I will be there next weekend for sure.
Posted by: Take 6 | February 03, 2009 at 05:55 AM