Richard joins Ryan Doyle and Jay Michaels of the NewsTalk 1010 afternoon show The Rush for Booze and Reviews! Today he talks about the Death in the Afternoon, a drink that sprung from Ernest Hemingway’s legendary liver, the Death in the Afternoon, the new “Velvet Underground” documentary, the latest from Michael Myers “Halloween Kills” and the reason Andrew Lloyd Weber bought a comfort dog.
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Richard and CTV NewsChannel morning show host Jennifer Burke chat up the weekend’s big releases including the relentless return of Michael Myers in “Halloween Kills,” the emotional family drama “Mass” and the rock ‘n’ roll documentary “The Velvet Underground.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Fans of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones may disagree, but The Velvet Underground are arguably the most influential band of the late 1960s and early 1970s. “The Velvet Underground didn’t sell many records,” said Brian Eno, “but everyone who bought one went out and started a band.”
They pointed the direction for everyone from David Bowie and Patti Smith to U2 and The Black Angels, and “The Velvet Underground,” a striking new documentary from director Todd Haynes, and now playing on Apple TV+, aims to bring people up to date on one of the most ahead-of-their-times bands of the 20th century.
Narrated by interviews with friends, family, colleagues, and, most importantly of all, the band, guitarist and singer Lou Reed, guitarist Sterling Morrison, bassist and violist John Cale, singer Nico, and drummer Maureen “Moe” Tucker, the film is a trippy look at the tumultuous time in New York City’s art world that gave birth to the band. “That love and peace crap,” says Tucker, “we hated that.”
Using split screens, montages and plenty of archival footage, Haynes paints an impressionistic portrait of the influences—early rock n’ roll, doo-wop, gay life in New York, drugs, Andy Warhol and more—that go a long way to reconcile how Cale’s experimental “drone” work—the “hum of Western civilization,” he calls it—blended with Reed’s more melodic sense to form a renegade sound nobody had heard before. Add to that, lyrics that essayed heroin addiction, death, sado-masochism and other topics not usually sung about in three-minute pop songs and the result is aggressively radio unfriendly rock whose echoes are still felt today. “We didn’t put things in,” Reed said, “we took things out.”
Haynes meticulously walks us through the band’s history, the rise, fall and ugly dissolution, wallpapering the movie with a visual onslaught of images that suggests the multi-media presentation Andy Warhol created for the band’s live performances. The pop artist saw those shows as a “chance to combine music, art and films,” and the documentary continues that spirit to capture the excitement of the story. The storytelling is rather conventional, linear, but the visuals are an idiosyncratic eyeful that match the ambitious nature of the music.
“The Velvet Underground” focusses on the band’s classic line-up heyday, giving later incarnations a bit of a short shrift. Nonetheless, the doc captures the mood and the spirit of a band music journalists have struggled to pigeonhole for decades.
Memory and regret hang heavy over “Nico, 1988,” an uncompromising biopic detailing the last years of 1960’s Velvet Underground icon Christa Päffgen a.k.a Nico (Trine Dyrholm).
Long removed from the New York City scene and band that made her a legend, Nico, who now prefers to be called by her real name Christa, is touring across Europe with an uninspired band and her drug-addicted son (Sandor Funtek).
Voice ravaged by hard living and heroin, she is unpredictable and unhappy. Her efforts to forge a new phase of her career are sidelined by an overwhelming interest in her legendary career. “Didn’t she sleep with one of the Rolling Stones? Which one was it? The one that drowned?” What about her work with The Velvet Underground? The ghosts of her past haunt her.
“Nico, 1988” is a gloomy film about the power of art as a survival tactic. Her life in shambles, Christa persists because she has something left to say, even if there aren’t many people interested in listening. As such, the movie works best in the moments when it allows her the chance to express herself. Not the diva behaviour, disrupting a restaurant in search of drugs or berating those around her, but letting her true spirit soar. To watch her sing “My Heart is Empty” in front of an Iron Curtain audience who risked arrest to see her perform is a galvanising moment in the film. Pure rock and roll passion filtered through anger, hurt and a desire to be heard. It’s the movie’s best scene, a sequence of catharsis that brings this portrait of a seemingly cool, detached woman roaring to life.
