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The Guardian
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Pavements review – US indie rockers and their dream director run four ideas at once
If ever a film-maker and a band were a match in indie heaven it is lo-fi writer-director Alex Ross Perry and 90s band Pavement, from Stockton, California (described here as 'the Cleveland of California'); the latter made critically adored albums throughout the 1990s with comparisons to the Fall and Lou Reed, while never signing to a major label. Now Perry has made a film about Pavement and it seems to be his intention here to avoid, strenuously and at all costs, obviousness – and perhaps the most clunkingly obvious thing for any newbie to ask about is the name. Pavement as opposed to Sidewalk because of a Brit affectation? No: just a functional name chosen almost at random and one that sounded right. Intriguingly, but finally a bit frustratingly, Perry is running four ideas at once, a kind of cine-quadriptych with the plurality signalled by the title. Firstly, it's a documentary about Pavement's return to live performance in 2022, complete with milky, blurry analogue video flashbacks to their 90s heyday. Secondly, an account of a touring museum exhibition about the band. Thirdly: a study of a jukebox musical project about Pavement called Slanted! Enchanted! after one of their albums, which had a three-day off-Broadway workshop presentation. And finally, a conventional fictional dramatisation of the band's history, entitled Range Life, of which we see a few clips, with Joe Keery as lead singer Stephen Malkmus, Nat Wolff as guitarist Scott Kannberg, Fred Hechinger as singer Bob Nastanovich and Jason Schwartzman as Matador Records chief Chris Lombardi. But it isn't entirely clear whether Range Life really exists as a standalone film, or how to judge or imagine its independent existence. We get a scene showing the actors doing an onstage Q&A after a screening, and it doesn't look like a fictional spoof. In the end, I wanted to see just one of these strands developed to feature length, perhaps especially the hilarious-sounding stage musical idea with Pavement tracks reinvented as showtune zingers. As it stands, Pavements doesn't have the clarity and punch of, say, Ondi Timoner's psych-rock documentary Dig!, or the dramatic cogency of Perry's recent 90s rock drama Her Smell. It is a palimpsest of approaches: four concepts placed on top of each other, but none can be seen clearly. For me, Perry's masterpiece is still his 2015 drama Listen Up Philip. But this film might well provide something for the Pavement fanbase. Pavements is on Mubi from 11 July.
The Guardian
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Pavements review – US indie rockers and their dream director run four ideas at once
If ever a film-maker and a band were a match in indie heaven it is lo-fi writer-director Alex Ross Perry and 90s band Pavement, from Stockton, California (described here as 'the Cleveland of California'); the latter made critically adored albums throughout the 1990s with comparisons to the Fall and Lou Reed, while never signing to a major label. Now Perry has made a film about Pavement and it seems to be his intention here to avoid, strenuously and at all costs, obviousness – and perhaps the most clunkingly obvious thing for any newbie to ask about is the name. Pavement as opposed to Sidewalk because of a Brit affectation? No: just a functional name chosen almost at random and one that sounded right. Intriguingly, but finally a bit frustratingly, Perry is running four ideas at once, a kind of cine-quadriptych with the plurality signalled by the title. Firstly, it's a documentary about Pavement's return to live performance in 2022, complete with milky, blurry analogue video flashbacks to their 90s heyday. Secondly, an account of a touring museum exhibition about the band. Thirdly: a study of a jukebox musical project about Pavement called Slanted! Enchanted! after one of their albums, which had a three-day off-Broadway workshop presentation. And finally, a conventional fictional dramatisation of the band's history, entitled Range Life, of which we see a few clips, with Joe Keery as lead singer Stephen Malkmus, Nat Wolff as guitarist Scott Kannberg, Fred Hechinger as singer Bob Nastanovich and Jason Schwartzman as Matador Records chief Chris Lombardi. But it isn't entirely clear whether Range Life really exists as a standalone film, or how to judge or imagine its independent existence. We get a scene showing the actors doing an onstage Q&A after a screening, and it doesn't look like a fictional spoof. In the end, I wanted to see just one of these strands developed to feature length, perhaps especially the hilarious-sounding stage musical idea with Pavement tracks reinvented as showtune zingers. As it stands, Pavements doesn't have the clarity and punch of, say, Ondi Timoner's psych-rock documentary Dig!, or the dramatic cogency of Perry's recent 90s rock drama Her Smell. It is a palimpsest of approaches: four concepts placed on top of each other, but none can be seen clearly. For me, Perry's masterpiece is still his 2015 drama Listen Up Philip. But this film might well provide something for the Pavement fanbase. Pavements is on Mubi from 11 July.
Irish Times
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Alex Ross Perry on his Pavement documentary: ‘The concept was an absurd notion that this band would ever go gold or platinum'
More than 16 years into his film-making career, Alex Ross Perry can shake the most algorithm-trodden viewers out of their complacency. His unapologetically caustic, literary milieu, populated by spiky, self-absorbed humans, remains defiantly indie, made on modest budgets, with zero concessions towards 'relatable' entertainment norms. In Listen Up Philip , from 2014, Jason Schwartzman plays a misanthropic novelist who alienates everyone around him. In Her Smell, playing Becky Something, Elisabeth Moss delivers a ferocious performance as a volatile, drug-addled punk rocker. In the earlier Queen of Earth , Moss excelled as a grieving woman descending into paranoia. The film-maker's devoted following intersects with that of Paul Schrader, John Cassavetes and the American authors Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth. Pavements, Perry's new hybrid documentary portrait of Pavement, indie rock's least-bothered legacy act, is a thrillingly maximalist curveball from an auteur with such a disciplined, character-driven oeuvre. It's a world away from those films that Perry's cinematographer, Sean Price Williams, has described as 'people talking in rooms'. READ MORE 'You hope that everything you create will be a new process, no matter what,' says Perry. 'You're looking for that every time in some way or another. But, by definition, there are 40 primary characters in Pavements whom you're keeping track of. That is extremely rare and complicated – except for movies like Nashville [directed by Robert Altman, from 1975]. 'The movie is actually really several smaller movies. The challenge was making little tiny movies that fit into a bigger movie. I wanted to make something complicated and unprecedented.' Nearly 35 years after a band of self-styled slackers from Stockton, California, emerged with a batch of lo-fi, inscrutable songs, Pavement remain an outlier in American indie rock. They were never meant for the mainstream. Formed in 1989 by Stephen Malkmus and Scott Kannberg (aka Spiral Stairs), Pavement began as a studio experiment of distorted guitars and nebulous mumbling. They sold self-distributed cassettes and secured some basement shows. They scored an unexpected success with their much-loved album Slanted and Enchanted from 1992, but their jagged sound and nonsensical lyrics would never truly go mainstream. 'I always was hoping that it was music for the future. I mean, I think everyone who's not that successful in their time tries to think that,' says Malkmus early in Perry's film, a documentary that occasionally gives you the sense that you're watching the biggest act on the planet. A lot is going on. An anchoring timeline chronicles the band's 2022 reunion tour – their first since 2010 – featuring rehearsals and performances from dates across North America and Europe. Off-Broadway, hopefuls audition for Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical. A pop-up Pavement museum, ostentatiously titled Pavements 1933–2022, features authentic artefacts and apparent fakes. There's more chicanery in Range Life: A Pavement Story, fragments of a grandiloquent Hollywood biopic filmed within the film, starring Joe Keery as Malkmus, with Schwartzman as Chris Lombardi, founder of Matador Records, the band's long-time label. There is even a completely made-up awards-season denouement, featuring Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. It's an epic sprawl that came together surprisingly quickly following an approach by Matador. Lombardi pitched the idea, with Malkmus giving a clear directive: they didn't want a typical documentary or a scripted screenplay. The frontman's only note was a request for something 'confusing and weird'. 'Within six weeks of being contacted to come up with some sort of radical or unusual idea that could be a suitably unique Pavement movie, all of those strands were there,' says Perry. 'When I look at my early documents, the only thing in my notes that is not in the movie is a fictionalised art-house film – I had the idea that, in addition to a very cliched, silly, bad Hollywood movie, there would be an art film like Edvard Munch by Peter Watkins. All of the ideas were there from the outset. My first thought was the movie ought to be a mosaic.' In 1999, after a decade that had seen them have moderate hits with Cut Your Hair, Gold Soundz and Range Life, Pavement broke up with the same shrugs they brought to their live performances. They had sung and played off-key during shambolic television appearances. Their inclusion on the bill of the Lollapalooza festival in 1995 – an odd fit alongside Sonic Youth, Hole, Cypress Hill, Sinéad O'Connor, Beck and Coolio – almost started a riot. Do Pavement fit Perry's description of his most acerbic creations as 'people who can't get out of their own way'? 'When I first heard Pavement as a young person, I had no understanding of the complexity of what an artist's goals are,' the film-maker says. 'You don't think about that stuff when you're 13. You're just hearing a good song and catching a concert. That level of insight is invisible to a lot of the public, and often only visible in hindsight. 'But it certainly became their story in the 20 years after they broke up. After the reunion it became the story of unfulfilled ambition and missed opportunities and untapped potential. 'During my research for the film, which was all done in 2020, deep into the pandemic, when nobody in the band had seen each other since the 2010 reunion tour, the narratives I was given by everyone involved with the band spoke to that disappointment.' Then came a plot twist. Harness Your Hopes, an obscure track recorded in 1996, unexpectedly became one of the band's most popular songs. Despite never being released as a single or receiving significant radio play at the time, the track gained traction on Spotify in the 2010s – it now has more than 210 million streams – before igniting a dance craze on TikTok. 'At some point, making the movie, I looked at their Spotify page expecting to see Range Life or Cut Your Hair as their number-one songs. And suddenly I'm asking, 'Why does this song have tens of millions more views than everything else?' 'This song hasn't even been on my radar for narrative purposes. And then I googled it and discovered this crazy thing happened. By the time the band were rehearsing for the 2022 tour, this song had blown up and they were playing it as part of every show. I shot the video for it before we shot the movie.' It is a delightful second act, not just for Pavement but for Pavements. Perry's grandiose, counterfactual account of the band now feels strangely prophetic. 'We made this movie over a five-year span,' he says. 'The concept was an absurd notion that this band would ever go gold or platinum. We weren't thinking, Oh, that'll be funny, because sooner or later they'll have gold records. It was, like, This is the most ridiculous thing imaginable, because they haven't been a band for 25 years. And now the movie is out and the success that had eluded them for forever has happened.' Pavements is in cinemas from Friday, July 11th
The Guardian
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Michael Madsen's brooding charisma needed Tarantino to unlock it
Until 1992, when people heard Stuck in the Middle With You by Stealers Wheel on the radio, they might smile and nod and sing along to its catchy soft-rock tune and goofy Dylan-esque lyrics. But after 1992, with the release of Quentin Tarantino's sensationally tense and violent crime movie Reservoir Dogs, the feelgood mood around that song forever darkened. That was down to an unforgettably scary performance by Michael Madsen, who has died at the age of 67. Stuck in the Middle, with its lyrics about being 'so scared in case I fall off my chair', was to be always associated with the image of Madsen, whom Tarantino made an icon of indie American movies, with his boxy black suit, sinister, ruined handsomeness and powerful physique running to fat, playing tough guy Vic Vega, AKA Mr Blonde. He grooved back and forth across the room, in front of a terrified cop tied to a chair, dancing to that Stealers Wheel number, holding his straight razor, which he had removed from his boot – smirkingly preparing to torture the cop (that is, torture him further) by cutting off his ear. His Mr Blonde is a nasty piece of work, really without the ironising or humanising touches that Tarantino and co-writer Roger Avary speckle over the rest of the crew; Madsen brought beef and heft to the role and added ballast to the picture, making sure we realise that this was not a collection of snarky suit-wearing hipsters and standup comedians, but serious criminals. Madsen was to become a repertory player for Tarantino, though turning down the Vincent Vega role in Pulp Fiction (supposedly the brother of his Dogs character; Tarantino once considered bringing them together for a prequel called Double V Vega). Famously, the part went to John Travolta, Madsen having committed himself to Lawrence Kasdan's Wyatt Earp, playing Wyatt's brother Virgil. Perhaps this was serendipitous for Tarantino, because Madsen was a born supporting player. In Kill Bill: Vols 1 and 2, he played the oafish trailer-trash Budd, brother of David Carradine's intimidating Bill, a one-time member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad who has neglected his warrior vocation and run to seed, having to Bill's horror even pawned his priceless samurai sword. In Tarantino's The Hateful Eight, he was the creepy and taciturn loner Joe, slouching in the corner of the roadhouse where most of the action is set. Aside from the Tarantino appearances, Madsen played formidable wiseguy Sonny Black in Mike Newell's Donnie Brasco, deeply suspicious (as in Dogs) of a suspected cop, the pretty-boy newcomer Johnny Depp, sensing that something about him is off – and he himself played a cop (though a ruthless one) in Lee Tamahori's Mulholland Falls. In fact, Madsen was to make a living out of playing tough guys in a whole raft of forgettable pictures, sometimes with hardly more than a cameo. Perhaps Madsen could have had a different career – he did after all effectively apprentice as an actor with John Malkovich at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company; his wryly self-aware and self-satirising movie Being Michael Madsen is a nod to Being John Malkovich. Madsen's mother, Elaine Madsen, was an award-winning documentary film-maker and sister Virginia Madsen is Oscar-nominated for her performance in Alexander Payne's Sideways. But Michael Madsen found himself typecast in violent roles, despite having played a heartfelt, gentler role in Free Willy, and the broodingly intense poet Tom Baker, Jim Morrison's friend, in Oliver Stone's The Doors and he showed tender gallantry as Susan Sarandon's boyfriend in Ridley Scott's Thelma & Louise. Tarantino unlocked one very powerful side to Madsen – but he had more, and it was sad that somehow he couldn't show them as much as he wanted. But what natural charisma and presence.
The Guardian
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Tarantino untapped Michael Madsen's charisma and menace. It's a shame he couldn't show more
Until 1992, when people heard Stuck in the Middle with You by Stealers Wheel on the radio, they might smile and nod and sing along to its catchy soft-rock tune and goofy Dylan-esque lyrics. But after 1992, with the release of Quentin Tarantino's sensationally tense and violent crime movie Reservoir Dogs, the feelgood mood around that song forever darkened. That was down to an unforgettably scary performance by Michael Madsen, who has died at the age of 67. Stuck in the Middle, with its lyrics about being 'so scared in case I fall off my chair', was to be always associated with the image of Madsen, whom Tarantino made an icon of indie American movies, with his boxy black suit, sinister, ruined handsomeness and powerful physique running to fat, playing tough guy Vic Vega, aka Mr Blonde. He grooved back and forth across the room, in front of a terrified undercover cop tied to a chair, dancing to that Stealers Wheel number, holding his straight razor, which he had removed from his boot – smirkingly preparing to torture the cop (that is, torture him further) by cutting off his ear. His Mr Blonde is a nasty piece of work, really without the ironising or humanising touches that Tarantino and co-writer Roger Avary speckle over the rest of the crew; Madsen brought beef and heft to the role and added ballast to the picture, making sure we realise that this was not a collection of snarky suit-wearing hipsters and stand-up comedians, but serious criminals. Madsen was to become a repertory player for Tarantino, though turning down the Vincent Vega role in Pulp Fiction (supposedly the brother of his Dogs character; Tarantino once considered bringing them together for a prequel called Double V Vega). Famously, the part went to John Travolta, Madsen having committed himself to Lawrence Kasdan's Wyatt Earp, playing Wyatt's brother Virgil. Perhaps this was serendipitous for Tarantino, because Madsen was a born supporting player. In Kill Bill: Vols One and Two, he played the oafish trailer-trash Budd, brother of David Carradine's intimidating Bill, a one-time member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad who has neglected his warrior vocation and run to seed, having to Bill's horror even pawned his priceless samurai sword. In Tarantino's The Hateful Eight, he was the creepy and taciturn loner Joe, slouching in the corner of the roadhouse where most of the action is set. Aside from the Tarantino appearances, Madsen played formidable wiseguy Sonny Black in Mike Newell's Donnie Brasco, deeply suspicious (as in Dogs) of a suspected cop, the pretty-boy newcomer Johnny Depp, sensing that something about him is off – and he himself played a cop (though a ruthless one) in Lee Tamahori's Mulholland Falls. In fact, Madsen was to make a living out of playing tough guys in a whole raft of forgettable pictures, sometimes with hardly more than a cameo. Perhaps Madsen could have had a different career – he did after all effectively apprentice as an actor with John Malkovich at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company; his wryly self-aware and self-satirising movie Being Michael Madsen is a nod to Being John Malkovich. Madsen's mother, Elaine Madsen, was an award-winning documentary film-maker and sister Virginia Madsen is Oscar-nominated for her performance in Alexander Payne's Sideways. But Michael Madsen found himself typecast in violent roles, despite having played a heartfelt, gentler role in Free Willy, and the broodingly intense poet Tom Baker, Jim Morrison's friend, in Oliver Stone's The Doors and he showed tender gallantry as Susan Sarandon's boyfriend in Ridley Scott's Thelma & Louise. Tarantino unlocked one very powerful side to Madsen – but he had more, and it was sad that somehow he couldn't show them as much as he wanted. But what natural charisma and presence.
