#The velvet underground full movie 2021 plus

This is his movie from the moment it starts, and the Welsh drone-guitar wizard makes the most of it. The final word usually goes to the last man standing, and Cale - just by virtue of being alive - gets to own the spotlight in a way he never could when sharing a stage with Reed.

Or maybe Cale was just waiting to say his piece. The most arresting example of this technique arrives right away, as Haynes enlivens the stories of Reed and John Cale’s early lives by wedging their Warhol camera tests onto the far side of the frame, as if they were scoffing at their own supposed importance or reminding us that even the greatest rock myths are rooted in flesh and blood. The screen is almost always split into fragments, recalling “Chelsea Girls” as editors Affonso Gonçalves and Adam Kurnitz create an associative mosaic of images so loud that you can practically hear the synapses firing as your brain connects the slow cinema of Andy Warhol to the sustained tones of La Monte Young. “The Velvet Underground” makes time for all of the expository table-setting we’ve been conditioned to expect (it’s hard not to feel a shudder of recognition when Haynes’ cold open segues into a segment on Lou Reed’s childhood), but there’s so much stimuli to process that even basic details are enlivened by how they might smear into something else. Haynes’ film is like that because the scene around the band was like that - a constellation of talents greater than the sum of their parts. Modern Lovers founder and Velvet Underground superfan Jonathan Richman describes the band’s “strange melodies” and how you could see everybody onstage and still not account for where a particular noise was coming from. Warhol said that he liked the Velvets because they sounded the way his movies looked, and now Haynes has made a documentary that looks the way the Velvets sounded. Nevertheless, “The Velvet Underground” is a film you hear with your eyes. But if “The Velvet Underground” excerpts oodles of experimental films (and channels several more) without threatening to become an experimental film itself, that’s only because Haynes’ loving tribute is able to translate the language of a singular American moment into something digestible enough for us to understand that no one will ever speak it the same way again. There are tired expository stretches toward the end - unhappy families might be different, but unhappy bands all seem to break up the same way - and there are giddy moments that threaten to explode non-fiction norms with the director’s usual flair. Just when you thought you’d rather watch all eight hours of “Empire” for the second time than ever sit through another fucking documentary about Andy Warhol, this lucid history sparks a new appreciation of what his factory made possible.Īt its best, Haynes’ film is neither a dry accounting of who the Velvets were nor a heady evocation of their work it’s a movie about the fires these people set inside each other and how they spread to anyone else who was burning and gave them the same permission to push back against expectations. The historical fact of their transgressive greatness has been distilled/immortalized/done to death by t-shirts, dorm-room décor, The Strokes, et al., but Haynes also captures the specific texture of the creative freedom that conjured the Velvets from the heteronormative safety of “Mad Men”-era New York.

And not just them, but also remembering the perfect catalysy of creative energies and tore it asunder before most of the world even began to recognize what it meant. The answer to those questions - or so it seems after the first of what could easily become a dozen viewings - is that Haynes is less interested in reinterpreting the Velvets than he is in remembering them. Quentin Tarantino's Favorite Movies: 40 Films the Director Wants You to See

#The velvet underground full movie 2021 plus

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What might compel an auteur capable of exorcising “Far from Heaven” from the ghost of Douglas Sirk to make a film so full of talking heads and archival footage? Why would someone with Haynes’ gift for interpolating his influences in unexpected ways submit himself to the strictures of a basic rise-and-fall rock saga that everyone knows?