"They're like the slacker Rolling Stones of the '90s."
Vancouver International Film Festival
In its four shape-shifting parts centred by a straightforward "real" music documentary, featuring archival footage, reunion tour rehearsals, and typical interviews, the film is accompanied by three constructed parallel elements—a news segment from a 2022 Pavement Museum retrospective in New York City, the behind the scenes of an off-Broadway jukebox musical production called Slanted! Enchanted!, and a mockumentary following the fake Hollywood production of a Pavement biopic called Range Life. Evidently, the latter three parts were extensively and elaborately concocted by Perry for Pavements despite being semi-real events involving actual fans.
In the biopic scenes, a method-acting Joe Keery hilariously plays a heightened version of himself about to portray contentious frontman Stephen Malkmus with Nat Wolff, Fred Hechinger, Logan Miller, and Griffin Newman playing themselves cast as the rest of the band. Filled with accurate-looking "For Your Consideration" movie clips, premiere red carpet videos, and even a cast and crew Q&A, the attention to detail in the conception of Pavements is high and always reflective of the band's outsider ethos.
As a complicated, semi-fictionalized tribute to their musical legacy, Pavements proves to live up to the 1990s slacker indie alt-rock group by treating them as if they were the most important band in the world despite never (intentionally) reaching the heights of contemporaries like Nirvana or Sonic Youth. Perry and company clearly have a reverence and sense of humour about the band's legacy and place in rock and roll history.
Pavements screened at the 2024 Vancouver International Film Festival as part of the Showcase series at the VIFF Centre.
More | YVArcade / Destination / Indiewire / NME / Variety
0 reactions:
Post a Comment