Three British Biopics of Musicians (2019, 1975)

Some fisherfolk, cavorting

Fisherman’s Friends (2019)

‘Fisherman’s Friends’ is a lively but very by-the-book story of an unlikely rise to fame. It’s the true story of a band of Cornish fishermen who sing folk music, are discovered, and then sell a lot of records. The music is good and the group’s performances have plenty of sparkle, but the script gave me no joy. It seemed such a film-shaped film, with its plot’s rises and falls following the pattern of the genre too lifelessly.

The A&R agent who discovers the band gets into some contrived conflict which blossoms into a romance. Not because that’s what really happened, but because there’s always a romance in a film like this, playing out the same way. (There’s nothing wrong with changing the truth to make a better film - as the others on this list will show, but here it had no magic and no surprise, just formula).

The romance is between Daniel Mays and Tuppence Middleton, good actors who do what they can with the material. Without Tuppence, ‘Fishermen’s Friends’ would be quite the sausage-fest. I bracket it together with ‘Dawn of the Battle of the Apes’ (2014) in that it’s obviously set after a female extinction event that left them at a 1:20 ratio with men, but nobody mentions it.

I saw it with my parents and none of us had cause to regret it, but I doubt we’ll ever seek it out again. It’s a passable film - passable in that it fulfilled my baseline criterion for an okay movie (that being, did two hours pass without me thinking of Donald Trump?).

My love for this shoe cannot be adequately stated

Rocketman (2019)

This is a far more interesting sort of biopic! The tagline, ‘based on a true fantasy’ sums it up perfectly. The film-making matches the real Elton John’s flamboyance, and his sincerity. I’ve heard ‘camp’ defined as being a jaunty exterior which masks the more complex, vulnerable humanity inside, and this dramatises the idea wonderfully.

It’s sort-of a musical, told within flashback. Young Elton, and others in his life, put their situations into the familiarest of his songs. I reckon this aspect is likely to divide audiences - if you’re expecting Elton John to sing The Bitch is Back, it’s disconcerting to pass from modern Elton to child Elton, to a full chorus of 1950s neighbours singing - it was certainly more Disney than I was expecting (and the second song of the piece ‘I Want Love’ was so straight and sober that I worried the movie was haemorrhaging all its glee - I was proved very wrong on this). The songs in this style work because this is a story of Elton’s imagination, his fantasies, and how he moves from imagining the absurd to really living it.

I don’t normally like flashback settings, but it really worked in this case. Adult Elton John’s storytelling wasn’t just narration to move things on - the act of telling the story challenges and changes him. The segue between different ages (and thus, different actors) of Elton John in Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting manages to satisfy, rather than annoy. I already liked Taron Egerton in ‘Kingsman: The Secret Service’ (2014) - he has a cocky, likeable quality that makes him satisfying to watch, and in that film he manages to anchor absurd situations. Elton John is inherently absurd, and so he was a great choice. As full-blooded as the real thing, without becoming comical. He did all his own singing in the role (including a duet with real-life Elton John for the closing credits) and it has the energy, and style style you'd hope for, but manages to preserve its own freshness. This is not just imitation.

The film takes its liberties with chronology, cause and effect to give neater resolutions, but it’s a no hagiography! At one point I wondered if the real Elton John would ever see the movie, or whether its portrayal of him and his upbringing would seem too raw, too ugly - but when the end credits came round I discovered he and his husband David Furnish were producers, and had worked closely to bring this true fantasy to the screen.

I liked this movie a lot, and it makes me want to make movies.

I would be misrepresenting 'Lisztomania' if I didn't show you this big willy

Lisztomania (1975)

Back in the 19th Century, Europe went wild for Franz Liszt. Screaming crowds, a cult of personality, the whole Beatles Schtick. This is an immensely energetic and peculiar film about the man and the myth. Roger Daltrey is Franz Liszt, galavanting around with (at one point) a ten-foot long penis which is sent to the guillotine. Rick Wakeman is Thor, and his songs make this a musical. Ringo Starr is the Pope, for some reason.

I tremendously enjoyed this film. It joins ‘Casino Royalo’ (1967) in being so unpredictable that I couldn’t be sure I wasn’t dreaming it. I’m glad I watched it alone, though. So many scenes of bare-breasted women, their bosoms very much for the viewers’ pleasure! Astonishing titillation. It’s a full-on sex-comedy - very dated, very of its time - but in other ways audacious, finding a uniquely absurd take on the life of Liszt. To give you a sense of it, the movie culminates in Liszt dying, going to Heaven, but returning in a space rocket to kill Richard Wagner, who in this movie is both a literal vampire and a kind of a Hitler Frankenstein, blasting people with his murder guitar.

I like to find films like this.



Those were some films

Yes, those were some films, and together they’ve given me a desire to make a music biopic of my own (perhaps in the vein of ’Some Deaths of Vincent van Gogh’ which I made in 2018, and which you might, for eight minutes, enjoy). It’s good when books make you want to write, when clothes make you want to sew, and when movies make you want to move … pictures! I hope I’ll actually do this at some point, once I find a good candidate, a good story and a visual angle that can be made loudly and colourfully in a bedroom. We shall see!

I didn’t have an appetite to see ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (2018), but I’m sure you’ve heard plenty about it already. I hope the trend of music biopics continues in cinemas - I hope to see some which aren’t so male. Alas, the only biographical film of a female composer's life that leaps to mind is ‘Hildegard of Bingen’ (1994), a one-off BBC drama starring the wonderful Patricia Routledge. I enjoyed it a whole lot, but it ticks my boxes more than it may yours.

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Apologies for the larger-than-usual gap between Penciltonian posts. If you missed me, you can find most of the art I'm up to over at swithen.uk

But I'm a Cheerleader (1999)

So Megan (Natasha Lyonne) is a cheerleader.  She's dating the captain of the football team, and so on and so forth.  She doesn't much like kissing him (and when you think about it, kissing is an absurd and alarming act, though as I recall an enjoyable one), but otherwise looks set to do the appropriate American thing, and settle down and get married.  Until, that is, her family put it to her that she's gay.  On the contrary, she protests, but they're most insistent.  The thought has never passed through her conscious mind, but in no time she's packed off to a correction camp, where stern leaders seek to convince her of her homosexuality, then 'cure' her, and others of her ilk, using a perfectly charmless five-step plan.

So starts this wonderfully cheap-looking film; its tall-screen aspect ratio (alas, cropped to 16:9 for the DVD release) and dearth of fancy make-up or lighting leave it with a pleasing humility, a look that owes more to the 50s or 70s that the slick 90s.  Several things left me expecting the film to be a broad comedy: the DVD box, the film's dazzling colours, the particular direction, and the oppressive villainousness of the main antagonist - but despite this, there's a strange absence of the overtly comic, of jokes or obviously humorous situations.  Not that there's anything really missing, as such - the film remains excellent fun, constructed with a wonderful lightness of touch - but at its core is not humour but a rising despair, a dreadfulness.

Pink for girls and blue for boys

So anyway, the Umbridge-like head of the camp berates Megan and her new friends into shameful acknowledgement of their gayness, and seeks first to gender them.  Pink and washing up for girls, blue and sports for boys - that horrid set of heteronormative stereotypes that, aside from anything else, have precious little to do with who has sex with whom.  I realise I oughtn't to be outraged by the outlandish petty villainy of fictional characters, but it never ceases to agitate me that pink (an excellent colour, if not the best) is mandated for half the population but utterly forbidden for the other half, a pair of complementary social diktats as terrible as one another, and one we're all taught from youth.  Mary Brown (Cathy Moriarty), the disciplinarian at the head of the camp believes this is the best way back to straightness, and that such rigorous, tedious normality is the only acceptable option, the only true good.

In the seventy films I've watched so far for this Penciltonian project, no villain has so easily raised my ire as Mary Brown.  Of course, it's possible that in such an extreme antagonist, the film is using a straw man - except I'm pretty sure that such camps do exist, where people are taught to despise and repress parts of themselves that cannot ever truly be changed.  This satire may heighten the performances and draw attention to the hypocrisies, but seems to represent something that does indeed exist in the world.  It's an unpleasant prospect.

My lodger, Saskia, showed me this film about a fortnight ago.  We consumed it in a double-bill with Michael Cera comedy 'Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist' (2008), a film which was an amply enjoyable indie romance, if perhaps a little too aware that it was being an indie romance.  'But I'm a Cheerleader' seemed less polished, less studio-constructed, and was all the better for it - I commended it at the time for actually being about something.  This film left something to be angry about, and had the sweeter romance, as Megan finds a complicated but engagingly peaceful relationship with Graham, a girl at the camp less naïve and less happy than her, who faces the threat of disinheritance from her family if she fails to turn straight.

Graham and Megan

I couldn't help but wonder whether this film was chosen with an ironic pointedness, since we watched this the night before I went off to run a Christian holiday-camp for 14-18 years-olds, whether perhaps the film's colour-coded borstal, with its ineffectual brain-washing and campaign of shame and condemnation is how my Scripture Union camp, 'Transformers' is imagined by some.  Needless to say, mine was not an exercise in oppression, but something far freer and more welcoming, and pushed no agenda on sexuality, being in general far more interested in God's love, and computers, and board games and such.

It seems curious to defend it against such an extreme example, but since I long ago met somebody who supposed that Christian holiday camps are concentration camps (invoking Godwin's law, indeed) I might as well say something of its content: the young people came because they thought they might like it, and returned because they did like it.  It's a computer camp, rather than a running around one, with a good half of the day given over to technical activities, those being programming, photography, 3D graphics, video and music production.  The projects, their tone and content are whatever the young people want to make, though we on the team lend a hand wherever we're asked for.  The rest is eating, worship and Bible study.  The latter are not, to my mind, indoctrination or normalisation, and not nearly rigorous or emphatic or competent enough to be the brainwashing my friend supposed in the aforementioned conversation.   They're there because we believe there is hope beyond death, and hope before it too, and that it's kind-of a big deal, and it would be churlish of us not to tell people all about it.

If you're curious about the sort of things the technical activities produce, by the way, here's 'The Face-Taker', a horror film the young people made toward the end of last week.  The same Youtube channel contains dozens more short movies we've made from the last few years.  I'd especially recommend 'Earth Pie', 'Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My', and any of them, really.  And I'm always glad to talk about the camp in person, too; I've been disappearing off to it each August for many years but rarely find the opportunity to properly enthuse about it.

I seem, now, to have sauntered so far away from 'But I'm a Cheerleader' that I feel I'd do well to wrap up.  It's an enjoyable film which places an immediately likeable main character in an alarming situation which fails to put her down, but rather brings out all her merits.  There's a message worth hearing and a beautiful romance, so I could hardly fail to recommend it to you.

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...and here it is on DVD, not that this was what I was driving towards.

Party Monster (2003)

James St James meets an impressionable Michael Alig

I'm coming around to the idea that interesting movies will generally be good movies, or at least worth the watching, so when my lodger Saskia described 'Party Monster' as interesting (indeed, as 'interesting') I knew it had to be Penciltonized.

The film is set in the club scene of '80s New York, but manages to look and feel, in some rather bizarre ways, timelessly modern rather than dated to that era.  It regards two extremely flamboyant and bitchy young socialites, Michael Alig (Macaulay Culkin, who surprised me by being excellent here) and James St James (Seth Green, an actor I always enjoy) - their club nights and their domestic life.  Michael and James live wilfully grotesque lives, never resting from their highly-strung, drug-frenzied Noel Cowerd schtick, all played out in drag and magnificent clubwear.  As the movie starts, the pair bicker self-consciously, quite aware that they're on camera, each vying to narrate their version of the tale.  Michael mentions, casually and without regret, that he's committed a murder, and as per 'Double Indemnity' (1944) the body of the film is in flashback, showing how the murder came to occur.  It's a true story, by the way.

Michael in characteristically alarming array.

The film was made on a tiny budget, its resources wisely spent on a strong and witty script, good actors who manage to make potentially shrill characters sympathetic, and a huge bevy of excellently alarming costumes.  Indeed, while I call it a film, it appears to have been shot on videotape rather than film, and with next to nothing in the lighting department, meaning that any keen amateur could have made their own version with a remarkably similar look.  It's rather disconcerting, as a maker of amaeur motion-pictures, to see a cinematic release so similar in picture quality and colour to my own crude works, and it lends the thing an air of a home-movie, as if Michael and James are not just narrating their own history, but have put together a video presentation about their adventures.

Michael and James are intriguing characters, and, presumably, people.  They're on all the time, always in costume and putting on characters, for themselves as much as for their peers, who they treat as an audience.  It's like 'Withnail and I' (1987), but with two Withnails and no I.  I felt for them in their superficiality; I wanted to see them relax, to be themselves rather than exhausting themselves with masks.  I didn't want to see them be normalised or become mundane, just to relax, to be honest with themselves.  It's the difference between being naturally eccentric (which is commendable) and being an eccentric.  Imagine being John Mccrirrick.  Now imagine being John Mccrirrick every day for the rest of your life.  It could be a wild novelty, but pursued as a lifestyle it would be exhausting, and would soon be no fun at all - a cry for help, and one that could lead to a tremendous breakdown.  Now, there's much to be said for dressing up, and far too few people dress interestingly; I'm a great advocate of all manner of fancy-dress antics, but there have to be some moments of some days where you dress for yourself, and as yourself, rather than merely to impress, alarm and intimidate your audience.  The only time Macaulay Culkin ever seems truly relaxed here, he isn't wearing anything at all.  For a brief scene towards the end of the movie, he takes a bath, and seems blissfully, innocently happy.  He loses nothing of his character, his mirth or habitual androgyny here, but seems to have a peace he's spent the rest of the film avoiding.

Angel, the dealer, starts as a leatherman but is encouraged to dress up to his name and station.
He was the victim of the aforementioned murder.

It is an interesting film, and I'm tempted to say it's also an excellent one.  It's aesthetically thrilling, has an fine soundtrack, and as I've noted, a script and cast worth hearing and watching.  It's also a world away from the other films I've written up to represent the early 2000s.  The Club Kids, those persistent and obsessive clubbers who formed Michael's entourage, come across like an anti-political Baader Meinhof gang, and their story is as fascinating as it is colourful, and this film's telling is simultaneously great fun and disconcertingly serious.

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...and here it is on shiny disc, though I watched it on Netflix meself.