Anvil! The Story of Anvil
Directed by Sacha Gervasi. With Steve "Lips" Kudlow, Robb Reiner, Tiziana Arrigoni, Kevin Goocher, Glenn Gyorffy, Lemmy, Slash, and Chris Tsangarides. (NR)
Call it The Rock of Ages: the two protagonists of Sacha Gervasi's Anvil! The Story of Anvil are 50-something Canadians Steve "Lips" Kudlow, guitarist/vocalist, and Robb Reiner, drummer of the once up-and-coming heavy metal band Anvil. Together, they shared stages in the 1980s with bands that went on to reap millions (and where Kudlow played his Flying-V with a vibrator); today, they work day jobs, play local clubs at night, and still dream of hitting it big.
It won't be an easy sell—Anvil plays the kind of shredding, sex-heavy metal whose heyday has long since passed (sample lyrics involve tarot cards, crystal balls, and fishnets)—but it's the pair's dedication to the music that makes you hope they can finally grab the brass ring. It isn't that Kudlow and Reiner aren't interested in changing what they do for the chance of success, it's that the thought never occurs to them: they're true metalheads, down to the leather.
The film opens with archival footage of a decades-old concert in Japan, when the band seemed to be on the cusp of breaking through to popular success. The fact that it never happened is still something of a mystery to the celebrity talking heads that follow, a who's who of hard rock musicians that all hail Anvil. "Everybody just sort of ripped 'em off," says Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash, "then left 'em for dead."
Amazingly, Kudlow has kept his spirits high. Genuine to a fault, he would play to a crowd of three (and does) just for the chance to share his love for the music. Reiner (no relation, jokingly or otherwise, to This Is Spinal Tap director Rob Reiner) loves Kudlow in a Keith-and-Mick fashion, but has also cultivated some of his other interests, including a surprising talent for painting. A tour of his Hopper-esque cityscapes—desolate yet hopeful, as though someone were about to enter the frame—ends in hilarity when Reiner reveals a painting his wife makes him keep in the bathroom.
As Anvil! rocks back and forth from touching to ridiculous, it's tempting to see it through the Spinal Tap lens. And when the band scores some overseas gigs, the details sometimes seem to be a parody of a parody—they visit Stonehenge and get lost in Prague, and their amp really does go to 11—but when you watch Kudlow trudging from one record label to another, dropping off his demos with bored receptionists, you almost want to cry.
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Also this week: Banjo great Bela Fleck is one of two people making the instrument welcome again in many American households (the other is still Steve Martin). On Monday, he comes to Amherst Cinema for a special presentation of Throw Down Your Heart, Sascha Paladino's documentary about Fleck's journey to Africa to uncover the often misunderstood history of his instrument.
Too often relegated to the dust heap of Southern caricature, the banjo in fact has deep roots in Africa. It was carried here in a different form by West Africans captured by slave traders, eventually evolving into the instrument we know today, one that in many ways contains a great deal of our national history—our penchants for cultural adoption, for reinvention, and even for cruelty (slaves played banjo partly because plantation owners outlawed drums).
With a year off from his touring schedule with the Flecktones, Fleck decided to travel to Africa to collaborate with native musicians. Paladino follows him across the continent as he forges connections with musicians in Uganda, Mali, The Gambia and Tanzania, proving along the way the old saw that music is a universal language—something that always sounds trite until you see it proved true.
Also on tap for this week and the next is a deluge of German films, showing in free (and open to the public) screenings at Pleasant Street Theater and Smith College as part of The Fifth Biennial East German Film Summer Film Institute. Presented by the DEFA Film Library at UMass-Amherst, the series includes a total of 12 films representing every decade from the '40s to the '70s.
The series aims for something more scholarly than simple moviegoing, however; a press release from the presenters notes that "2009 marks the 20th anniversary of the end of the Cold War. As its ideological divisions and artistic legacies come into clearer view, previously neglected aspects of East German cinema become available to critical reassessment as well—and with it, the concepts and methodologies that have guided much of the scholarship on postwar German film." Over the course of the seminar—which also brings together dozens of film scholars, art historians,and social scientists in an attempt to broaden the scope of its inquiry—the DEFA team aims "to use the continued provocation of East German cinema to confront a number of historiographical and methodological issues in the study of postwar German cinema, including questions of periodization, institutional continuities, conceptions of cinema as a public sphere, and film's contribution to the audio-visual legacy of the 20th century."
Heady stuff, certainly, but one small detail promises to throw a wrench in the works: only four of the films have been subtitled in English, leaving two-thirds of the festival fare only available in the original German. It's not an insurmountable problem—and at least one of the films, Horst Bonnet's 1974 Orpheus in the Underworld, is certainly worth seeing in any form, especially for his vision of hell as a haven for can-can dancers—but for such an ambitious festival, it's an odd programming choice.
Of the four subtitled films, three screen in the first half of the week, all of them at Graham Auditorium in Hillyer Hall on the Smith College campus. On Monday is Bismarck, Wolfgang Liebeneiner's 1940 film ostensibly devoted to "Iron Chancellor" Otto von Bismarck. Made as a state commissioned film during Hitler's Third Reich, it was also meant to reinforce in the public's mind a link between the biographies of Bismarck and their newest leader. Like the work of Leni Riefenstahl, the result forces us to question the value of artistry when used as a tool for propaganda.
On Tuesday comes The Kaiser's Lackey, Wolfgang Staudte's 1951 adaptation of Heinrich Mann's novel. An acid historical satire, Staudte's vision of Germany is one in which success is attained through a simple bit of societal wisdom: the best way to reach those above you is to step on those below. His "hero" is Diederich (Werner Peters), who goes from meek student to Kaiser's lackey by following that advice.
Documentary filmmaker Karl Gass' 1962 work Look at This City! arrives on Wednesday. The film tells the history of Berlin between the end of World War II and the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Originally intended as a proof of the wall's necessity, it portrays the city's Eastern section as an oasis of peace, whereas the West is seen as a "spearhead against the East." The Communist slant is continued in a series of satirical montages that mock Western ideas of freedom. Gass, who continued directing into the 1990s, died this past January, but the work he left behind retains a vital potency.
For a full schedule of the DEFA film series (including German-only films), visit www.umass.edu/defa/sfi2009.
