Eugene weekly., October 13, 2011, Page 24, Image 24

movies
BY RICK LEVIN
Music for Humans
Color Me Obsessed captures glory of The Replacements
F
In the short, shoddy, glorious span
or a moment that was all too
Color Me Obsessed:
of
years
they existed — from, say, 1980
brief — but perfectly, preciously,
The potentially
until,
say,
1989 — the Replacements were
bittersweetly too brief — it looked
true story of the
last best band
untouchable. They embraced anarchy,
to all of us like it was theirs for the taking.
plays Oct. 20-22
inspired chaos, oozed charm, electrifi ed
It wasn’t only punk rock that needed
at Bijou Cinemas.
the
scene, overwhelmed the shadows
saving, but music itself, and therefore the
Director Gorman Bechard
will hold a live Q&A
and underachieved themselves into
world itself. There it sat like some overripe
following the 9 pm
extinction. Led by singer/songwriter Paul
fruit, waiting to be plucked and eaten and
Thursday, Oct. 20, screening;
Westerberg, the band inadvertently created
thrown back up: the world of our parents,
info at bijou-cinemas.com
an underground that they immediately
the world of Ronald Reagan, the world of
repudiated, and in so doing they undid the
the suburbs. That world was ready, almost
damage that a decade of mock-heroic cock rock and sleazy
begging, to be destroyed and saved. Here was a talent show
easy listening had wreaked on the only recognizably original
the boys might actually, for once, win.
American art form. The Replacements were legend.
Even at those basement parties where the Minneapolis
It wasn’t all shits and giggles. Nobody’s perfect. The
police started banging on the door, they kept it turned up
Replacements refused, on principle and probably to a fault,
loud and teetering on the brink of beautiful chaos. The
to take themselves too seriously. Long before Kurt Cobain
trick was to not try, and not to try to not try. You can’t fake
satirized the music industry’s radio-friendly unit shifters,
that shit. Years before Nirvana, these were the real losers:
the band goosed the glam machine’s inverted Midas touch
a band of precocious, smirking, raggedy-ass misfi ts who
— “Label wants a hit, we don’t give a shit,” Westerberg
knew the score but never forgot that music is not some toe-
growls drunkenly on Hootenanny, the Replacement’s
gazing mope fest. It’s about joy.
imperfect pre-masterpiece masterpiece. This neener-
And then, in a blink, they were gone — just like that, not
neener, fuck-you punk fury was, and still is, exhilarating,
with a bang but a whimper. Ashes to ashes, dust to dustbin.
equal parts lame, hilarious, tongue-in-cheek and serious
The Replacements were a mere fl ash in the pan, and they
as the shakes. “Fucked ‘em up,” Westerberg drawls after
didn’t leave even one hit to wonder about. They came,
blowing a couple chords at the end of “Treatment Bound,”
they saw, and — seeing what was there to conquer — they
old beyond his years.
shot themselves in the foot, one last time. Everybody saw
Classic snotty moments like these are part and parcel of
it coming, so it was kind of funny. It was kind of terrible,
the mystique, to be sure, but not so long after this Westerberg
too. It was, in the grandest sense, totally tragic and comic,
started laying down some of the fi nest lines ever committed
in the same way Charlie Chaplin and Charlie Brown and
to tape — lyrics soaked in heart and heartbreak, and as
Townes Van Zandt are tragic and comic. Tragicomic like
razor-sharp scary as drinking yourself sober. The man could
the continent itself — like America.
Holiness and Hell
C
harismatic preacher Edmund Creffi eld was known to send his followers into seizures
of religious ecstasy, sermonizing passionately for up to 24 hours straight. Combine
that with the fact that most of Creffi eld’s followers were young women, that the
preacher held a belief in communal nudity and spent several months in a hole under a house
in Corvallis, and you have a creepy, early 19th-century cult worthy of a feature fi lm.
Few hard facts are known about the Church of the Bride of Christ, and Portland
fi lmmaker Edward P. Davee’s imagination fi lls in to illuminate the connection between
sex, murder and salvation.
Cryptic storytelling quickly puts the viewer on edge with the fi lm’s black-and-white
images, minimal dialogue and heavy music. The pacing is designed for discomfort.
Time and events clip along too quickly, but in long, slow takes. An illuminating scene is
24 OCTOBER 13, 2011
EUGENE WEEKLY
turn a phrase to stop you short and just crush you, as he does
in the bridge to “Bastards of Young”:
“The ones who love us best
Are the ones we’ll lay to rest
And visit their graves on holidays
at best.
The ones who love us least
Are the ones we’ll die to please
If it’s any consolation I don’t begin to understand
them.”
Every new Replacements record, of course, was pegged
by fanatics as a sell out, in the days when being called a
sell out was a deep insult. It’s funny now, in retrospect,
how dearly we held the Replacements — how the band’s
intimacy and spontaneity were met with such a personal
stake, how close we held them, how bad they pissed us off,
betrayed us, took us back in, won us back over.
Listen, once you start making a case for the
Replacements, it just keeps coming, like the trots: They
were the only real punk band. They were the last great rock
band. They laid down two of the greatest pop songs of all
time — “Left of the Dial” and “Alex Chilton” — as well as
another baker’s dozen that could be argued so, like “Can’t
Hardly Wait” or “Unsatisfi ed” or “Color Me Impressed” or
“Skyway” or “I Will Dare.”
But the hell with all that. Analyzing the Replacements is
like reading comic books with a telescope. Sure, they were
the ultimate critic’s darlings but, way more than that, they
were the hoi polloi, the down and out. They were us. Before
talking his way into the band, Westerberg was a janitor.
Before the biggest interview of their career, they all shaved
off their eyebrows. The Replacements didn’t give a shit.
Director Gorman Bechard’s documentary, Color
Me Obsessed, captures in all its tattered, passionate
glory the earnest devotion and sloppy love of hard-core
Replacements fans. Subtitled “The potentially true story
of the last best band,” Bechard’s fi lm works nicely as a
companion piece to author Jim Walsh’s 2009 All Over
But the Shouting, a stunning oral history that peeks into
every knuckleheaded nook and emetic cranny of the band’s
mythic and legendary anti-heroic status.
Color Me Obsessed is, like its subject, a strange, slippery
beast: The fi lm contains no footage of, or music by, the
band. Opening with a still shot of a cigarette smoldering
in an ashtray beside an old answering machine, the movie
progresses in roughly chronological fashion, following the
timeline of the Replacement’s albums. Bechard seems little
concerned with creating a defi nitive cinematic biography.
Instead, he taps a load of interviews — with producers,
label reps, writers, fans, as well as musicians like Husker
Du’s Grant Hart, REM guitarist Scott McCaughey and
Gaslight Anthem singer Brian Fallon — to eke out what
it is about the Replacements that continues to exert such
a fascination. As musician Jim McGuinn puts it: “Kind of
brilliant. Kind of dumb. Kind of Replacements.”
Strangely, it all works. Color Me Obsessed is a hilarious
and moving love letter to the little train that could but didn’t
— a Minneapolis garage band that, for one exhilarating
and excruciating moment, stood poised on the brink of
something enormous. Whether that brink was the cutting
edge of success or a ledge into the abyss doesn’t really
matter. What’s important is that the Replacements took the
plunge. And the rest is history.
ew
purposefully shortened, followed by an uncomfortably long look at a tree branch. It’s as
though a series of old photographs is laid out, one after the next, and we are left to piece
together the clues.
Shot through mullioned windows or backwoods brush, How the Fire Fell casts the
audience in the role of uncomfortable voyeur. This makes the fi lm interesting but
ultimately unsatisfying, as we never really understand any one character, only see them.
While one can forgive the fi lm it’s somewhat obvious imagery and heavy aesthetic, I
cannot come to terms with the way the fi lmmaking upstaged the very story it was trying to
tell. How the Fire Fell would have benefi tted from more psychological introspection and fewer
explicitly self-conscious gestures.
Davee is a passionate fi lmmaker with a strong, innovative approach. I look forward to
his future fi lms. It’s only a matter of time before this director discovers a more seamless
way of meshing the story and the telling in his work. – Anna Grace
A special screening of How the Fire Fell, followed by a Q&A with the fi lm’s director, Edward P. Davee, will be
held 8pm Thursday, Oct. 13, at Bijou Cinemas; info at bijou-cinemas.com
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