San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Ask Mick LaSalle: All-time favorite rock ’n’ roll movies.
Greetings Mick: What are your favorite rock ’n’ roll movies, and why?
Charis Moore, Oakland
Greetings Charis:
I’ll give you three, all filmed in the 1960s and all, therefore, from before my time.
I really like “Monterey Pop” (1968), about the Monterey International Pop Music Festival of June 1967, because it captures a moment in youth culture when it seemed like things could only get better. That’s usually when things are at their best point, and that was probably the case here.
“Gimme Shelter” (1970), about the Rolling Stones’ concert at Altamont in December 1969, captures the reverse phenomenon. It shows all the cherished assumptions of the ’60s generation blowing up in their faces. All the nonsense propagated by Woodstock — that a music festival could be like a model for a future society — comes crashing down. All the peace-andlove stuff seems like impotent posing in the face of actual evil. And all the drugs that were supposed to lead to enlightenment lead instead to lots of tiresome, oblivious and often naked people stumbling around in a pathetic haze.
The two documentaries, taken together, show how utopia can become hell in less than 30 months.
My favorite rock ’n’ roll narrative feature is the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” (1964). The earliest of the three, perhaps surprisingly, it’s the one I saw when it came out. My mother took me to it when I was 5. (Actually, she took herself to it and took me along because she had no babysitter.) It’s one of the first movies I ever saw in a theater, and all I remember is the sound of teenage girls screaming all around me.
Years later, in high school, I discovered it on “The Late Show,” and then, as an adult, rediscovered it as an innovative art film that, at the same time, does what all youth musicals must do: It makes the case for its era as a wonderful time in which to be young.
Dear Mr. LaSalle:
In your article about “In the Heights” you intimated that Stalinism has reared its ugly head on the extreme left. This ugliness pairs well with the fascism on the extreme right. Which do you think is worse?
Dear Mr. Biehl:
I found the “In the Heights” situation, with Lin-Manuel Miranda and Rita Moreno getting grilled for no reason, highly disturbing, and I believe that if the extreme left and right were equally powerful, they’d be equally scary: Both use intimidation to force people to say things that they know aren’t true.
However, the extreme-left people are like the Jacobins during the French Revolution, always ready to attack each other, to accuse members of their own ranks of ideological impurity in the hope that someone besides them will get guillotined. The extreme right is more alarming, because they’re more organized. They have an airtight media system to make sure truth never cracks through, they’re trying to prevent people from voting, and they’re more violent. There are also more of them.
I was in Utah early this summer, talking to a seemingly normal older woman who owned a bed and breakfast. We were sitting on her front porch, having the obligatory pandemic conversation, and she said, “I wore a mask until it became political. But once it became political, I said, ‘Forget it,’ and I stopped wearing one.” She genuinely believed, she told me, that Anthony Fauci had made mask wearing into something political. I was speechless. I thought, if this otherwise sane woman really believes that, what else does she believe, and how many others believe it, too? It depressed me for the rest of the day, and I’ve been telling this story to everybody for months.
troupe’s Cal Performances debut, it plans to bring “Batucada Fantastica,” Vicente Nebrada’s celebration of Brazilian Carnaval, as well as works by a rising star of the ballet world, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, and Spanish dancemaker Gustavo Ramirez Sansano. original member of her company) and Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards, Teicher is scheduled to visit Cal Performances with “More Forever.” Think tap means metal clicks and Fred Astaire? This collaboration with composer and live pianist Conrad Tao takes inspiration from the Lindy Hop and presents the company barefoot and dancing in a 24-square-foot sandbox.