Ghosts Are Us: Charlie Kaufman’s new film is difficult and unique, but is it any good?

Charlie Kaufman’s having a busy summer: his debut novel, Antkind was released in July and his latest directorial effort comes to Netflix this Friday. Kaufman adapted I’m Thinking of Ending Things from lain Reid’s novel of the same name. Kaufman is best known for his surreal screenplays for films like Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). Kaufman’s directorial debut came with Synecdoche, New York (2008), a film the late great Roger Ebert called “the best movie of the decade.” I’m Thinking of Ending Things is an emblematic of Kaufmanesque filmmaking: meta contextualizing of stories-within-stories; characters breaking the fourth wall; characters aware of their own narratives; non-linear storylines, to say the least. I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a difficult, complex movie, but is it any good?

I was taken aback when I saw that Kaufman’s new movie was being released as a “psychological horror” film. The movie is ultra-weird and often creepy, but I wouldn’t call it scary. You could say that I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a haunted house film, but the house is time itself and the ghosts are us. The whole plot of this film revolves around a Young Woman (Jessie Buckley) on a road trip with her newish, almost-boyfriend, Jake (Jesse Plemons). They’re on their way to a remote Oklahoma farmhouse where the Young Woman will meet Jakes parents (Toni Collette, David Thewlis) for the first time. Here’s the problem: the Young Woman is already thinking of ending things with Jake.
A horror film, after all.

Of course, this is a Charlie Kaufman movie where simple ideas are given free reign to spin into ever more complex webs of philosophical questions and cultural allusions – everyday reality is undermined, and travelers stop for milkshakes in the middle of a blizzard. Viewers watch Kaufman’s film through the lens of the Young Woman’s ennui over her own lack of self-determination. But before we’re even through the first act character identities begin to shift, circumstances begin to repeat themselves, and the Young Woman looks directly into the camera to recite a poem to the audience. She’s a poet. Or she was a poet. Or she will be.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a Kaufmaneque film from Charlie Kaufman, which is exactly what I was hoping to see. That said, this movie’s value only equals the sum of its sometimes outstanding parts: Lukasz Zal captures an otherworldly lensing of the bleak Oklahoma winter-scape that perfectly frames the characters’ dislocated experiences. Collette’s performance alone is worth streaming this film for, and I’ve grown to appreciate Thewlis’ recent roles having never enjoyed his earlier work. Plemons does a lot with a little to bring the brooding Jake to life, making him relatable despite his awkwardness and angry outbursts. Buckley, not so much. She’s a game actor, but she’s in the unenviable position of playing an unsympathetic character in a lead role. The Young Woman’s decision to meet Jake’s family even though she knows she’s leaving him creates the whole plot of the film. But how can a viewer connect to such a weak, unmotivated character? To make matters worse, Kaufman gives the Young Woman reams of pretentious dialog and a torrent of internal narration which spools out in endless droning voice-over. Many people have made the bad decision to take a step forward in a relationship they knew was over. And almost everybody was smart enough not to make a movie about it.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things streams on Netflix beginning this Friday, September 4

This is a review of a documentary feature called Nightcrawlers. The movie makes its world premiere at the Defy Film Festival in Nashville, TN this weekend. This review originally appeared in print in The Contributor.

In the opening scene of Nightcrawlers, a young man sits cross-legged on a bathroom floor. He glances at the camera in a lo-fi image that reads more like a video found on a phone than the first scene of a documentary feature. He wraps a belt around his arm and bites the end between his teeth to keep a tight squeeze above his elbow. He picks up a hypodermic syringe before the shot cuts to the same young man looking into the same camera, sitting against a block wall in a hoodie with a black backpack, and seemingly homeless.

Filmmaker Stephen McCoy received his first camcorder in 2011 in the last semester of his senior year in high school. After the sudden death of his father, McCoy began obsessively documenting his everyday life in a small town outside of Boston, MA. In Nightcrawlers, McCoy ceaselessly films his friends and teachers during a day at school. It’s a bleak and wintry spring day, but the kids are already restless to graduate. He lenses his adorable toddler little sister who shouts “baby!” when she recognizes herself on the camera’s display. Then we cut to a swing music dance at a public park. Nightcrawlers began as a visual diary, but evolved into a film about street people in Boston. Before long drugs and an unraveling personal life found McCoy living among his subjects, swallowed by addiction, poverty and his own dangerous art.

The film includes footage McCoy captured over his first five years out of high school, and seeing his transformation from a sweet young kid to a desperate heroin addict is like watching a horror movie monster metamorphosis in slow motion. But McCoy also captures the decline of America in the background of his scenes: the 2008 economic crisis and the Occupy Movement, the Boston Marathon bombing, and the opioid/heroin epidemic are all contemporaneous echoes of McCoy’s own exodus on the nightmare side of the American dream. Many of the images in this film are almost a decade old, but Nightcrawlers feels up-to-the-minute timely despite is beautifully dated hi8 camcorder images. The film is never preachy or moralizing, and McCoy even brings some humor to the proceedings in his naturally charismatic, very respectful interviews and interactions with a gallery of Boston street people whose stories are captured in the film.

Nightcrawlers‘ structure dismisses common narrative and editorial presumptions. The film’s unscripted capturing of actual people in real situations certainly qualifies it as a documentary film, but there’s a surreality to the nomadic days of homeless artists and wandering subway singers, and there’s a twilit somnambulism to the scenes of McCoy’s strung-out subjects living on junk time. Nightcrawlers definitely doesn’t glamorize drugs, but McCoy and editor Luc Benson’s gorgeous, repetitive, free-associative montages communicate a feeling of what attracted McCoy to this life in the first place. And the inventiveness of McCoy’s lensing and Benson’s cutting finds this project hovering between journalism and an art film. McCoy gives viewers a seductive mix of sounds and images that range from the grimly realistic and difficult to watch to the purely poetic. And even though he acknowledges debts to filmmakers like Werner Herzog and Harmony Korine, McCoy’s movie stands on its own merits as the relentlessly intimate memoir of a uniquely obsessed filmmaker.

See the world premiere of Nightcrawlers on Friday, August 23 at 8:10 P.M. at the Defy Film Festival at Studio 615 in East Nashville. Stephen McCoy will be doing a Q&A immediately following the screening. Go to www.defyfilmfestival.com for tickets and a full schedule for this two-day experimental cinema celebration.

Watch a trailer for this weekend’s festival…

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By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29768619

In September of this year we’ll recognize 35 years since poet Richard Brautigan shot himself in the head, committing suicide at the age of 49 in 1984. I was thinking about Brautigan today because a link to the excellent Adam Curtis documentary All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace popped up on my Twitter feed. The BBC documentary series outlines the spread of Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophies into America’s Silicon Valley, and it examines the cybernetic utopia promised by the virtue of selfishness at the speed of integrated circuits. The series takes its name from one of my favorite Brautigan poems…

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

Watch Part 1 of the series on Vimeo but first check out this great interview with Curtis talking about his unique style of storytelling…

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I just bought two tickets to see Quentin Tarantino’s new film Once Upon A Time in Hollywood. It’s playing in 35mm at our local arthouse and I’m very excited for this one. I’ve grown to really like Django — especially Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance — but The Hateful 8 is probably my least favorite of Tarantino’s films and I predict history will mark it as a low point in the auteur’s filmography. Suffice to say I’m glad we’re out of the Western genre and back into a dark drama set in a moment when Old Hollywood faded and New Hollywood rose to ascendancy on a wave of countercultural filmmaking that spoke to a youth culture that asked us to “Give Peace a Chance” even as it delivered up Altamont and Helter Skelter. The film tells the story of a fictional washed-up television actor, but it overlaps with the story of the real life Manson murders. Right after I purchased my tickets I saw this post at The Psyco Path that caught my eye. It’s about a special that’s coming to the Oxygen channel that features interviews with the Manson murderers. Here’s a taste…

Manson: The Women, a new Oxygen special premiering August 10, which features interviews with four women who belonged to the Manson family—Dianne Lake, Catherine Share, Sandra Good and Lynette Fromme—as well as experts, including Lis Wiehl, Nikki Meredith and Deborah Herman, weighing in on the infamous murders.

“What was it about Charlie Manson that made these women join his family?” Wiehl asks.

The special aims to answer that very question.

See the full post at the link above and connect to the original article there. In the meantime, here’s an interview with authors Peter Levenda and Whitley Strieber discussing the connections between the Manson Family the Process Church and the CIA. I hope Tarantino alludes to an Intelligence conspiracy in his film…

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The film Hereditary was scary successful last year. Writer/director Ari Aster’s feature debut delivered an incendiary performance by Toni Collette and a tightening noose of a story that gradually strangled viewers in supernatural sights, occult symbols, real life tragedies and heavy themes about the generational traumas that can ripple though family lines. Hereditary is a work of art that transcends the horror genre, and it belongs in the same conversation as The Shining and The Wicker Man. The Wicker Man is the ultimate example of the folk-horror sub genre, and while Hereditary eventually found its way to a pagan place, Ari Aster’s new film is one long fertility rite freak-out, and it’s probably the best bad boyfriend revenge movie we’ll see this year.

Christian (Jack Reynor) and Dani (Florence Pugh) are a young couple on the rocks. Christian is sort of a shiftless jerk who can’t decide what his graduate thesis should be. He’s been with Dani for four years, but he constantly considers breaking up, but he constantly doesn’t have the courage to do that. He can’t remember how long they’ve been together and even forgets her birthday. Christian is a boy-man who won’t commit to decisions because he doesn’t want to face their consequences. That said, Dani is not an easy person to be with – her family brings sky-high drama, and she’s steadily popping anti-anxiety meds and sleeping pills throughout the film. Christian should leave Dani in the first act of Midsommar so he and his buddies can go stag on a secret trip to a summer solstice festival in Sweden. He should be the selfish loafer that he really is and leave Dani and her troubles to their own fates. Instead he chickens-out and passive-aggressively takes his frustrations out on her. He claims to apologize but doesn’t say sorry and he gaslights her until she’s the one apologizing to him. Dani joins Christian and the guys on their trip to the communal Swedish farm where their friend Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren) grew up.

Midsommar’s greatest strength is its ravishing visuals. Cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski points his camera at a frozen Swedish forest in the throes of a howling twilit blizzard in the film’s first frames. The shot gives us foreboding trees, ominous winds and announces the central trope of folk horror: the isolated landscape. It’s a great opening, but this is a movie that takes place in Sweden over the summer solstice when there are only a few hours of darkness at night. One of Midsommar’s gimmicks is that it’s a horror movie taking place in broad daylight and the beauty of the Swedish countryside, the colorful designs decorating the farm buildings, and the embroidered robes and masks worn by the revelers positively sparkle in all that mountain majesty. Add to these colorful sights throbbing and shimmering psychedelic hallucination effects and a totally disorienting upside down camera shot that announces the group’s arrival at the festival and there is plenty to trip out on here.

Unfortunately, Midsommar disappoints in fundamentals like story and characters. Aster’s characters are exactly the “smart ass,” “nerd,” “jerk,” personas we find in the most cliché horror films where we know all those city kids are going to go into the countryside to die. Aster could have set the audience up with those expectations, but that would result in shock or surprise or some other experience that you won’t find here. Midsommar is a new skin for an old ceremony. It dresses up like a folk horror classic, but it’s better enjoyed as a simple, predictable female revenge film that hinges on a combustible third act performance from Pugh.

Here’s a great short introduction to the folk horror sub-genre and the revival we’re witnessing in pictures like Midsommar…

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Before Pride Month is over, I wanted to share a movie review I wrote for a Nashville publication a few weeks back. This new PBS doc examines a lesser-known civil rights struggle from the 1950s that found homosexual federal employees forced out of positions with the government for fear that their sexuality made them vulnerable to coercion by those filthy communist Russians.,, 

In 1953, during the first freeze of the Cold War, newly-elected President Dwight D. Eisenhower took the White House in the midst of chaos. The so-called Red Scare found Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy leading a government purge of supposed communists and soviet sympathizers that famously reached all the way into the entertainment industry, destroying lives with accusations and blacklists along the way. A new public television documentary, spotlights The Lavender Scare – a lesser-known purge of gay employees of the federal government. TheLavender Scare demonstrates how gays were seen as vulnerable to communist blackmail because of their sexual secrecy. The film quotes Joseph McCarthy, “Homosexuals must not be handling top secret materials. The pervert is easy prey for the blackmailer.”

It’s ironic that an executive order from President Eisenhower ultimately blackmailed thousands of federal employees into resigning quietly for fear that their sexual orientation might be made public. The Lavender Scare revisits a time during the 1950s when gay men and lesbians sought to blend in and not be visible. Fear of anti-gay laws, homophobic violence, and social alienation all meant that many American men and women found themselves leading double lives.

During the purge American citizens were exposed to targeted legal investigations that peered into every part of a person’s life: a government worker’s fellow employees and supervisors were interviewed; a worker’s minster, priest or rabbi would be contacted; social habits were monitored and connections were made between known homosexuals. By the time F.B.I. agents confronted a suspect they already had extensive insights into every aspect of a person’s daily habits. Suspects were not allowed to confront the confidential informants who often outed them, and they weren’t allowed any legal representation or due process.

The Lavender Scare’s deep historical documenting is one of its best strengths, and its educational value alone make this an important film to watch in June. The movie retraces the footsteps of large populations of gay men and lesbians who moved to Washington, DC in the 1930s. Those young men and women sought the 1000s of government jobs created under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. They also sought the sophistication and freedom of an urban lifestyle in the nation’s capital over the provincial backwaters and small-minded hometowns they fled. The Lavender Scare also examines the revolutionary effect World War II had on the lives of gay Americans. The total mobilization of the country pulled thousands of young men and women into the military’s same-sex environments. For many gay American soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines the war was an opportunity to meet like-minded friends and lovers. One former sailor interviewed for the documentary flatly states, “I didn’t know how many people were gay before I joined the Navy.”

 Director Josh Howard’s take on David K. Johnson’s book combines found footage and stills with lots of Ken Burns-esque voiceovers to bring public documents, letters, diaries and the people behind them to life. He also uses “Dragnet” style narration and the files, folders, and photos asesthetics of a police procedural to bring a paranoid, crime film tone to the investigation scenes in the movie. The Lavender Scare is narrated by Glenn Close and features voice acting from Cynthia Nixon, Zachary Quinto, TR Knight and David Hyde Pierce.

Howard is an entertaining filmmaker, but the story that’s the real star of The Lavender Scare. If there is any real value to observances like Pride Month it’s that they can focus our attention on people and issues that many of us may only be cursorily connected to in day-to-day lives. For me The Lavender Scare is an invitation to discover a story from a chapter of our country’s recent history that I’ve never known about. It’s a love story and a tragedy, but it’s also a story about workers’ rights and civil rights and the pursuit of happiness. The Lavender Scare is a valuable addition to queer cinema, and its an important American film.

The Lavender Scare premiered on National Public Television stations on Tuesday, June 18

Check your local listings and Public Television sites to see the new film, but go ahead and watch this great little primer from Step Back History while you’re here…

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/uPsPPnJ-XNE” frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture” allowfullscreen></iframe>

Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=91603

I just got back from a preview from the new Tolkien film which tells the story of the life of J.R.R. Tolkien, the creator of Middle Earth and author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I’ll be reviewing the movie in next week’s Nashville Scene so no spoilers. Instead I’ll just say that bookish movies are notoriously difficult and I enjoyed the movie more than I thought I might. And when I came across this article about Tolkien’s own recordings of his works I was in the mood to share…

In the clips here, you can listen to Tolkien himself read from The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, including a recording at the top of him reading one of the fantasy languages he invented, then created an entire world around, the Elvish tongue Quenya in the poem “Namarie.” Some of these YouTube clips have received their own cinematic treatment, in a YouTube sort of way, like the video below with a montage of Tolkien-inspired media and a dramatic score. This may or may not be to your liking, but the origin story of the recording deserves a mention.

Shown a tape recorder by a friend, whom Tolkien had visited to pick up a manuscript of The Lord of the Rings, the author decided to sit down and record himself. Delighted with the results, he agreed to read from The Hobbit. He liked the technology enough that he continued to record himself reading from his own work. Tolkien may not have desired to see his books turned into spectacles, but as we listen to him read, it’s hard to see how anyone could resist the temptation to put his magnificent descriptions on the big screen.

Check out the full Open Culture piece at the link above. Before you go see Tolkien at the theater — if you’re reading this post you’d likely enjoy the film — listen to the man himself read his famous words. Try to imagine what he imagined when he wrote them. That’s the stuff at the center of this new movie which is an important entry in the saga of Middle Earth on screen…

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The name Francis Ford Coppola conjures a cinematic career crossed by contradictions: he set out to be a “European,” personal, small filmmaker, before creating some of the most popular, successful films in American cinema; he’s a star auteur whose struggles for independence nearly ended his career more than once; he helped to define the New Hollywood-era, but his methods always look back to the ensemble film-making of the golden era of the Hollywood studios.

FFC turned 80 over the weekend and Apocalypse Now is 40 this year. Here’s a great interview between Coppola and Paul Thomas Anderson…

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By Furiodetti – Furio Detti, CC BY 3.0, Link

Filmmaker, poet, critic and philosopher Jonas Mekas passed away on January 23 at the age of 96. The wildly creative and willfully cantankerous Mekas was a champion of experimental cinema and a film critic whose taste and style was ahead of its time. Mekas is credited with getting Andy Warhol to try his hand at movie-making, and his feminist defense of Greta Gerwig’s Ladybird put the nearly-century old Mekas right in time with millenials and the Me Too movement. Mekas was a well known Lithuanian language poet, and a collaborator with Nico, Allen Ginsberg, John Lennon, Yoko Ono and Salvador Dali. However he’s best remembered as a film curator and critic. Here’s the Wiki…

In 1954, together with his brother Adolfas Mekas, he founded Film Culture, and in 1958 he began writing his “Movie Journal” column for The Village Voice. In 1962, he co-founded Film-Makers’ Cooperative and the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque in 1964, which eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives, one of the world’s largest and most important repositories of avant-garde film. Along with Lionel Rogosin, he was part of the New American Cinema movement.

Days after his passing The Guardian published Mekas’ last interview. Here’s a taste of Mekas’ famous flair for creative camaraderie…

Perhaps most importantly, he opened up his loft to friends and fellow travellers in the avant garde. Here, any number of legendary – or soon to be legendary – artists met to watch endless films in which nothing happened, while discussing cultural possibilities. These included Andy Warhol, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Salvador Dalí, Kenneth Anger, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs. (Although he was firmly rooted in the counterculture, he had many establishment friends. Mekas taught the children of John and Jackie Kennedy to make films.)

It was at Mekas’s apartment that Warhol first became interested in film-making. “In my loft,” he says, “Andy met film-makers and was inspired by them. That’s where he got the bug. My loft was a gathering space for musicians, poets, film-makers.” Mekas helped Warhol shoot Empire, an eight-hour, slow-motion film of an unchanging view of the Empire State Building. He has little time for those who regard Warhol as merely a self-publicist. He didn’t seek out fame, says Mekas – it was the other way round.

“The newspapers began to attack him and it created a kind of fame. Then the society around him began to seek him out. Then everybody began to write and say, ‘Andy is only interested in those fake people, he only wants fame.’ But it was the reverse . He was never interested in them and, the more he ignored them, the more they flocked to him. Everybody could go into the Factory – and lost souls would come in because he never said no. Whatever they said, he acted like a good father. He just never said no.”

Read the rest of the interview here, and watch this great vid about Mekas, his life and work to find out more about the great man…

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This week we lost the cinematic master, Nicolas Roeg. The British auteur practically defined cinematic counterculture in the 1970s and his groundbreaking filmography includes David Bowie’s turned as a lonely alien in The Man Who Fell To Earth, Donald Sutherland’s searing, anguished performance in the unforgettable Don’t Look Now, and the mysterious parable of Walkabout. Variety had some words to share at Roeg’s passing…

Each film was a compelling, idiosyncratic tale with highly stylized performances — and beautiful, moody cinematography.

Roeg immediately hit again with his saga of the Australian outback, “Walkabout,” on which he again did double duty. As with “Performance,” the narrative was fractured, and it offered a certain mysticism that captivated arthouse audiences. The film starred Jenny Agutter and his son Luc as siblings abandoned in the desert by their father who are found by an Aboriginal boy (David Gulpilil) on his coming-of-age walkabout.

Two years later, in 1973, Roeg directed “Don’t Look Now,” with two major stars, Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, in the leads. This occult story set in Venice was perhaps his most fully realized and moody thriller, though it never reached a mass audience as it was overshadowed by “The Exorcist” in the year of its release.

…Roeg used Bowie’s alien persona to good effect in “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” another odd but satisfying film about a visitor from another planet. Based on a 1963 science fiction novel about an extraterrestrial stranded on Earth, it co-starred Candy Clark, Buck Henry and Rip Torn and competed at the Berlin Film Festival. When Paramount’s Barry Diller saw the finished film, he reportedly refused to pay for it and it was released independently, later becoming a cult classic and staple of repertory cinema.

Here’s a review of Performance that I published in my newspaper column earlier this year…

With the recent passing of The Rolling Stones’ muse Anita Pallenberg, this week’s screening of the cult classic Performance at the Belcourt Theatre’s Music City Monday event couldn’t be more timely. Pallenberg, Mick Jagger and James Fox are all featured in this countercultural crime drama that finds a wounded mobster holing-up in the decaying mansion of a reclusive rock star and the ladies who share his bed. This scenario finds Performance delivering on all of its sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll promise, but the movie continues to find new viewers because of its dazzling photography and editing, its inventive use of sound and its deeper examining of the links between artistic performance, madness and identity.

Chas (James Fox) is an enforcer for an East London gang. Chas uses his penchant for cruelty and violence to intimidate and coerce anyone who threatens the business of his boss, Harry Flowers. But when Chas winds up on the wrong side of Flowers’ favor, he finds himself on the run from the gang he used to call his own. Chas colors his hair, assumes a new name and ends up hiding out in the decadent abode of a washed-up rock star named Turner (Mick Jagger). At first Chas is put-off by the perverse, bohemian lifestyle and free love values Turner shares with his bisexual housemates Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) and Lucy (Michelle Breton). But little by little, Turner and Chas start to influence and mirror one another in a surreal face-off, pitting Chas’ traditional tough guy masculinity against Turner’s androgynous, theatrical persona.

Lots of movies from the 1960s are still labeled “lurid” or “wild” because they caused scandals when they were released half a century ago during those days of cultural revolution. That said, many of those films – Blow Up comes to mind – now seem coyly charming with their peeks of nudity and hints at forbidden desires. Performance, on the other hand, seems thoroughly preoccupied with sex and violence, and the editing of the sights and sounds in the film’s famous opening sequence alone confuses every wince, groan, slap and caress into a montage of sensations that still seems as intense and skanky as the best Keith Richards solos.

In its original form, Donald Cammell wrote Performance as a comedic romp – a lighthearted look at London counterculture in the swinging ’60s. But under the influence of the work of Agentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges and the theatrical philosophies of Antonin Artaud, Cammell’s drafts of the screenplay grew increasingly darker. Warner Bros. was originally hoping to get The Rolling Stones version of The Beatles’ A Hard Days Night (1964), and one might argue that the milieu at Turner’s pad seems a lot like the one the British tabloid press captured during The Rolling Stones’ infamous “girl in the rug” drug bust at Keith Richards’ country estate in 1967 – the year before Performance was produced. When Warner Bros. got Cammell and cinematographer Nicolas Roeg’s (the pair are credited as co-directors) finished product, they demanded changes. A deft Cammell supervised edits to satisfy the studio while also making the overall feel of the film even more hallucinatory. After threatening to shelve the movie, Warner Bros. eventually released the film in 1970 when it quickly became a cult phenomenon. The movie is now regarded as one of the most influential and innovative British films of all time.

Warner Bros. was also hoping the Performance soundtrack would comprise a new album by The Rolling Stones, but rumors that Mick Jagger’s sex scenes with Anita Pallenberg were anything but play acting drove a wedge between the singer and Pallenberg’s then-boyfriend Keith Richards. However, this Music City Mondays pick comes along with a soundtrack full of nuggets featuring contributions by Randy Newman, Ry Cooder, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Lowell George and composer Jack Nitzche. Merry Clayton might be best known for her standout singing on The Rolling Stones “Gimme Shelter,” and her vibrant vocals adorn three tracks here alongside the lone Stones contribution, “Memo from Turner.”

Performance is a chestnut of psychedelic ’60s cinema, but unlike the usual exploitation fare of the era, it’s a sophisticated examination of self-perception and self-expression through the lens of sex and drugs. The movie hits high gear by the time Chas becomes part of the scene at Turner’s mansion, which is almost literally a house of mirrors where Chas lies about being a juggler before the influences of Turner, Pherber and Lucy slowly start pulling at the loose ends of the gangster’s identity.

Here’s Jarvis Cocker interviewing Roeg about The Man Who Fell to Earth back in 2013…

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