As a young man who started college, director Todd Haynes soon fell to The Velvet Underground — the band famously mentioned by musician Brian Eno didn’t sell much records, but bought records. Everyone went and started a band.
It sounds like a wonderful fictional music movie story. In the hippie era of flower power, rock bands emerged from New York’s avant-garde art scene, with the opposite spirit, dressed in black in an outsider atmosphere, singing about medicine, and dubious sex. This group of improbable personalities and awkward talents work with edgy Andy Warhol to blend music, visual arts and performance. This is a unique mix that brings little commercial success. However, the band is credited as one of the most influential in rock history.
“The Velvet Underground” Haynes’ wonderfully peculiar, well-constructed rock document-or rockumentary? – I will tell you exactly that. And that’s true.
It may be surprising that some people, like Haynes, the band’s enthusiastic fan who started Lou Reed’s career and was managed by Warhol, refer to it as well as the Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Maybe. However, The Velvet Underground is favored by many who point out its impact on punk and other styles. It lasted about six years before Mercurial Reed left in 1970, with no real mainstream success.
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Whatever your level of familiarity, Haynes’s documentation (the first of this skilled director) is very stylist-friendly and it doesn’t really matter what you know. ..
His only purpose is to tell the story of The Velvet Underground through interviews and a surprisingly large collection of archived material, all taken before the early ’70s, including generous fragments of avant-garde filmmaking. Not. He seems to be trying to create a documentary version of The Velvet Underground Show in his unique non-linear style.
Most importantly, Haynes uses split-screen technology for virtually the entire two hours, which goes far beyond the technical benefits. It’s as if one point of view is never enough. Whether it’s a pensive lead photo or an implicit skepticism of what someone is saying, there’s always something else. Or munching at Hershey’s chocolate bar.
And we don’t just mean two screens. At some point, there are 12 screens that tell a story, a combination of still images and videos. The spirit seems to be in line with a multimedia show in the mid-1960s, with Warhol projecting dreamy screen visuals when velvet played and an eclectic audience danced (even Rudolf Nureyev).
Haynes’ dazzling visuals interview two live band members of Welsh and classically trained violist John Cale, who have made a strong partnership with Long Island-born Reed. It is based on. The other is drummer Moe Tucker. He has a great line when explaining how velvet diverged from hippie culture: peace and love? “We didn’t like it. Make it a reality,” she says negatively.
One man who couldn’t be interviewed: Reed himself died in 2013 after a long solo career. Haynes collects some of all the audio clips and archived footage he can do to capture the dangerous energy of young leads. Instead of running a show he doesn’t want to do, he smashes his fist into a piece of glass.
Of course, Warhol, who died in 1987 and appeared in a quick clip, and Nico, a German singer whose blonde charm and stage presence helped secure the group’s first record deal, are also gone.
Haynes started in the early 1960s, when the group’s name and sound weren’t there yet, and wasn’t much praised. “No one hired us, so we had to change the name significantly,” Reed said.
But Reed knew what he wanted. “I want to be rich, and I want to be a rock star.”
The film includes the band’s founding 1967 first album “The Velvet Underground & Nico”, downtown shows, tour performances, West Coast stints, second album “White Light / White Heat”, and Nico. “She was a wanderer,” says Cale.
Whimsical Reed fires Warhol and then kicks Kale out. “I didn’t know how to please him,” says Cale. “You tried to be kind, he would hate you more.”
Finally, Reed himself leaves.
“We weren’t close to what he wanted us to achieve,” explains Tucker. “It was’Damknit, when will it happen?'”
But they did. Perhaps the best line of all comes from music manager and spokeswoman Danny Fields. “They were so bright and shining that there wasn’t enough space for that amount of light,” he says. “To describe the band at its height requires physics.”
The Apple TV + release, The Velvet Underground, has been rated R by the American Film Institute for “language, sexual content, nudity, and some drugs.” Execution time: 121 minutes. 3 out of 4 stars.
MPAA definition for R: Limited. Children under the age of 17 must be accompanied by a parent or guardian.
Copyright 2021 AP communication. all rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission.
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