EVERY BEAT OF MY HEART is a personal and musical biography of Johnny Otis, the musician, bandleader, producer and songwriter who is often called the Godfather of Rhythm & Blues. But it is more than the biography of one man, just as the story of R&B is about much more than music. Johnny’s six decade odyssey through the world of African-American music is a window into aspects of race and culture that have defined and transformed contemporary America and , in turn, have touched the rest of the world.
Sound Unseen is very pleased to present a special screening of this work-in-progress rough cut edit.
Sound Unseen 9 opening night reception in the Riverview lobby before and after the film. Meg Ashling will be performing during the pre-movie party and Ballast during the afterparty.
Director: Peter Rosen Writer: Sara Lukinson Running Time: 89 minutes
Americas foremost humorist and commentator, Garrison Keillor, takes his skits and jokes, music and monologues across the country in his traveling radio show, spinning his stories into American gold. This free form, intimate look at the private man in the public spotlight goes behind the scenes of Americas most popular radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, and inside the imagination of the man who created it.
Over one year of filming has resulted in an unusual portrait that cannot be defined by the standard terms of chronological biography: the subject himself is an enigma, and the fictional world he has created has become a real place in America. The film follows the writer/performer as he mingles fact and fiction to create one of Americas favorite places, Lake Wobegon.
Today, there is no one like him. His take on America is both pungent and poignant. In the best tradition of Will Rogers and Mark Twain, Keillor mixes story telling and humor to give us a light hearted but deeply felt reflection of ourselves. A prolific author with more than 20 books to his credit and a weekly column, he is also a highly sought after speaker and lecturer. He is credited with reviving the virtually lost art of live radio entertainment in America; his weekly radio show, started in 1974, has more than 4 million listeners and is broadcast on 558 stations. Keillor and his characters leapt onto the big screen and an even wider global audience in Robert Altman’s film, A Prairie Home Companion.
Keillors down-home commentary and love of the authentically American, have made him into an everyman philosopher. His highly entertaining radio show with songs and stories is written with a poets heart. While comparisons will be made between him and America’s great humorists and essayist from H. L. Mencken to Mark Twain, James Thurber, Robert Frost, and Will Rogers, Garrison Keillor is unique. In this untraditional biography, we begin to see how and why.
At 14, Toronto school friends Steve “Lips” Kudlow and Robb Reiner made a pact to rock together forever. Their band, Anvil, went on to become the “demigods of Canadian metal,” releasing one of the heaviest albums in metal history, 1982’s Metal on Metal. The album influenced a musical generation, including Metallica, Slayer, and Anthrax, that went on to sell millions of records. But Anvil’s career took a different path - straight to obscurity.
Director Sacha Gervasi has concocted a wonderful and often hilarious account of Anvil’s last-ditch quest for elusive fame and fortune. His ingenious filmmaking may first lead you to think this a mockumentary, but it isn’t. Gervasi joined the legendary heavy-metal band as a roadie for a tour of Canadian hockey arenas, so he has intimate insight into the members’ eccentricities. It’s fascinating to see the reality of their day-to-day lives as they struggle to make ends meet, take a misguided European tour, and engage in antics on the road - which is not always lined with fans. Gervasi even finds a softer center to this raucous film, introducing us to band members’ ever-supportive, but long-suffering, families. At its core, Anvil! The True Story of Anvil is a timeless tale of survival and the unadulterated passion it takes to follow your dream, year after year. Anvil rocks - it has no other choice.
The documentary “Nerdcore Rising” investigates the newest, wave of hip-hop, nerdcore, as it follows the godfather of the genre, MC Frontalot, on his first national tour. Beginning in South Carolina and culminating in nerd mecca - the Penny Arcade Gaming Convention in Seattle - masses of fans across the country come out to bask in the Front’s geek glory as he strives to achieve mainstream success.
Frontalot fanatics are the real stars of the film. They are hackers and gamers, bloggers and podcasters, they play World of Warcraft, live virtually in Second Life, and of course, they love nerdcore hip hop. In short, they are hardcore nerds, and together, they illustrate the funny, fascinating, and unapologetically uncool cultural phenomenon that is nerdcore.
Behind the scenes, relationships among Front and his band are challenged by their experiences on the road. Frontalot and keyboardist Gaby Alter (AKA G Minor 7) are childhood friends, and both met bassist Brandon Patton (AKA Blak Lotus) in college. Strugis, the drummer, tries to fit in as the new guy. The tour brings out the natural flirt in Brandon, the stubborn taskmaster in Sturgis, the genius-but-flighty qualities of Gaby, and the ultimate funny nerd-leader in Front.
Throughout the film, music industry notables provide insight into nerdcore. Old school trailblazers like Prince Paul and contemporary hip hop aficionados like J-Live examine the legitimacy of nerdcore as a subgenre of hip hop. Music-nerd celebrities like Weird Al Yankovic and Jello Biafra discuss the origins of nerdcore while gaming-geek celebs Gabe and Tycho expound on the digital revolution that is enabling the nerdcore movement.
MC Frontalot wants to live in a world where nerdcore is a real genre of hip hop and where other MC’s take him seriously as a rapper-de-la-resistance! *Nerdcore Rising* is embedded in the nerd trenches, illuminating this struggle.
Director: David Kleijwegt Running Time: 70 minutes
In almost fifteen years, Low became an institution on the indie and alternative scenes. Famous for their quiet, beautiful slow songs, and fascinating harmonies, as well as their religious background (core members Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker are Mormons). For this documentary, a film crew followed Alan and Mimi on tour, at home in Duluth, MN, in their church community, and as parents. It’s more than an on-the-road or behind-the-scenes video. It shows Sparhawk as the ambivalent main character in an intriguing movie about religion, violence, conscience, and madness. It can also be seen as a touching love story.
In the endless magic hour of the Icelandic summer, Sigur Rós played a series of concerts around their homeland. Combining both the biggest and smallest shows of their career, the entire tour was filmed, and now provides a unique insight into one of the world’s shyest and least understood bands captured live in their natural habitat.
The culmination of more than a year spent promoting their hugely successful ‘Takk…’ album around the world, the Icelandic tour was free to all-comers and went largely unannounced. Playing in deserted fish factories, outsider art follies, far-flung community halls, sylvan fields, darkened caves and the hoofprint of Odin’s horse, Sleipnir*, the band reached an entirely new spectrum of the Icelandic population; young and old, ardent and merely quizzical, entirely by word-of-mouth.
The question of the way Sigur Rós’s music relates to, and is influenced by, their environment has been reduced to a journalistic cliché about glacial majesty and fire and ice, but there is no doubt that the band are inextricably linked to the land in which they were forged. And the decision to film this first-ever Sigur Rós film in Iceland was, in the end, ineluctable.
Shot using a largely Icelandic crew (to minimise Eurovision-style scenic-wonder overload), ‘Heima’ - which means both “at home” and “homeland” - is an attempt to make a film every bit as big, beautiful and unfettered as a Sigur Rós album. As such it was always going to be something of a grand folie, but one, which taking in no fewer than 15 locations around Iceland (including the country’s largest ever concert at the band’s Reykjavik homecoming), is never less than epic in its ambition.
Material from all four of the band’s albums is featured, including many rare and notable moments. Among these are a heart-stopping rendition of the previously unreleased ‘Gitardjamm’, filmed inside a derelict herring oil tank in the far West Fjords; a windblown, one-mic recording of ‘Vaka’, shot at a dam protest camp subsequently drowned by rising water; and first time acoustic versions of such rare live beauties as ‘Staralfur’, ‘Agaetis Byrjun’ and ‘Von’.
Filed Under (Movies) by mojomarshall on 10-10-2008
Major Organ and the Adding Machine will be playing before Merely Mouthpiece. See both films on the same ticket.
Tuesday, October 28
7:15 PM
Showing at Sound Unseen’s Underground Screening Facility
2820 E. 33rd St in South Minneapolis
$8
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Director: Eric Harris Running Time: 25 minutes
A disgruntled interdimensional pastry chef sends two unwitting children on a desperate mission through time, space and the frozen foods isle with the mysterious bearded ones and an army of telephone poles in hot pursuit. A film for the whole family to ponder, so bring the kids!
Writer and Director: Bahman Ghobadi Running Time: 107 Minutes
Half Moon is the moving and beautiful new film from Kurdish director Ghobadi (A Time for Drunken Horses, Turtles Can Fly). Mamo, an iconic Kurdish musician in the twilight of his life and in failing health, must lead a dozen of his sons to Iraq for a concert - “A Cry of Freedom” - to celebrate the fall of Saddam Hussein and the end of his repression of Kurdish music. Their plan is to drive across the border between Iranian and Iraqi Kurdistan, but the road will be long and winding and the local wise man has predicted calamity. On their quest, the men will encounter the most sublime visions alongside the most horrendous brutality - primarily meted out by border guards. But first they must pick up Hesho, Mamo`s exiled singer and muse. The “celestial voice” she represents takes on a divine, transformative power, and Mamo is left in a state of grace no one could ever have anticipated.
Director: Christian Karim Chrobog Running Time: 93 minutes
“Left home at the age of seven / One year later I leave with an AK-47.” For hip-hop artist Emmanuel Jal, a veteran of the 20-year civil war in southern Sudan, these lyrics are hardly empty posturing. One of the tens of thousands of “lost boys” of the Sudan, Jal left his devastated home in 1987. At a United Nations camp for Sudanese refugees in Ethiopia, he became the children’s spokesperson and soon joined the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, training to fight the Arab-dominated north right under the UN’s watch. After almost five years, he and his friends deserted, embarking on a harrowing journey that few survived. Now in his 20s, Jal is using his music to raise awareness about the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Sudan and the plight of child soldiers throughout the world. First-time filmmaker C. Karim Chrobog follows Jal as he performs at a fundraiser and meets with students in Washington, DC then returns to Sudan for the first time in 18 years to reunite with his family, including the father who summoned him to war and then abandoned him. On the way he visits a battlefield that brings back painful memories, a UN camp in Kenya for Sudanese orphans, and the Nairobi prep school where he wound up after a chain of events so remarkable they’ll soon be retold in a movie directed by Tony Scott. “I believe I survived for a reason,” raps Jal in his hit “War Child,” and that reason is evident in every frame of Chrobog’s moving portrait.
Wholphin is a quarterly DVD magazine from McSweeney’s, lovingly encoded with the best short movies, documentaries and uncategorizable films — from rare Spike Jonze documentaries to Alexander Payne’s first short feature. If it’s good, rare, new or unseen, it’s on Wholphin.
Heavy Metal Jr.
24 minutes
Directed by Chris Waitt
A band of Scottish 9-year-olds singing “Satan Rocks” at the county fair and trying to rebel against a world that thinks they’re cute.
Death to the Tinman
12 minutes
Directed by Ray Tintori
Bill loves Jane and she loves him, but in this small town, many are jealous of Bill, especially the volunteer firefighters.
Heavy Metal Drummer
6 minutes
Directed by Toby MacDonald and Luke Morris
A Moroccan teenage metal fan breaks the mold and rocks out while performing at a wedding. Cameo by Terry Bozzio.
Chonto
13 minutes
Directed by Carson Mell
Third installment in Carson Mell’s animated Bobby Bird series. Featuring an aging rock star adopting a heroin addicted carnival monkey.
Patton Oswalt/David Bryne
6 min
Directed by Wholphin
Patton Oswalt stares at the camera for five minutes, followed by David Bryne doing a country cover of “There Stands the Glass” in a storage locker.
Shot Through
3 minutes
Directed by Tom Dale
Shooting up a drum kit out in the English countryside.
MORE
6 minutes
Directed by Mark Osborne
An Academy Award nominated animated short about the tolls of the pursuit of happiness, set to New Order’s “Elegia.”
Born Like Stars
5 minutes
Directed by Steve Haddock and Brad A. Seibel
Baby squid, born like stars, 6000 feet under the sea. Set to the music of Colleen.
Writer and Director: Jim Jarmusch Running Time: 121 minutes
Johnny Depp delivers a remarkable performance in this highly acclaimed tale of adventure and intrigue in the wild, wild west! A young man in search of a fresh start, William Blake (Depp) embarks on an exciting journey to a new town … never realizing the danger that lies ahead. But when a heated love triangle ends in double murder, Blake finds himself a wanted man, running scared — until a mysterious loner teaches him to face the dangers that follow a “dead man.” With an outstanding supporting cast including Gabriel Byrne (The Usual Suspects), Crispin Glover, Iggy Pop, Gibby Haynes and Robert Mitchum (Cape Fear), and an original soundtrack by Neil Young, Dead Man is another motion picture triumph from filmmaker Jim Jarmusch.
Directors: Mark Flanagan and Andrew van Baal Running Time: 112 minutes
An intimate club nestled away on a busy Hollywood street, Largo has garnered a reputation among performers and fans alike as a place where what’s on stage truly matters. (Talking during shows is frowned upon, and heaven help you if your cell phone goes off.) This respect for the artists and their work carries over in this film by club owner Mark Flanagan and filmmaker Andrew van Baal. Circumventing flashy MTV-style lensing or editing, Largo places its focus squarely on the musicians and comedians onstage—no self-important interviews or backstage antics here—allowing the performances to truly shine through.
The talent on display is amazing, as the Largo extended family includes musicians and comedians like Aimee Mann, Fiona Apple, Sarah Silverman, E from the Eels, Patton Oswalt, Zach Galifianakis, and multi-instrumentalist/in-house musical genius Jon Brion. Even actor John C. Reilly gets in on the act, telling a behind-the-scenes story about Boogie Nights that you could only imagine hearing in a magical place like Largo.
Sunday, October 26
3:00 PM
St. Anthony Main Theatre
$8
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Director: Jody Lambert Running Time: 83 Minutes
The most unique comeback story of the year. Dennis Lambert was one of the most successful and diverse songwriter/producers of the ‘70s and ‘80s, with hits like “Ain’t No Woman Like The One I’ve Got”, “Rhinestone Cowboy”, “Don’t Pull Your Love”, “Baby Come Back”, “One Tin Soldier” and “Nightshift”. He had chart-toppers in almost every genre of music — at one point four of his songs were simultaneously on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, a feat previously accomplished only by The Beatles. That was then. Today, he’s a 60-year-old family man selling real estate in Florida. But it turns out his obscure 1972 solo album is huge… in the Philippines. A Filipino concert promoter has been begging Dennis to tour for decades, and in 2007 (thirty-five years after the release of his album) he finally agreed. “Of All The Things” is a hilarious and touching pop/rock/country/R&B documentary that follows Dennis on his whirlwind tour as he rediscovers his passion for music — a two week adventure that takes him from the comforts of Boca Raton, through the remote outer islands of the Philippines, to a sold-out show at Manila’s famous Araneta Coliseum for thousands of fans he never knew he had. Some lives deserve an encore.
Directors: Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti Running Time: 84 Minutes
Heavy Metal in Baghdad is a feature film documentary that follows the Iraqi heavy metal band Acrassicauda from the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 to the present day. Playing heavy metal in a Muslim country has always been a difficult (if not impossible) proposition but after Saddam’s regime was toppled, there was a brief moment for the band in which real freedom seemed possible. That hope was quickly dashed as their country fell into a bloody insurgency. From 2003-2006, Iraq disintegrated around them while Acrassicauda struggled to stay together and stay alive, always refusing to let their heavy metal dreams die. Their story echoes the unspoken hopes of an entire generation of young Iraqis.
In our age of mass-production and consumption, what is the role of the musician — both an instrument’s craftsman and its player? Musically, what have we gained? More importantly, what are we losing?
The most thoroughly handcrafted instruments in the world, Steinway pianos are as unique and full of personality as the world-class musicians who play them. However, their makers are a dying breed: skilled cabinetmakers, gifted tuners, thorough hand-crafters.
Note By Note is a feature-length independent documentary that follows the creation of a Steinway concert grand, #L1037— from forest floor to concert hall. It explores the relationship between musician and instrument, chronicles the manufacturing process, and illustrates what makes each Steinway unique in this age of mass production. From the factory floor in Queens to Steinway Hall in Manhattan, each piano’s journey is complex—spanning 12 months, 12,000 parts, 450 craftsmen, and countless hours of fine-tuned labor.
Filmed in key Steinway locations—the factory, Steinway’s reserved “Bank,” and private auditions—Note By Note is a loving celebration of not just craftsmanship, but of a dying breed of person who is deeply connected to working by hand. In the end, this is an ode to the most unexpected, and perhaps ironic, of unsung heroes. It reminds us how extraordinary the dialogue can be between an artist and an instrument—crafted out of human hands but borne of the materials of nature.
Take a behind the scenes look at one of the most influential indie bands of all time when a group of seven high school students set out to make a documentary on Sonic Youth!
As part of a non-profit called Project Moonshine, these teens were given cameras and a few days to be let loose and record a day in the life of Sonic Youth. The film is filled with behind-the-scenes interviews, original performances and the enveloping experience of a Sonic Youth concert from a new perspective. The result is a point of view that is authentically refreshing; a unique situation that allows the students to approach the band with an honesty and innocence that’s hard to find in veteran documentary filmmakers.
Filed Under (Movies) by mojomarshall on 01-09-2008
BUY TICKETS ONLINE Thursday, October 30
5:30 PM
St. Anthony Main Theatre
$8
……….
Director: Kerri O’Kane Running Time: 81 minutes
The rousing and heartbreaking story of Seattle band The Gits, whose promising start was cut short by the tragic murder of spirited lead singer Mia Zapata.
Rumored to have been descended from Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, the incredibly magnetic frontwoman had a powerful, soulful voice that belied her inherent shyness and distinguished The Gits from other punk bands of that day.
This riveting documentary is part musical history and part murder mystery, brimming with rare performance footage dating from their Antioch College days through their subsequent move to Seattle just before the world’s ears suddenly tuned into the emerging northwest music scene. The Gits would become an integral and influential part of the milieu if largely unsung in comparison to fellow Seattle bands like Nirvana and Soundgarden. But just as they were about to make it big, the band was dealt a mighty blow with the sudden, violent loss of their friend and band member whose lyrics eerily foreshadowed events to come.
Mia’s murder became a rallying point for seattle music scene, as the investigation ripped through the community with devastating results, leaving many female musicians feeling momentarily disempowered before turning their insecurity into anger and into a statement that would resonate with women the world over. A celebration of Mia’s life as well as a comprehensive testament to the band’s greatness as a whole. The film’s interviews reflect the enormous respect and love Mia’s peers had for her, and also the sadness over her absence that still haunts them today.
