On April 11 we have an encore presentation of “Pop Life” with an in-depth interview with John Lennon’s personal photographer Bob Gruen. The legendary photographer opens up about taking famous pictures of every rock ‘n roll star from David Bowie and Led Zeppelin to The Clash and The Sex Pistols. Then the “Pop Life” panel, Canada’s most renowned celebrity photographer George Pimentel, photojournalist Richard Lautens and artistic content creator and photographer Elie Jonathan Kimbembe, discuss how to get the perfect shot.
Watch this episode HERE or catch up on any shows you may have missed HERE!
Film critic and pop culture historian Richard Crouse shares a toast with celebrity guests and entertainment pundits every week on CTV News Channel’s talk show POP LIFE.
Featuring in-depth discussion and debate on pop culture and modern life, POP LIFE features sit-down interviews with celebrities from across the entertainment world, including rock legends Sting and Meat Loaf, musicians Josh Groban and Sarah Brightman, comedian Ken Jeong, writer Fran Lebowitz, superstar jazz musician Diana Krall, stand-up comedian and CNN host W. Kamau Bell, actors Danny DeVito and Jay Baruchel, celebrity chefs Bobby Flay and Nigella Lawson, and many more.
The third episode of season five of “Pop Life,” featuring an in-depth interview with John Lennon’s personal photographer Bob Gruen, airs Saturday October 5, 2019 (8:30 pm on CTV NewsChannel, midnight on CTV). The legendary photographer opens up about taking famous pictures of every rock ‘n roll star from David Bowie and Led Zeppelin to The Clash and The Sex Pistols.
On the famous photo of John Lennon flashing a peace sign at the Statue of Liberty: “This photo of John at the Statue of Liberty I think is one of my most important. We actually started talking about it in October, because the US government was trying to throw John out of the country. I think that his crime was that he talked about peace and the time of war and President Nixon was very afraid that he was going to galvanize support for peace in a time of war. I thought that Statue of Liberty was a symbol of welcome to America, and if John was out there by the statue it would be a statement that we should be welcoming this great artist to America and not trying to throw them out.
“Oddly enough it didn’t really get published a lot at the time. I think a lot of people were didn’t really want to get involved in the politics of the case but after he passed away it became one of my most popular pictures because, I think, people see John Lennon as a symbol of personal freedom similar to the Statue of Liberty.”
Film critic and pop culture historian Richard Crouse shares a toast with celebrity guests and entertainment pundits every week on CTV News Channel’s all-new talk show POP LIFE.
Featuring in-depth discussion and debate on pop culture and modern life, POP LIFE features sit-down interviews with celebrities from across the entertainment world, including rock legends Sting and Meat Loaf, musicians Josh Groban and Sarah Brightman, comedian Ken Jeong, writer Fran Lebowitz, superstar jazz musician Diana Krall, stand-up comedian and CNN host W. Kamau Bell, actors Danny DeVito and Jay Baruchel, celebrity chefs Bobby Flay and Nigella Lawson, and many more.
Pete Townshend, guitar god of The Who, says he learned to play guitar and started a band for two reasons:
A: His nose. B. To meet girls.
About his nose he said, “It was huge. It was the reason I played guitar.” He also noted that bands (even band-members with large noses) “always got the best girls.”
“It is definitely one of the things that inspires lads to play music,” agrees Sing Street star Ferdia Walsh-Peelo.
Ask most male musicians why they joined a band and 99 out of 100 will tell you it was for one very simple reason, to meet women. Art, money and fame are often far distant second place to the lure of the opposite sex. Such is the case with Conor (Walsh-Peelo) a fifteen-year-old school by with a crush on Raphina (Lucy Boynton) in Sing Street, the new musical romance from Once director John Carney that plays like a spiritual cousin to The Commitments.
“I think that is the thing that gets Conor started and gets people started pop music,” he says. “Then you form the band and you find refuge in the music. It becomes more than just getting the girl. It’s actually a way of coping when things are crap.
“I didn’t have a great time in school and I went through all these similar kind of phases [as Conor]. I remember seeing [the John Lennon biopic] Nowhere Boy and me and this other guy at school bought leather jackets, gelled our hair back and went into school. Bringing combs with us and doing our hair like in Grease. Looking like complete twats running around town just doing mad stuff. It’s all part of the process. Finding yourself and finding your voice.”
Born and reared just thirty minutes outside Dublin in in County Wicklow, in the film the young actor is the perfect picture of an 80s rock star, despite knowing next to nothing about the decade or the music when he signed on to play Conor.
“It was a huge learning curve,” he says. “I hadn’t reached that point where I was diving into 80s music. I suppose I was up to the late Sixties. When I went into Sing Street I was playing bands and we were still in that place. I was listening to loads of country, music from Tennessee, skiffle music, bluegrass. I had been experimenting with loads of different kinds of music and I got into the 80s stuff when we shot the movie.
“It took me a while but then I got into it after watching a million ridiculous 80s videos. I just got it,” he says. “They just weren’t taking themselves seriously at all. It was just that kind of era. It was all just mad, wasn’t it? There was loads of horrendous stuff around at that time but there were a few gems. Hall and Oates are absolute gems of the pop stuff.”
The musician-turned-actor also singles out The Cure and The Talking Heads as great stuff,” but says his heart lies in folk music.
“Folk music is always where it’s been at for me. I played skiffle music with bands for the craic (fun) of it but when I came back, in my room I’d be listening to Joni Mitchell.”
“It’s impossible to talk about N.W.A without talking about South Central LA in the late 1980s.”
Straight Outta Compton is the legendary album by gangsta rap group N.W.A, released Aug. 8, 1988. It’s a sonic blast that plays, as Rolling Stone said, like a “bombastic, cacophonous car ride through Los Angeles’ burnt-out and ignored hoods.” It became the first platinum album to reach that status with no airplay or major tours and now it’s also the title of a biopic that documents the group’s beginnings and turbulent history.
Writing for theverge.com, Lizzie Plaugic observed, “It’s impossible to talk about N.W.A without talking about South Central LA in the late 1980s.” Infected by crack and gang violence, the area was so rough the LAPD created a special unit known as CRASH — Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums — and it was these surroundings that helped birth the ferocious beats of Straight Outta Compton and a genre known as gangsta rap.
Music is unavoidably influenced by the surroundings of those who make it and music biopics have always been quick to use location as a shorthand to help the audience understand how and why musicians produced the music they did.
Just as South Central sets the scene for Straight Outta Compton, Manchester’s drug-fuelled “Madchester” club scene of the late 1980s and early ’90s informs 24 Hour Party People and the mean streets of Brooklyn set the stage for the meteoric rise of rapper Notorious B.I.G. in the 2009 film Notorious.
There is no shortage of John Lennon or his birthplace on celluloid. There are five official Beatles movies, documentaries like The U.S. vs. John Lennon, a 2006 movie that focuses on Lennon’s transformation from musician into antiwar activist, and even experimental short films like the John and Yoko shorts Two Virgins and Apotheosis.
Portrayed by everyone from Paul Rudd (in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story) to Monty Python’s Eric Idle, rarely has any actor captured both Lennon’s rebelliousness and vulnerability as Aaron Taylor-Johnson does in Nowhere Boy, the story of the musician’s formative years.
Taylor-Johnson, recently seen in blockbusters like Avengers: Age of Ultron and Godzilla, is aided in his performance by a gritty portrait of Lennon’s lower-working-class neighbourhood in Liverpool, England. You can almost smell the bangers and mash coming off the screen and the vivid Merseyside backdrop provides subtle clues about the man Lennon would become.
Set back when you could still drink a bottle of stolen booze in the shade of the Hollywood sign without being arrested for trespassing, The Runaways focuses on two glue-sniffing, glam-rock obsessed tough girls named Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) and Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning). Disaffected SoCal teens, they see an exit from their mundane suburban lives through rock ’n’ roll.
Unfortunately their ticket out comes in the form of impresario Kim Fowley, a record producer and self proclaimed “King Hysteria.” He cobbles together the band, trains them to be rock stars, convinced that they will “be bigger than the Beatles.” Before they can play Shea Stadium, however, the band breaks up — knee deep in ego, drug abuse and bad management. Set in and around the Sunset Strip’s late 1970s seedy underbelly, the movie perfectly captures the sun-dappled decadence that illuminated the time.
In the movies, like real life, it’s about Location! Location! Location!
Check out Richard’s cineplex.com article on Monty Python as the Beatles of Comedy.
“’I’ve got two legs from my hips to the ground, and when I move them, they walk around,’ isn’t a line with the elegance of, ‘Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away,’ but it is a lot funnier.
“Comparing the work of Monty Python and The Beatles might seem like equating apples to oranges, or guitars to crunchy frogs, but it really isn’t that much of a stretch. Eric (Idle), Graham (Chapman), Michael (Palin), John (Cleese) and a couple of Terrys (Gilliam and Jones) have a lot in common with John, Paul, George and Ringo.
“Monty Python has been called the most influential comedy troupe of all time. Their absurdist brand…” Read the whole thing HERE!
There is no shortage of John Lennon on celluloid. There are five official Beatles movies, documentaries like “The U.S. vs. John Lennon,” a 2006 movie that focuses on Lennon’s transformation from musician into antiwar activist, and even experimental short films like the John and Yoko shorts like “Two Virgins” and “Apotheosis.” He’s been portrayed by everyone from Paul Rudd (in “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story”) to Monty Python’s Eric Idle but rarely has any actor captured both Lennon’s rebelliousness and vulnerability as Aaron Johnson does in “Nowhere Boy.”
The coming-of-age-story of one of the most famous people of the twentieth century, “Nowhere Boy” examines Lennon’s relationship with his estranged mother Julia (Anne-Marie Duff) and his Aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas), the woman who raised him. For the first time on film we see the effect the combustible combination of women had on his life. His mother’s ready! steady! go! lifestyle helping to form his rock ‘n’ roll side, while Aunt Mimi’s more slow and steady influence brought out John’s sensitive, artistic side.
“Nowhere Boy” is a fascinating character study that reveals the formative years of a complicated man. Aaron Johnson, who was eighteen at the time, succeeds because he doesn’t try to imitate Lennon, instead he plays a young, confused man who is on the cusp of growing up. Sure, the distinctive Liverpool accent is there as are the right period details, but it’s what is beyond those crutches that make this performance, as they said in “Yellow Submarine,” “a tickle of joy on the belly the universe.”
First time director Sam Taylor-Wood gets the muddled mix of excitement, testosterone and disappointment Lennon felt on an almost daily basis just right, and in the process has made one of the best Beatle bios to date.
Aaron Johnson knew when he signed on to play John Lennon in the biopic Nowhere Boy that he would come under scrutiny from not only Lennon fans but from the late musician’s friends.
“I get guys who know the exact type of guitar string, the tie pin he wore and what colour brothel creepers he had,” the young actor says, adding that “all of those things have been positive.” Also positive, although a little more nerve-wracking, were the reactions of Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono.
McCartney, Johnson says, “thought it was great. The only thing he said was that he couldn’t remember John ever punching him in the face. But that is something you would want to forget; your band mate punching you in the face.”
The toughest critic of all, Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono lent a hand to filmmakers early on when she granted the right to use the song Mother over the closing credits. “Yoko has been a huge supporter of this film,” says Johnson. “She says if you want to understand John even more, and see what pain he put away this is the untold story.”
The film, which examines Lennon’s relationship with his estranged mother and his Aunt Mimi, will be released in Canada on October 15, just a few days after what would have been Lennon’s seventieth birthday.
“We did it as accurately as we could,” says Johnson, “but with the characters we didn’t want to make it impersonations. We just wanted to embody the spirit and the soul of these people. We were lucky because this is the only part of his life that wasn’t documented so we had a bit of freedom to make a natural and instinctive film.”
Johnson says he approached the role as a Lennon outsider. Although the Beatles “are kind of embedded in my British history,” he wasn’t a Lennon obsessive when he signed on.
“I’m not from the generation,” says the actor who was 18 when he made the film, “which was kind of a big thing for me, playing Lennon, because I wasn’t a fanatic or anything. I could look outside the box and look in, observe and analyze and not feel so attached. It was a bit easier for me to perform it, I suppose.”
In the beginning he approached the project as simply a coming-of-age story, but came closer to Lennon as the first day of shooting approached.
“I couldn’t play guitar and didn’t know if I could sing or anything,” he says. “I was willing to give it a shot, but the producers were like, ‘No, no we’ll just dub your voice and we’ll cut to someone strumming the guitar.’ I said, ‘We’ve got a couple of months, let me at least try.’ They kind of batted me away and I think that made me more determined to show them that I could do it. I can’t play John Lennon and not be able to play guitar or sing. I had a blast doing it and in the end I got to sing and perform on songs.
“It was a big thing for me to learn more about Lennon as well because his inspirations became my inspirations. Watching Elvis and watching Buddy; looking at how they moved and how they held a guitar and how they sang. That added another whole level of insight for me into the character.”
He now counts himself among Lennon’s fans, singling out In Spite of All the Danger as his favorite Lennon tune. “It’s one of the first ones he ever wrote and recorded and it is the song I perform in the film. It’s quite a personal one to me.”
On April 11 we have an encore presentation of “Pop Life” with an in-depth interview with John Lennon’s personal photographer Bob Gruen. The legendary photographer opens up about taking famous pictures of every rock ‘n roll star from David Bowie and Led Zeppelin to The Clash and The Sex Pistols. Then the “Pop Life” panel, Canada’s most renowned celebrity photographer George Pimentel, photojournalist Richard Lautens and artistic content creator and photographer Elie Jonathan Kimbembe, discuss how to get the perfect shot.
