Deep Dive Docs
A music doc featuring a Christian band that wouldn't preach to the choir.
Music documentaries are maybe the only comparison for music biopics when it comes to genres with uncuttable ties to a tired formula. What more is there to say about most band, even (or maybe especially) good ones, other than they met, they played, and success followed – rare is the movie about the band that topples on the launch pad. VH1 perfected the reverse alchemy for turning stories of platinum into cardboard with each of its episodes following oft-lampooned steps through the band’s trajectory: formation and fame followed by drugs and in-fighting followed by redemption for the surviving members. Maybe the musician’s lifestyle lends itself to repetition, but after a while one asks, aren’t there some nice guys out there who can rock?
Witness Parallel Love, a behind-the-music doc with better style than Behind the Music and, refreshingly, not a tale of a band eaten from the inside by success. Arguably this is because the band Luxury never had a chance to reach self-consuming levels of success.
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Services: Free on Tubi, Filmzie(?), Flixhouse(??) and Fawsome(?!?), available to rent on usual platforms.
Luxury had their followers in the 1990s with a growing reputation based in no small part on their basement and small venue live shows. In first of a number of unlikely details, the band formed on the campus of a small Christian college in Toccoa, Georgia and begin gaining a reputation in the nascent alt-rock scene.
Like many documented bands, the biggest threat to their band is a threat to their very lives. But if you can’t relate to the booze and babes, here’s a different harrowing story from a life on the road: after making a splash with their first album, the band gets in a massive car wreck after a live show with injuries that could easily have killed all five of them. Amazingly, all members survive and after a long recovery period, return to making music. It’s easy to point to the crash as the moment that crippled their rise to rock stardom, but even the young and wild incarnation of the band seems reticent to engage in self-promotion.
The most compelling aspect is the band’s relationship to the music world itself. Being men of faith in their private lives, the band gets noticed at a Christian rock festival and, perhaps hastily, signs with a Christian label. But the label has some buyer’s remorse when the band’s lyrics that explore sexuality and gender-identity ambiguities – coupled with their distaste for performative niceties like thanking God in the liner notes – frequently put them on the outs with Christian bookstores. Meanwhile the affiliation with the Christian music scene at all makes them invisible to many mainstream listeners and critics aside from a few die-hard champions.
They exist in a no band’s land, unable to please either world. They drop the label after their second album, break up, reform and rock on to this day. Luxury has the distinction of being the only known rock band with 3/5 of its membership ordained as Orthodox priests. This is so incredibly un-punk sounding that it perhaps loops back around to one of the most punk things possible (made moreso by the members of Luxury not particularly caring what it does for their faint reputation).
I was introduced to the film by a friend who had long been a fan of their music, and it’s an interesting enough tale all on its own to keep it from being a For Fans Only doc, though being into the indie rock scene is the more likely conduit to enjoyment.
About the writer
C. D. Ploughman
The weary Ploughman is a writer and filmmaker, focusing these days on documentary and educational projects. He obsesses over movies with his very patient wife and children.
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As a religious person who can’t stand the performative niceties, I am loudly applauding.
Oh, I’m very here for this. Already intrigued enough to check out the music itself, too. (And I got a good laugh out of the increasingly obscure streaming platforms this is on.)
What did we watch?
M*A*S*H, Season Two, Episode One, “Divided We Stand”
A weaker episode, analysis-wise; as you’d expect, it simply establishes the characters and their dynamics again, through what is already an old saw of an authority figure coming in to evaluate the camp and concluding they’re mad but necessary. In this case, it’s a psychiatrist; I don’t know how old that specific iteration of the cliche was in 1973, to be fair, but it looks especially weak compared to the more nuanced version of the trope coming later this season in Sydney Freedman. Though I will give the episode points for one of the funnier moments of Hawkeye dancing around sexuality:
Margaret: There isn’t a nurse in this camp they haven’t hit on!
Trapper: ‘cept the male ones.
Hawkeye: Speak for yourself.
Dark Star – To my surprise, I found this cult classic first film from John Carpenter (with a lot of help from Dan O’Bannon) to be oddly charming. I don’t usually find nihilist stoners funny or appealing but something about this bunch won me over. (And even if they don’t actually use pot, these guys really feel like stoners.) What works for me? The low key humor. The surprising humanity of these space losers. Also the fairly good effects and set. And despite the real downer of an ending, I didn’t come away sad.
Frasier, “Ham Radio” – But if you want peels of laughter and not just smiles and giggles, this is the place. Frasier directs a re-creation of the first mystery program that aired on KACL. Niles of course knows his brother will take the lead role for himself, re-write the whole thing, and drive everyone crazy. Hilariry ensues. Lots of it. Kelsey Grammer’s favorite episode, and while there are some that have way more heart and some with much more clever set-ups, there are few as hysterical.
Kojak, “Laid Off” – When NYC was hit by the famous 1975 budget crisis, large numbers of cops were laid off (something I cannot imagine ever happening again just to save money). This is the story of one of them. Wife and son to care for, in debt to a loan shark, and now asked to do the loan shark favors. We’ve seen this sort of compromised cop plot before, and better. In fact, this one was pretty dull and unfocuses. But hey, at least they acknowledged something from the real world. (Alas, Son of Sam is not next up.) Guests include Lee Wallace, the Ed Koch lookalike who played the mayor in Pelham One Two Three (before Koch was mayor) and the mayor in Batman ’89 (earning the one nice thing Koch, at this time writing movie reviews for a local free paper, said about the movie).
Remembering when Bush disbanded the Iraqi police and they all joined the insurgents. Turns out leaving a bunch of armed dudes with no money and angry grudges while invading their country is probably a bad idea.
I like the Dark Star novelization by Alan Dean Foster. A downer ending but Foster’s final line, a one word summation of Dolittle’s fate, is just perfect.
Ham Radio is also one of my favourite Frasier episodes – hysterical is absolutely the right word. The escalation in the recording booth is perfection, all the way to Niles finally snapping and rewriting the ending.
The Righteous Gemstones, “For Their Own Nakedness Is Your Nakedness” and “I Have Not Come to Bring Peace, But a Sword”
Baby Billy’s Bible Bonkers! He’s right, it is fun to say.
Having Baby Billy and Tiffany back (now accompanied by the dirt- and cigarette-eating Lionel) is such a treat, and it’s already leading to multiple comedic highlights: Baby Billy’s rant about how they can’t expect him to be satisfied with a penthouse in paradise and a bunch of free pina coladas, Jesse’s befuddled response to his “you haven’t seen the last of me!” proclamation, “Can we get some waffles after we get some ass?”, etc. Plus some genuinely touching stuff: Baby Billy earnestly saying Tiffany’s the prettiest girl he knows, Tiffany and Judy’s relationship, and the offbeat poignancy of going from Baby Billy’s starry fantasy of the Zion’s Landing work to the unglamorous reality of it.
Keefe’s line about having trouble explaining how buying all these sex toys was church business killed me, and like all Keefe moments, it’s only improved by his absolute, awkward sincerity. It’s easy to get why the church families are now worried enough to not want him around their kids, but his puppyish heartbrokenness in accepting being shuttled out of the youth ministry–going to it with a martyr’s stoicism, even moving out so he won’t taint Kelvin by association–is so hard to watch. I did love Kelvin throwing a fit about his brother and sister insisting Keefe has to go, complete with doubling down on voting no on funding the battered women’s shelter just out of sheer contrariness.
Speaking of hard to watch: Judy and BJ. (It’s such a great BJ characterization detail that while he and Judy will enthusiastically dirty-talk each other in the weirdest way possible, he’s not up for the “locker room talk” with Stephen: he’s not a prude, but crude, bizarre intimacy is something he wants with his partner, not a random dude. Especially when he doesn’t know the woman in question is okay with being talked about! Other perfect BJ detail: thinking he should let the dick pic sender know it went to the wrong person, so some nice woman doesn’t miss out!) Their relationship is one of my favorite parts of the show, and seeing it founder like this–over a guy with frosted tips, no less!–is so painful. But the comedy that comes from more and more people finding out–even Lionel!–and throwing in subtle barbs about it was all excellent.
Everyone–even BJ!–drawing guns on Peter Montgomery cracked me up. It’s such a perfectly constructed scene, moving from the characters everyone knows would have guns–Eli, Jesse, Amber, Judy–on to relative wild cards like BJ and Martin (still also with guns), only to then reveal that Kelvin and Keefe are at a loss, forced to settle for finger guns and a brandished fork.
The Montgomerys going along with the Gemstones only to steal all the fertilizer and bring it to their father is a good, intriguing plotting move, and a great end to the episode; I also loved how Jesse’s speech about betrayed trust acts as a kind of oratory montage for both this and the last Judy-BJ scene.
“When did y’all get guns?” got a huge, huge laugh out of me, like Kelvin was accidentally left out of the gun shopping experience one day. (And BJ’s tiny gun is fucking priceless.)
It’s such a perfectly youngest sibling question + delivery, too. Amazing.
Also, agreed on BJ’s gun. That was the bit my wife could not stop laughing about.
BJ is a treasure. That pickleball scene where he politely declines to engage in crass locker room talk… while wearing a Versace workout ‘fit!
Andor, first three episodes – I mentioned that I was going to cancel Disney+ now that I’m done with Justified and was told by friends that I HAD TO watch Andor first. I haven’t cancelled my cancellation but since it doesn’t run out for another week or so I figured I should at least give it a go. But I’m not really seeing much here to grab me so far, the general consensus seems to be that this is in a different league to other “what if that one movie you liked was now eight TV shows?” fare but three episodes in I just feel like it’s more of the same? Would anyone like to throw me a “ah, but by episode five you’ll be completely won over!” reassurance before I simply give up?
The first season definitely takes off by the third arc, and ends well. But between you and me and the magpies, as good as Andor is. it’s not fun. There is a pretty good chance that after I am done with all of Andor, I never rewatch it.
Hmm I could use a little fun to get me on board. It does seem very moody and serious in a way I often struggle to click with.
“Would anyone like to throw me a “ah, but by episode five you’ll be completely won over!” reassurance before I simply give up?”
I can’t because I was won over by the first episode, especifically by the dialogue, which for all its seriousness and cynicism is very fun for me. (Still delighted by Syril being dressed down by his corrupt security supervisor because he’s doing his job too well.)
The first half of the first season is kind of split into two three-episode arcs that each don’t really pay off until the third. So it’s a bit slow going to start. But everything does build and pay off and the best episodes are some of the best TV in recent memory.
(I also have already rewatched some of it. I didn’t find it lacking in fun… I mean, episode 10, you’ll see what I mean when you get there. Maybe it’s not everybody’s type of fun, but it’s certainly mine.)
I’m in the Guillermo camp of being hooked by the first episode with the espionage-procedural-ideas-world building vibes. So I would say I found it ‘fun’ in more of a thriller sense than a caper or adventure sense, if that helps.
The next set of episodes are ‘heisty’ and ‘inner workings of bureaucracy’, to give you an idea of flavour coming up immediately.
I wholeheartedly say I think it was fantastic TV on the basis of drama, character, great writing and acting, tight plotting with consequential payoffs. But it’s not what I would categorise as light viewing.
Final Destination – Would absolutely put on a double bill with Steamboat Bill Jr., this may not be a great movie but it’s more tongue in cheek than critics admitted at the time (Funniest, goriest use of “I hope you drop dead!” possible here) and the Rube Goldberg death machine “executions” are really, heh, well-executed. Devon Sawa* also is a pretty good “Final Guy” as is Ari Larter, they’re not fresh original characters but their fears and transformations are believable, especially how Alex by the climax is carefully eating out of a can with a plastic spoon, all too aware of how a metal fork could wind up in his body. The mechanism of the movie is older and deeper than the petty morality of Saw, which is basically “What if the thing you did happened to you BUT WORSE” – Fate is coming for you and only the flimsiest of rules can stop it (for now).
*Also the DILF in a Season 2 episode of Hacks, looking much buffer and hotter 25 years later.
My mind has now been completely blown by realizing that Devon Sawa was Deborah’s hook-up in that episode of Hacks. I’ve watched Idle Hands so many times! I should have recognized him! (In my defense, as you said, he really did get a lot hotter.)
He’s really great in Idle Hands, haha. Such a committed physical performance.
“I’ve watched Idle Hands so many times!”
MY PEOPLE
My friend wants to do a group screening soon so evidently it’s on my list now.
Don’t forget Sawa as the Pop Warner quarterback in 1994’s classic Little Giants! https://www.the-solute.com/year-of-the-month-cliffy73-on-little-giants/
Mission:Impossible – The Final Reckoning – Opens with two montages of moments from every previous entry in the series and a declaration: we will finish tying everything together, sticking together disparate parts with spit and whispered dialog if we have to. You’ll find out what the Rabbit’s Foot was and what happened to the guard who was supposed to keep Ethan from rappelling down an air shaft to his state-of-the-art CRT monitor in 1996. It’s all here! Except M:I2, we’ve memory-holed Thandwie Newton and everything else about that adventure.
The side-by-side comparison of the recent chapters to the wild early iterations unencumbered by mythology or even a style directive beyond “stunts, please” emphasizes the fading brightness of the shockingly durable M:I series. Now Ethan battles not a rogue terrorist band or a single naughty nation, but The Entity, an AI program that threatens all of humanity by playing off their national conflicts and slipping into computers systems to take the burden of operating nuclear weapons out of the hands of humans. Once it gains control of every nuclear nation’s stash (and it seems like a soft accusation by the movie to repeatedly show exactly which nations possess functioning nuclear arsenals), The Entity will launch all missiles and enjoy some peace and quiet for once. For reasons that don’t become clearer for being explained longer, these massively complex systems can only be saved by one man and for other reasons that aren’t clear, that man is Ethan Hunt.
Battling an incorporeal, existential threat that evolved from all those cool computer systems the Impossible Mission teams used or broke into over the years, and a threat that transcends all the national conflicts that the franchise has either exploited or tip-toed around throughout decades of shifting politics – all this seems like a perfect opportunity to make that meaningful summary of the movies and the collective fears of the moment. But the images of rioting crowds and the damp, dour bunkers and escape routes only emphasizes one point: this isn’t much fun any more. The first… twenty minutes? Hour and a half? I lost all sense of time during this film. The first substantial portion of this movie which cuts between intense whispering matches and close-ups of very serious faces is so unengaging it’s easy to miss that it’s also deeply weird.
Much of the movie looks like a supercut of the silly, portentous dialog that buffers action scenes in a Mission: Impossible movie except it somehow takes twice the time. I prepared for something really clever, like discovering this was all a generative facade created by The Entity, a movie created by AI as imagined by humans. But nope, this is what Everything Has Led To, as one of the trailer-friendly lines might say. Characters that aren’t really characters expressing feelings that aren’t really feelings and doing errands that border on the abstract. More than once those errands involve an atomic bomb with a red timer display and nests of wires to be cut. When you’re generating an new entry the Mission: Impossible series, that’s going to get iterated a few times.
I recommend it on the whole just for that strange, free-floating feeling inside the movie: you’re glimpsing the nexus of a trembling planet’s collective consciousness, but the only route is up Chris McQuarrie’s ass. For tolerating this excursion, you’ll get a very nifty sequence where Tom Cruise navigates a sunken submarine with corridors of crazy water and gravity effects (Cruise, his age-resistant face magnified by the experimental scuba gear, looks particularly like he’s being swallowed by the uncanny here). But I can also strongly recommend sneaking in during the last half-hour where you can witness 1) actual daylight and 2) possibly the most amazing sustained stunt sequence put to film since the silent days. The mono-a-mono between Ethan and human villain Gabriel (Esai Morales, the only actor having fun here) in Snoopy-era biplanes is so entertaining and truly worthy of intense whispering, you wonder why the movie spends the other 2.5 hours without this kind of energy (or half the visible color spectrum). I suppose the world is a scary, gray place these days and if you want to be taken seriously saving it, you have to show it that way. Not sure serious faces nodding makes something truly serious, but as the series increasingly believes, the effort is the reward.
Final M:I Rankings:
1) Rogue Nation
2) M:I
3) Ghost Protocol
4) Dead Reckoning
5) M:I 2
6) M:I III
7) Final Reckoning
8) Fallout
More importantly, final ranking of each Mission: Impossible by its best stunt sequence:
1) Final Reckoning (wing walking)
2) Ghost Protocol (Burj Khalifa tower)
3) M:I (computer room suspension)
4) Dead Reckoning (cliff jump / train)
5) Rogue Nation (car-turned-motorcycle chase)
6) M:I 2 (motorcycle battle)
7) M:I III (bridge bombing)
8) Fallout (Paris motorcycle chase)
I’ve seen the first five M:I films (entirely out of order) but sort of stopped having much interest in them. Will note that while I don’t entirely agree with old friend Julius’s take on the political end of things here, once I starting seeing such things I could not unsee them and that plus feeling like we were repeating things had me jumping off. So it’s interesting to see a review that suggests I made the right decision.
But really…biplanes? Your big stunt is something that’s been obsolete for 80 years? It is because AIs can’t control planes built in 1920? Or are Tom and McQuarrie just looking to remake Wings?
I think it’s the one part of the film that they came up with a stunt setpiece for and then backwards engineered the story into it. Well, “engineered” is a bit strong, there’s a single line by the villain about how he’s going to get away in a little plane and that he has a second plane in case something happens to the first. We’re on the brink of nuclear war, no time to question these things!
“You destroyed my little plane! Lucky for me, I thought of exactly this situation and have a second plane.
Wait, they did “Sideshow Bob’s Last Gleaming”?
Re. the biplanes, I’m assuming it’s like the bit in Pacific Rim where a monster has just fried all the giant robots with an EMP and our hero exclaims about his only slightly older than the rest robot: “Gypsy’s nuclear! She’s analogue!” (insert groaning) and proceeds to suit up and save the day.
That sounds at least movie logical (especially one where a rogue AI has compromised anything digital or networked) but I don’t remember them even going to that length. Tom even dons some nifty oversized flight goggles at one point! Not enough flowing scarves, though.
Just saw it and can confirm they do put the notes in: Gabriel tells Ethan he has his escape plan ready, a plane that the Entity can’t get into (he actually says the A word – analogue) – and to wrap things up tidily he also mentions that he brought a spare in case of emergencies.
Also, who the f was the old dude with him?
Glad to know they did the work. No idea who the old guy was, he was just in charge of following him with the back-up plane apparently? Also this led to
“For reasons that don’t become clearer for being explained longer, these massively complex systems can only be saved by one man and for other reasons that aren’t clear, that man is Ethan Hunt.”
The thesis of the M:I films in a nutshell.
Monday night – Jackass Forever – this was, admittedly, after a Memorial Day / service-world weekend evening out, so my attention span / memory for this one wasn’t / isn’t the best. But these movies are always fun and funny, with the wrinkle this time that, of course, in 2022, the original crew is not only stunting but bringing along a new generation of performers. (Many of those appeared in the Family Feud episode I mentioned recently.) And then there’s some footage toward the end showing the old stunts and new stunts side-by-side. Time comes for us all, I guess. What else to say? It’s Jackass, which means it’s ridiculous and funny and I’m glad I’m safely at home watching.
Tuesday night – a venture to the theater for Friendship. I very much enjoyed this and would recommend it. On the one hand, is Tim Robinson kind of playing the ur–I Think You Should Leave character? Yeah, kinda. On the other hand, the movie has more depth than that and more specific characterization than that. It’s got little oddball touches like the relationship between Craig’s (Robinson) wife Tami and son Stevie. But Craig and the source of his loneliness, and Austin (Paul Rudd), the new neighbor Craig becomes obsessed with, are also given more depth and detail than you might typically expect, avoiding more pat explanations for why they are the way they are.
Craig’s loneliness isn’t just a product of Male Loneliness in the 21st Century; it’s because of who he is. Craig isn’t malicious, but he’s got a very Alan Partridge type of narcissism: He’s lonely and awkward because he’s so self-absorbed; he doesn’t really pay attention to other people or consider their needs, he only relates to them in terms of what they can do for him and how they can feed his ego and his needs. We really see this through a few grand gestures to Tami– they’re not the kind of thing she wanted, but he does them because he needs to be validated as the good husband, or he needs a spark of adventure in his life, or whatever reason.
On the flipside, Austin seems effortlessly cool to Craig, but– as we see with how his coworkers treat him when he moves up to the morning show, and also with his toupee– it’s all a facade. Austin is clinging to faded youth as a way to try to seem cool and stay relevant. That’s enough to impress Craig, but it also means Austin has his own loneliness and vulnerabilities at his core.
The movie is very funny, too. The cringe comedy aspects universally made me laugh– there’s one about a third of the way through that just had me howling– and there’s a sequence that may be the funniest use of a Subway sandwich shop on film that I can remember. It’s very funny and gave me some things to chew on afterward, so I recommend it. The ending seems to land in the right place, too.
Also, I suspected Tami’s ex Devon was Stevie’s real father by about the second time she brought him up (well, that, and the fact that Stevie looks nothing like Tim Robinson), and then Josh Segarra appeared as Devon, and I was like, oh, yeah, obviously. (Even before he gave his toast.)
The rare Christian rock band that seemingly didn’t make rock worse or make Christianity look lame! My friend was in the 2000’s Vegas scene and remembers many metalcore Christian bands. (“This one’s for Jesus!” *plays incomprehensible metal riffs*)
Excellent write-up. I can see “Luxury” as a name not doing well with performative labels as well. Have you boys considered “Poverty?”