DVD, Blu-ray and TV

ZAPPA

MAGNOLIA PICTURES

7/10 A character study of a singular, irascible obsessive. By Rob Mitchum

THERE aren’t many musicians harder to squeeze into documentary flm format than Frank Zappa. With 62 albums released during his lifetime, plus dozens more afer his 1993 death, and a musical style that combines compositional complexity with sophomoric humor, Zappa’s career is impervious to today’s playlist and streaming doc synopses.

In his flm, director Alex Winter represents this impossible task by returning again and again to the Zappa archives, shelves stacked foor to ceiling with audio and video tape in the basement of his former home. But the 129-minute flm largely punts on trying to wrap its arms around the voluminous output of Zappa’s short life, creating instead a character study of the singular, irascible and obsessively creative musician.

The musician who is driven to work at all personal costs is a hoary rockpic cliché, but if anyone earned it, it’s Zappa. A majority of the archival footage fnds the lanky Rasputin fgure rehearsing his band, hunched over notation paper, or conducting live concerts – ofen with his middle fnger. The flm is cut like you’re inside his restless imagination, with brief fashes of monster movies, gas masks from his youth growing up next to an Army chemical plant and graphic claymation.

The movie also lets Zappa himself – never shy in interviews – do most of the talking; it’s 20 minutes before you hear from anyone else. There’s good reason for that, as Zappa kept nearly everyone at arm’s length throughout his career. A lengthy roster of band members is introduced in concert footage, most with a very short timeline of collaboration noted beneath their name. Guitarist Steve Vai says Zappa saw his fellow musicians as “a tool for the composer”, while Zappa himself admits in one interview that he has no friends, only a family that he rarely sees between tours.

In the context of rock history, Zappa is also portrayed as a man apart. While The Mothers Of Invention had all the trappings of late-’60s hippiedom, their thorny music is laughably incongruous with the writhing dancers at the Whisky A Go Go. Zappa famously didn’t do drugs, carried a very severe political and artistic ethos at odds with the loosey-goosey vibes of the time and was more concerned with intricately scripted music and theatrical hijinks than jamming out.

The flm honors this preferred identity, that of a 20th-century composer inspired by Varese and Stravinsky, who largely used the musical tools at hand to realise his vision: the electric guitar and whatever genre was currently popular, be it psych-rock, jazz fusion, prog, or new wave. One of the longest live clips included doesn’t feature Zappa at all, but the Kronos Quartet, performing a Zappa piece and comparing him to Ives, Partch and Sun Ra. At one point he fat out hires the London Symphony Orchestra to record some of his symphonic work, then throws shade on them to David Letterman.

That no-bullshit prickliness served Zappa well in his eternal battles with the record industry and his unlikely late-life roles as free-speech spokesman and musical ambassador to Czechoslovakia afer the Velvet Revolution. All these chapters are given considerable screen time – they’re easier to

explain than the plot of 200 Motels or Joe’s Garage – and his media and Congressional hearing campaign against the pearl-clutching censors of the Parents Music Resource Center remains heroic even if you don’t care for his music.

And if you don’t, Zappa doesn’t make a very strong case for giving it another chance. Documentaries shouldn’t necessarily be commercials for their subjects, but the flm never really sells why anyone unfamiliar with his heady concepts and absurd lyrics should reconsider; his songs are even more disorienting and impenetrable when cut up and combined with the rapid-fre visual editing. Apart from the unlikely novelty hits of “Dancin’ Fool” and “Valley Girl” – both of which Zappa dismisses, natch – there’s little to suggest why he earned progressively larger crowds and a devoted following.

But even at that remove, the flm hits its emotional climax with Zappa’s fnal concert, conducting the Ensemble Modern in Germany. In the rehearsals leading up to the event and the performance itself, Zappa, fghting the prostate cancer that would kill him at only 52, fnally appears satisfed (mostly) with the quality of the musicians reproducing the music in his head. Then he walks backstage and sits alone, while the crowd cheers on. It’s an oddly moving Mr Holland’s Opus ending for a subject even a sympathetic flmmaker has depicted as relentlessly cold and unsentimental.

“You must have been thrilled?” an interviewer asks about the 20-minute ovation at the fnal show.

“I was happier that they did that rather than throw things at the stage,” Zappa replies.

Frank Zappa in the editing room of his Laurel Canyon home, LA, March 25, 1972

The film is cut like you’re inside his restless imagination

BLUE SKY

BFI 7/10

Lange’s nuclear bombshell Tony Richardson’s reputation rests on kitchen sink dramas. His fnal flm (released posthumously in 1994) applies his social conscience to a tale of radiation and infdelity in the American west of the early 1960s. Jessica Lange won an Oscar for her Marilyn-like performance as Carly, an untameable bombshell who tests the patience of engineer husband Hank (Tommy Lee Jones), while he is preoccupied with the fallout from nuclear testing. The performances cover-up the plot’s simplicity. Extras: 6/10. Commentary, nuclear shorts, essays. ALASTAIR McKAY

JOE BONAMASSA

GUITAR MAN AMAZON

7/10

High-quality hat-tip to one of the world’s great guitarists

Despite more No 1 Blues albums than any other artist, the unassuming Bonamassa still has something of a branding problem. Cue this expertly assembled proflepiece, which charts a blues-rocky road from teen prodigy to arena-fller in 140-odd minutes. It’s a great watch, soundtracked by sparkling guitar playing and crunched with entertaining interviewees: step forward production honcho Kevin “Caveman” Shirley and Jason Bonham, Joe’s bandmate in Zep-a-like supergroup Black Country Communion. A Clapton geek and self-confessed “student of the students” of the blues, his life story doubles as a light essay on the genre’s legacy in the 21st century. MARK BENTLEY

BOB DYLAN

ROLLING THUNDER REVUE

CRITERION COLLECTION 9/10

Dylan’s dog and pony show, reframed Martin Scorsese’s reframing of Dylan’s 1975-76 big tent revue tour confused some with its occasional untruths when released on Netfix. Even Scorsese, in the extras, now admits he has no idea what’s true or false, an admission entirely in keeping with Dylan’s intentions. As curated myth, it’s fascinating, but the intense live performances dispel the static. Extras: 8/10. Unseen live footage, interviews with Scorsese, editor David Tedeschi, Larry “Ratso” Sloman. ALASTAIR McKAY

KEITH EMERSON

FANFARE FOR THE UNCOMMON MAN: OFFICIAL KEITH EMERSON TRIBUTE CONCERT

CHERRY RED 7/10

Held in LA in 2016, this concert saw a host of performers including Brian Auger celebrate the music of Keith Emerson. As you’d expect, it is a prolonged demonstration of exceptional virtuosity and showmanship, and not just on keyboards – at one point four guitarists spend fve minutes playing the same solo in slightly diferent styles – but also great joy. The players work through a stash of synths, afectionately recreating Emerson’s greatest moments in prog, rock and classical. All proceeds go to charity. Extras: 7/10. 2CD with audio recording. PETER WATTS

LITTLE STEVEN

MACCA TO MECCA

WICKED COOL/UME 7/10

The Boss’s amanuensis pays Fab Four tribute

In late 2017, Van Zandt’s European tour with his Disciples Of Soul big band landed in Liverpool. Somehow all 15 of them crammed onto the tiny Cavern Club stage to play an exuberant eight song set of Beatles classics, captured here in intimate style, afer the flm has suitably opened with McCartney himself joining the band to sing a joyous “I Saw Her Standing There” during the tour’s London date. Extras: 7/10. Four discs of live audio recordings from the tour. NIGEL WILLIAMSON Letitia Wright plays activist Altheia Jones in Mangrove

SMALL AXE

BBC 9/10 An essential quintet from Steve McQueen. By David Calhoun

YOU’LL be endlessly humming Janet Kay’s 1979 hit “Silly Games” afer seeing Lovers Rock – one of the fve stories that make up this quintet of flms directed and co-written by the Black British flmmaker Steve McQueen. Each of McQueen’s fve flms, originally made for BBC TV, takes a diferent perspective on the Black experience in London from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, touching on important historical moments but also digging deep into the emotions of what it meant and felt to be young and Black in those years. Lovers Rock is the high point: barely an hour, it’s short, sweet and soulful, almost entirely set at a house party in west London in 1980. These flms build into an event. Individually, they are smart, sharp and pointed. Together, they are powerful and ground-shifing: a view on a culture we’ve not had the chance to experience before, especially right there on the small screen, at prime time, slap bang in the middle of a Sunday evening.

The flms in Small Axe are not autobiography, but they’re surely personal for McQueen, a Londoner who grew up in the city in the 1970s and ’80s. The dominant perspective is young, Black and male. In Education, a young boy is shunted into the hell of the ‘special school’ system not because he has genuine learning problems but because his headteacher and others treat him diferently from the white kids. In Alex Wheatle, a young man stumbles out of the care system and struggles to fnd his identity in 1980s Brixton, having to face up to his demons in jail. In Red, White And Blue, Leroy Logan (John Boyega) joins an almost entirely white police force and faces both on-the-job racism and scepticism from his own community, not least his own dad.

There’s a close-up intimacy running through them all. But the grandest of the fve in terms of sweep and story is Mangrove – the true story of how Frank Crichlow (Shaun Parkes), the Trinidad-born owner of the West Indian restaurant of that name in Notting Hill, ended up in court in 1970 alongside eight other Black activists and thinkers. A portrait of a charged community turns into a furious courtroom drama alive with wit and intellect.

There hasn’t been a moment in British television like this. Or in flm – and you could debate which this is, flm or TV, as McQueen proudly brings the art of cinema to the small screen in terms of style and ambition. This is a Black British flmmaker distilling the surrounds of his own childhood and young adulthood into uncompromising storytelling that shows hard, unheard truths about the history of his country – and doing it in a way that’s tough at times but never far from humour, warmth and the glorious chaos of everyday family, school and work life. It’s genuinely essential.