There’s something spot-on about a good film about music. When done right, the marriage of the two forms leads to an end result where the music has enriched the film, and the film has provided an expansion of the music. Films about music have had protagonists ranging from composers to critics; they encompass fiction, nonfiction, and metafiction. Here, for your consideration, are ten upcoming films, from fiction to documentary, from abstract compositions to starkly linear narratives, covering music ranging from punk rock to large-scale choral works.
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The songs we hear sung by Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges), the onetime country-music superstar at the center of Scott Cooper’s film Crazy Heart, are infused by a weary regret. “I used to be somebody,” he sings to a sparse crowd gathered at a bowling alley in southern Colorado, and it’s only the first of a series of lyrical recriminations that he’ll declare. Offstage, Blake is anything but penitent — he drinks whiskey by the bottle, chain-smokes, and brushes off the young musicians hoping to be acolytes for a day. From Colorado, his tour heads south to a cozier two-night stand at a small Santa Fe bar, where he meets Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal). A journalist and single mother, she seeks an interview with him, which — over talk of the Delta blues and Lefty Frizzell — becomes something deeper.
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Suggestion: it’s going to be a good autumn for David Wingo, a musician perhaps best known for his work with filmmaker David Gordon Green. The end of October brings with it the opening of Gentlemen Broncos, a Jared Hess-directed comedy about science-fiction writers, for which Wingo composed the score. Come November, Belly of the Lion, his second album recorded under the name Ola Podrida, will be released on Western Vinyl. It’s a rich, textured work, edging Wingo’s Americana-focused concerns into a territory that sounds — dare I say it — pretty close to cinematic.
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Sunset/Sunrise, the second album from the Seattle duo The Dutchess & The Duke, begins much as its predecessor, 2008’s She’s the Dutchess, He’s the Duke, did: stark vocals, acoustic guitar, visceral lyrics. And then, with the sound of a booming drum, there’s a shift into a much more expansive sound. It’s a reminder that, although this is only their second album under this name, this group is far from the first time Jesse Lortz and Kimberly Morrison have made music together. Notably, the lone single released by the girl-group-influenced The Sultanas is well worth tracking down. Read More »
Reading Blake Butler‘s “novel in stories” Scorch Atlas
will disorient you. Its imagery is vivid, fleeting, and sometimes grotesque, and the relationships within it — whether familial dynamics or laws of physics — exist to be defied. And yet there’s an exhilaration to it — through the length of the slim volume, its cover designed to resemble an artifact from some unspeakable disaster, Butler balances these scenes from upturned life with prose that glides and disorients. Read More »
What exactly is a rock-n-roll novel? It isn’t necessarily a novel about musicians, or a novel for which rock music provides a backdrop — though there have been novels that have fallen into each of these categories. Nor is it necessarily a book by a rock musician: the narrator of Joe Pernice’s recent It Feels So Good When I Stop
may play music, but its role in the novel is ultimately less about his creative endeavors and more about music’s parallels to his romantic life. Read More »
