Tweet Numerous films have explored music as a form of protest, and at first glance Let Fury Have the Hour seems cut from the same cloth, with its all-star cast of politically minded artists. But not long into Antonino D’Ambrosio’s rousing documentary, it becomes clear that something both more broad and more nuanced is afoot. Very loosely based on D…

Tweet Raymond Scott Deconstructing Dad, Stan Warnow’s music documentary about the enigmatic composer, bandleader, and inventor Raymond Scott, makes an overdue theatrical bow on Friday, July 13, at Greenwich Village indie/art house Quad Cinemas. It’s a story, and a movie, well worth getting to know, so if you missed it the first time around, here’s …

Tweet Martin Scorsese’s mammoth music documentary George Harrison: Living in the Material World has been widely hailed (including in these pages) for the breadth and cinematic skill with which it tackles the life of the so-called Quiet Beatle. But the bubble of approbation has been pricked by some very sharp critical sticks, variously objecting to …

Tweet Tony Palmer at the Sound+Vision music film festival. Photo by Tommy Weir/Cinema North West. In this edition of See It Loud, the music documentary podcast, we continue our conversation with Tony Palmer at last week’s Sound+Vision music film festival in Sligo, Ireland. After detailing the tangled history of his restored Leonard Cohen tour docum…

Tweet Editor’s note: With the very belated theatrical release in January of the storied 1974 Leonard Cohen tour documentary Bird on a Wire, we’re reposting our 2011 interview with the great music-film maker Tony Palmer on the doc’s tortured history and glorious rebirth. Since film sidetracked him from an academic career in the 1960s, Tony Palmer ha…

Tweet In his music film How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin, the distinguished British documentarian Leslie Woodhead tackles the untold story of a generation of young Soviets’ illicit love for the Fab Four, and how that passion ripped a gaping hole in the Iron Curtain. It’s a tale of crude bootleg vinyl, homemade guitars, and befuddled apparatchiks …

Tweet Kevin Gant Through the magic of podcasting, See It Loud returns to Los Angeles to talk to acclaimed feature filmmaker Jay Duplass (Baghead, Cyrus) about his new music documentary, Kevin, which screens this week at LA’s Don’t Knock the Rock film fest. For his first nonfiction film, Duplass tracked down the musical hero of his Austin film-schoo…

Tweet Bob Forrest was the crazed frontman of indie cult band Thelonious Monster. Patty Schemel was the pounding drummer driving Hole in its heyday, and one of the few out lesbians in mainstream rock ‘n’ roll. And for a while in the 1990s, they might have topped anyone’s list of LA rock’s likeliest drug casualties. Schemel spent time as a homeless c…

Tweet Coinciding with the reunited Pulp’s first tour in nine years, The Beat Is the Law – Fanfare for the Common People traces Jarvis Cocker and company’s long, bumpy ride to Britpop stardom against the backdrop of musical and social ferment the 1980s wrought in their hometown of Sheffield. Due out on DVD tomorrow, Eve Wood’s documentary threads Pu…

Tweet From the mid-’80s to the late ’90s, the sound of British indie rock was the sound of Creation Records, the buccaneering label that launched the Jesus and Mary Chain, Ride, Primal Scream, Teenage Fanclub, and a little Mancunian outfit called Oasis, among others. A dozen years after mercurial founder Alan McGee shuttered the label, audiences al…

Tweet It’s music docs back and forth on the latest edition of See It Loud as the MFW team reviews what we saw at South by Southwest and previews a highlight of the upcoming Chicago International Music & Movies Festival (CIMMFest). First, Andy Markowitz, Dave Watson, and Cinetic Media’s Matt Dentler offer post-Austin analysis on the SXSW music doc l…

Tweet With their genre-bending sound, furious shows, and all-out assault on musical and racial stereotypes, Fishbone has done just about everything a band could do, except become stars. Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone tells the tale of one of the great live bands of the last 30 years, an all-black outfit that emerged from LA’s early ‘80s h…

Tweet It’s See It Loud’s first remote! Direct from Austin, Texas, MFW talks to director Andrea Blaugrund Nevins, producer Cristan Reilly, and Jim Lindberg, ex-frontman for SoCal skate-punk icons Pennywise, about The Other F Word, a South by Southwest world premiere that takes an intimate look at what happens when punk veterans like Lindberg, Flea, …

Tweet All sonic and cinematic roads lead to Austin this week as the 25th anniversary edition of South by Southwest gets underway Friday. As the MusicFilmWeb team prepares to hit the Texas capital for a smorgasbord of music, movies, breakfast tacos, and Lone Star beer, we’re talking SXSW music docs on See It Loud. First up, Andy Markowitz talks to S…

Tweet On this edition of See It Loud we’re kickin’ it old school with Dick Fontaine, one of the deans of British documentary and the director of the rare hip hop docs Beat This! and Bombin’. Made for British TV in the 1980s and screening February 19 and 24 at New York’s Anthology Film Archives as part of an eight-day retrospective of Fontaine’s nea…

Tweet Morgan Neville has covered a lot of ground in his music doc career, from Nat King Cole to Hank Williams to the Brill Building to Memphis soul. But never has he – or many other nonfiction filmmakers, for that matter – made such a neck-snapping swerve in subject matter between projects as with his latest work. After documenting the making of Ig…

Tweet Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?) unravels the life and art of one of the most enigmatic pop stars of his day. Harry Nilsson was a New York kid who wound up in 1960s Los Angeles and rode omnivorous songwriting chops, a three-and-a-half octave vocal range, and a highly publicized endorsement from The Beatles to the…

Tweet Wavy Gravy has been at the forefront of the American counterculture for 50 years, from the Greenwich Village Beat scene to the Merry Prankster acid tests to the muddy fields of Bethel, N.Y., where he and his cohorts from the famed Hog Farm commune fed the Woodstock masses and talked down victims of the brown acid. Wavy’s Woodstock stage annou…

Tweet The 2008 documentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil turned a has-been Canadian metal band and the middle-aged headbangers at its core, motormouth guitarist Steve “Lips” Kudlow and stoic drummer Robb Reiner, into hard rock folk heroes, persevering through Spinal Tap-ish indignities and heartbreaking obstacles in pursuit of their boyhood dreams of m…

Tweet Stephin Merritt might be the least likely icon in indie rock, a prodigious song stylist whose incisive, melodic, and musically off-kilter odes to love, lust, and heartbreak owe more to Tin Pan Alley than to Nirvana or the Clash (although he did write a song called “Punk Rock Love”). While his band, The Magnetic Fields, has attracted a small b…