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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Sound Unseen
Wednesday 18 September @ 10:06:32 |
 by Dwight Hobbes & Robert Czernik
Minneapolis’ annual film and music festival, Sound Unseen (Sept. 20 - 27) takes a step up this year, collaborating with the Walker Art Center. The wonderful art house Oak Street Cinema and snobsters paradise Bryant Lake Bowl return as venues. Walker Arts Center will program four events, including the closing night tribute to Frank Zappa discovery, Captain Beefheart. Here’s slight sampling of what else is playing at the festival.
Tribute
You could put “Tribute” on store shelves and it would sell—more than a few copies. It’s got that much good music and that much neurotic, true-life drama. The documentary on cover bands is carried by Larger Than Life, a storied resurrection of KISS with able support from the backstabbing horror behind Monkees impersonators, The Missing Links. The only actual drag is the Sheer Heart Attack (Queen) segment. It features the explosive vocals of Enrique (Freddie Mercury), but spends far too much time indulging devotee Mark Eldridge, who takes both hero-worship and himself way too seriously.
Larger Than Life are superior musicians, level-headed professionals who had themselves a real problem when Andy Patche, their Gene Simmons, apparently lost his mind and set his house on fire. They weathered it like straight-up professionals to come back strong as ever. Interviews with Andy Patche and Jay Harris (Paul Stanley) are fascinating. Patche’s words before the tragedy are profoundly disquieting. Here is this talented guy who seems to truly have a grip on things. But he later grows convinced Simmons and the rest of KISS are evil. What Danny Lopez (Davey Jones) reportedly did to the Missing Links shouldn’t be done to anyone—at least not without a condom. He’d book Missing Links gigs and at the last minute substitute a Beatles cover band for which he played a very convincing George Harrison. An embittered Chuck Halter (Mike Nesmith) chronicles the bands demise and promotes Head, his own version of the Monkees. (D.H.) 9:45 p.m. Sat. & Sun., Sept. 21 & 22. Oak Street Cinema .
Free Radio
“Free Radio” champions the renegades who consider FCC regulations as a violation of the right to free speech. “No democracy”, says Ralph Nader in an unidentified clip from one of his addresses. “can really thrive in a fundamental sense if it has to rely so heavily on the mass media.” In 1978 when the Federal Communications Commission outlawed radio broadcasting under 100 watts, it effectively eliminated low-cost community stations across the country.
However it did not stop Stephen Dunifer (Free Radio Berkely) or Mbanna Kantako. Dunifer won a victory when a federal judge refused an injunction by the FCC to shut down his pirate radio station. Kantako operated, from his apartment in the projects, a Springfield, Ill. station that exposed and opposed long-standing police brutality. One interview subject describes an ass-whippin’ he’ll never forget. The police department eventually prodded the FCC to come down on the station and, faced with a $10,000 fine or 10 years in jail, Kantako closed up shop. “In the home of Lincoln”, says Mike Townsend, Professor the University of Illinois, “they just couldn’t have police exposed killing and beating up blacks, they couldn’t have this stuff going out ovedr the air.” There’s a fine interview with Japanese activist Tetsuo Kogawa, credited with starting a movement that launched thousands of stations in Tokyo alone. It’s a powerful documentary (several interviews courtesy of Paper Tiger TV) on an important subject. (D.H.) 5:30 p.m. Sun., Sept. 22. Bryant Lake Bowl.
Something out of Nothing
This short 28 minute film was originally filmed between 1988 and 1990 for Soul Asylum's label to be a video promo for “..And The Horse You Rode In on”. Short on any focus, the film lets the music and the band speak for themselves. We get to a see a rather young SA as they play in their practice space, on stage and in the studio. There's lots of funny scenes, one involving a drunk Pirner trying to lay down some vocals in the studio. In an undated concert (I'm assuming 1990 or so) at First Avenue, we are treated to a crowd shot of some pretty '80s hair and outfits. I enjoyed the film as a Soul Asylum fan, but felt it lacking some order to really make it a true documentary. It seemed cut together, with no subtitles to reference the locations or dates. For any fan of SA or the decade that brought the Minneapolis sound to the world, check it out. (R.C.) Plays Mon., Sept. 22 before Oak Street Cinema’s 7:30 p.m. Showing of “A Skin Too Few”
Boot Factory
Director Lech Kowalski of D.O.A. fame again brings his raw and engaging style to the screen with another movie about Punk Rockers. The story of four Cracow, Poland friends who make leather lace up boots (8, 10, 12 and 14 holed) by hand. It follows their seperate but interlaced lives as they struggle with drug addiction, love, and running a thriving business. This film is raw and it should be. Like the punk ethics that run the lives of his subjects, Kowalski uses sparse settings and a single camera to bring us into their lives. Their really not much of a story, just a year or so in their lives. We see cramped punk parties that could be a basement in Dinkytown, and feel cramped in the process. The minimal use of camera angles, staging, and lighting makes the viewer feel like they are in the room when boots are getting made, beers are getting drunk, and lives are being changed. Kowalski films the first 2/3 of the movie in black and white, jumping to color after a six-month period to catch us up on his subjects. (R.C.) 9:30 p.m. Sun. & Mon., Sept. 22 & 23. Bryant Lake Bowl
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