20,000 Days On Earth. (15.)
Directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard.
Featuring Nick Cave, Warren Ellis, Darian Leader, Ray Winstone, Blixa Bergeld and Kylie Minogue. 97 mins
I'm pushed to think of a rock/pop performer who has contributed more to the cinema than Nick Cave. Tom Waits makes a strong case with an impressive run of performances and some excellent scores for films such as One From The Heart and Night On Earth. Cave has also written a series of top film scores with bandmate Ellis, his song are scattered across movies from Shrek 2 to Until The End of The World; he has written the scripts or stories for Ghosts of the Civil Dead, Lawless, The Proposition and an unmade Gladiator sequel that follows Maximus into the afterlife. Cave's acting career has been negligible but he pops up momentously at the climax of Wings Of Desire. Now he turns his attentions to that most forlorn and worthless of pursuits, the film portrait of the musician and, with the assistance of directors Forsyth and Pollard, has made something that he much more than a pithy title. Indeed, it may make claim to being one of the year's best films.
20,000 Days is not a documentary as such. It is part a lecture on what it is to write songs and be a rock performer, part a reflection on how it feels to have accumulated such a back catalogue of past days as he looks through the Nick Cave Archives. It is also a series of Nick Cave Meets: he chats with Freudian analyst Leader about his childhood (his earliest memory of his father is him reading him the first chapter of Lolita, mine is the sound of “Della and a Dealer and a dog named Jake and a dog named Kalamazoo” blaring out the car window to indicate his return from work) and to Ellis about great gigs. Between that he drives around his adopted hometown Brighton in the rain and figures like Winstone and Minogue appear for a chat. Everything is so beautifully filmed by Erik (Submarine, Tyrannosaur) Wilson and you wonder if Holy Motors is an inspiration – Cave even looks a bit like Denis Levant.
Cave is a compelling figure. At the age of 57 he's still waifishly and wastedly thin, is almost always seen wearing a black suit with a white shirt and has jet black hair that is gracefully retreating from his forehead but hangs down straight around the rest of his head, like a morbid shower curtain. He also performs almost entirely without the aid of a chin. He is every inch the goth rock idol but simultaneously has the bearing of 70s Northern club circuit stand up, approaching the mic with a fine line in mother-in-law gags in an edition of The Comedians. He is a synthesis of Iggy Pop and Max Wall.
Some will claim it is staged and pretentious but I'd say that that was just him making an effort to be interesting. (If you need some in depth discussion of chord changes and some rock'n'roll nostalgia I'm sure BBC 4 on a Friday can help you.) Cave seems to commit to a fairly narrow range of goth obsessions- religion, death and transgressions. What is amazing is that they don't limit him. Having seen him in concert twice I can confirm he has talent that means he can impress people who wouldn't be his natural fan base. His is dark view of existence, but one filled with zeal and curiosity. He does what any artist should do: he makes life seem that bit more wondrous, and his film is thrilling example of it.
Directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard.
Featuring Nick Cave, Warren Ellis, Darian Leader, Ray Winstone, Blixa Bergeld and Kylie Minogue. 97 mins
I'm pushed to think of a rock/pop performer who has contributed more to the cinema than Nick Cave. Tom Waits makes a strong case with an impressive run of performances and some excellent scores for films such as One From The Heart and Night On Earth. Cave has also written a series of top film scores with bandmate Ellis, his song are scattered across movies from Shrek 2 to Until The End of The World; he has written the scripts or stories for Ghosts of the Civil Dead, Lawless, The Proposition and an unmade Gladiator sequel that follows Maximus into the afterlife. Cave's acting career has been negligible but he pops up momentously at the climax of Wings Of Desire. Now he turns his attentions to that most forlorn and worthless of pursuits, the film portrait of the musician and, with the assistance of directors Forsyth and Pollard, has made something that he much more than a pithy title. Indeed, it may make claim to being one of the year's best films.
20,000 Days is not a documentary as such. It is part a lecture on what it is to write songs and be a rock performer, part a reflection on how it feels to have accumulated such a back catalogue of past days as he looks through the Nick Cave Archives. It is also a series of Nick Cave Meets: he chats with Freudian analyst Leader about his childhood (his earliest memory of his father is him reading him the first chapter of Lolita, mine is the sound of “Della and a Dealer and a dog named Jake and a dog named Kalamazoo” blaring out the car window to indicate his return from work) and to Ellis about great gigs. Between that he drives around his adopted hometown Brighton in the rain and figures like Winstone and Minogue appear for a chat. Everything is so beautifully filmed by Erik (Submarine, Tyrannosaur) Wilson and you wonder if Holy Motors is an inspiration – Cave even looks a bit like Denis Levant.
Cave is a compelling figure. At the age of 57 he's still waifishly and wastedly thin, is almost always seen wearing a black suit with a white shirt and has jet black hair that is gracefully retreating from his forehead but hangs down straight around the rest of his head, like a morbid shower curtain. He also performs almost entirely without the aid of a chin. He is every inch the goth rock idol but simultaneously has the bearing of 70s Northern club circuit stand up, approaching the mic with a fine line in mother-in-law gags in an edition of The Comedians. He is a synthesis of Iggy Pop and Max Wall.
Some will claim it is staged and pretentious but I'd say that that was just him making an effort to be interesting. (If you need some in depth discussion of chord changes and some rock'n'roll nostalgia I'm sure BBC 4 on a Friday can help you.) Cave seems to commit to a fairly narrow range of goth obsessions- religion, death and transgressions. What is amazing is that they don't limit him. Having seen him in concert twice I can confirm he has talent that means he can impress people who wouldn't be his natural fan base. His is dark view of existence, but one filled with zeal and curiosity. He does what any artist should do: he makes life seem that bit more wondrous, and his film is thrilling example of it.
