It impressed me that the pharaohs seldom wore shirts.

Gimme Danger

(2016)

Oddly, given their reputation as a confrontational band, Jim Jarmusch’s film about Iggy and The Stooges isn’t all that explosive. Perhaps it’s down to the intervening 50 years and inevitable mellowing of the main suspects. Certainly, a good music documentary usually involves conflicting parties and opposing viewpoints, and Gimme Danger never really feasts on these things.

As such, while Jim Osterberg is an infinitely more interesting character than the Gallagher brothers, Gimme Danger isn’t as engaging a documentary as Supersonic. Jarmusch charts Iggy’s formative years, raised in his parents’ trailer, his decision to quit drumming (“Eventually I just got tired of looking at someone’s butt all the time”) the origin of the Stooges name (“We don’t anything wrong, but everyone’s picking on us” like their namesakes) and Iggy’s disavowal of much of the music of that era, which was “more of American Idol than people think”, citing corporate influences and singling out Crosby, Stills and Nash’s Marrakesh Express.

He’s casually amusing on influences, from his bare torso (“It impressed me that the pharaohs seldom wore shirts”) to wearing a dog collar after being inspired by the content of a pet shop window, and how Ed Sanders, who was writing The Family at the time, on Charles Manson, reprimanded him with “You don’t know what that means” (“I still don’t know what it means” admits Iggy). We hear of arrests, prodigious drug intake and Tony Defries’ management (Bowie’s very oblique here, this not touching on Iggy’s solo career), which was to side-line the band, eventually resulting in Iggy being “suspended for moral turpitude” and abandoned, the crunch coming when Defries took him aside in his limo and suggested he play Peter Pan. “No, no no, Tony, I gotta be Manson” Iggy replied.

There’s a nice snippet of archive interview where he comments “I think I helped wipe out the ‘60s”, and Jarmusch is careful to note the band’s influence (The Sex Pistols, The Damned), although the director has the same urge to unnecessarily enliven the interview footage with rudimentary animation, much as Supersonic does, which makes it seem like just another easily distracted rock doc on one level.

The coverage of the band’s “reunification”, all paid equally as communists, might actually be the more engrossing part, from the first seeds with Velvet Goldmine and J Mascis. Particularly bizarre is James Williamson’s return, having been a Sony exec and not having played guitar in 30 years. At their 2010 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Iggy finished his speech with “Thanks for being so… cool”; maybe that’s why Gimme Danger isn’t as rousing or invigorating as it might be. Iggy’s just so cool. Too cool.

Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.

I’m smarter than a beaver.

Prey (2022) (SPOILERS) If nothing else, I have to respect Dan Trachtenberg’s cynical pragmatism. How do I not only get a project off the ground, but fast-tracked as well? I know, a woke Predator movie! Woke Disney won’t be able to resist! And so, it comes to pass. Luckily for Prey , it gets to bypass cinemas and so the same sorry fate of Lightyear . Less fortunately, it’s a patience-testing snook cocking at historicity (or at least, assumed historicity), in which a young, pint-sized Comanche girl who wishes to hunt and fish – and doubtless shoot to boot – with the big boys gets to take on a Predator and make mincemeat of him. Well, of course , she does. She’s a girl, innit?

If you ride like lightning, you're going to crash like thunder.

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Everyone creates the thing they dread.

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This entire edifice you see around you, built on jute.

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I’m the famous comedian, Arnold Braunschweiger.

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I think it’s pretty clear whose side the Lord’s on, Barrington.

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Death to Bill and Ted!

Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991) (SPOILERS) The game of how few sequels are actually better than the original is so well worn, it was old when Scream 2 made a major meta thing out of it (and it wasn’t). Bill & Ted Go to Hell , as Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey was originally called, is one such, not that Excellent Adventure is anything to be sneezed at, but this one’s more confident, even more playful, more assured and more smartly stupid. And in Peter Hewitt it has a director with a much more overt and fittingly cartoonish style than the amiably pedestrian Stephen Herrick. Evil Bill : First, we totally kill Bill and Ted. Evil Ted : Then we take over their lives. My recollection of the picture’s general consensus was that it surpassed the sleeper hit original, but Rotten Tomatoes’ review aggregator suggests a less universal response. And, while it didn’t rock any oceans at the box office, Bogus Journey and Point Break did quite nicely for Keanu Reev

Just because you are a character doesn't mean that you have character.

Pulp Fiction (1994) (SPOILERS) From a UK perspective, Pulp Fiction ’s success seemed like a fait accompli; Reservoir Dogs had gone beyond the mere cult item it was Stateside and impacted mainstream culture itself (hard to believe now that it was once banned on home video); it was a case of Tarantino filling a gap in the market no one knew was there until he drew attention to it (and which quickly became over-saturated with pale imitators subsequently). Where his debut was a grower, Pulp Fiction hit the ground running, an instant critical and commercial success (it won the Palme d’Or four months before its release), only made cooler by being robbed of the Best Picture Oscar by Forrest Gump . And unlike some famously-cited should-have-beens, Tarantino’s masterpiece really did deserve it.

Poetry in translation is like taking a shower with a raincoat on.

Paterson (2016) (SPOILERS) Spoiling a movie where nothing much happens is difficult, but I tend to put the tag on in a cautionary sense much of the time. Paterson is Jim Jarmusch at his most inert and ambient but also his most rewardingly meditative. Paterson (Adam Driver), a bus driver and modest poet living in Paterson, New Jersey, is a stoic in a fundamental sense, and if he has a character arc of any description, which he doesn’t really, it’s the realisation that is what he is. Jarmusch’s picture is absent major conflict or drama; the most significant episodes feature Paterson’s bus breaking down, the English bull terrier Marvin – whom Paterson doesn’t care for but girlfriend Laura (Golshifteh Farahani) dotes on – destroying his book of poetry, and an altercation at the local bar involving a gun that turns out to be a water pistol. And Paterson takes it all in his stride, genial to the last, even the ruination of his most earnest, devoted work (the only disappoint

Piece by piece, the camel enters the couscous.

The Forgiven (2021) (SPOILERS) By this point, the differences between filmmaker John Michael McDonagh and his younger brother, filmmaker and playwright Martin McDonagh, are fairly clearly established. Both wear badges of irreverence and provocation in their writing, and a willingness to tackle – or take pot-shots – at bigger issues, ones that may find them dangling their toes in hot water. But Martin receives the lion’s share of the critical attention, while John is generally recognised as the slightly lesser light. Sure, some might mistake Seven Psychopaths for a John movie, and Calvary for a Martin one, but there’s a more flagrant sense of attention seeking in John’s work, and concomitantly less substance. The Forgiven is clearly aiming more in the expressly substantial vein of John’s earlier Calvary, but it ultimately bears the same kind of issues in delivery.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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