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      Remembering the Velvet Underground Through the Mirror of Film

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherIn its day, the Velvet Underground verged on the inscrutable, a band that tempered pop curiosity with avant-garde abrasion. Managed for a time by Andy Warhol, it wasn’t particularly successful by commercial measures, but the group — which included Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Moe Tucker — provided an early counternarrative to the peace and love centrist counterculture of the 1960s, and proved to be profoundly influential.The band is remembered in “The Velvet Underground,” a new documentary directed by Todd Haynes, who has made unconventional music films for the last two decades. This movie is a deep dive on the New York demimonde that birthed the band, and also a reflection on the cinema and art of the day.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about how the Velvet Underground was experienced in its time, how the band’s musical aesthetic matches with the film’s visual aesthetic and the state of contemporary music documentaries.Guests:Jon Pareles, The New York Times’s chief pop music criticA.O. Scott, The New York Times’s co-chief film criticConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      ‘A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks’ Review: Defining Portraits

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      This documentary celebrates how the work of the great photographer Gordon Parks brought a nuanced fidelity to Black experience.John Maggio’s “A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks” shares a title with the great photographer’s 1966 autobiography, which voiced his need for a camera that was mightier than the sword. Parks was born in 1912 as the last of 15 children on the family farm in Kansas. He went on to tell defining chapters in America’s story through the establishment pages of Life magazine, with a nuanced fidelity to Black experience.Maggio’s documentary moves through Parks’s rich photo essays on a Harlem gang leader, the segregated South, Muhammad Ali and a boy in a Rio de Janeiro favela, as well as bold early work on Ella Watson, a janitor at the Farm Security Administration. A line is drawn from Parks’s legacy to the cultural narratives being charted by the current photographers Devin Allen and LaToya Ruby Frazier.This helps avoid a portrayal of Park — an avuncular sage in sweater and pipe — as a stand-alone figure. He also made history as the first Black artist to produce and direct a major Hollywood film (“The Learning Tree,” from his own book), directed a pop-culture monument in “Shaft,” composed music and wrote several books. Spike Lee, Ava DuVernay and curatorial critics sound valuable but similar points about his empathy and point of view.Perhaps no one documentary can do justice to Parks. But “Choice of Weapons” ends up streamlining his complexity, and its wind-down looks past his other audiovisual output (screening soon in a retrospective at Anthology Film Archives). Still, as Parks once said, “I consider this my world,” and we’re all still living in it.A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon ParksNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Watch on HBO Max. More

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      ‘Cusp’ Review: Teenage Girls, Stuck With Shrugging Off Harm

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      What starts as a documentary about three Texan high schoolers becomes a look at the normalization of sexual abuse.Directed by Isabel Bethencourt and Parker Hill, the verité-style documentary “Cusp” follows three Texan teenage girls on summer vacation. The group of friends, Brittney, Aaloni, and Autumn, ages 15 to 16, live a seemingly carefree existence. But as we partake in the girls’ shenanigans — house parties, back seat gossiping, bedroom intimacies — their recurring testimonies about sexual trauma and consent stand out.A portrait of modern girlhood, this documentary ultimately becomes a bleak look at the normalization of sexual abuse among the very victimized young women.The film begins on a disturbing note: Two girls laze around on a tire swing as a boy nonchalantly approaches with a rifle slung over his shoulder. Though the location in Texas is unspecified, grassy flatlands, gravel roads and isolated bungalows suggest these are rural, working-class parts. (Press materials say the filmmakers, based in New York, met the girls on a road trip a few summers ago.)Brittney, who wears contoured makeup that adds years to her appearance, discusses her daily drinking and partying with a grin and shrug. Aaloni worships her freewheeling mother and loathes her chauvinistic father, who is never captured on camera. Autumn suffers a bad breakup, which sends her spiraling into reckless party mode. She even gets her nipple pierced by Aaloni, the one moment in the film not centered on boys and trauma.Either in voice-over or in discussions caught on camera, the girls speak candidly to their experiences with rape or sexual abuse and the regularity with which they are approached by older men who initially feign concern about their status as minors. Their hyper-awareness of these dynamics feels all the more tragic when one of them begins dating a controlling adult man.The film ends on a hopeful note, which feels contrived given the bottom line: that the cyclical nature of sexual abuse is resilient and yet unbroken.CuspNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters currently. On Showtime beginning Nov. 26. More

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      ‘Julia’ Review: She Changed Your Life and Your Utensil Drawer

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      An invigorating new documentary looks back on Julia Child and her influence on how Americans cook and eat.According to this movie, if you own a garlic press, you probably have Julia Child to thank for it. The opening scenes of “Julia,” a lively documentary directed by Julie Cohen and Betsy West, paint a dire picture of suburban American home cooking in the post-World War II era: frozen entrees and Jell-O molds and Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam — an ethos that put convenience ahead of delectability.With the double-whammy of an unlikely best-selling cookbook and a series that helped put public television on the map, Child changed all that.Her story has been told, in fictionalized form, in the charming Nora Ephron film “Julie & Julia.” That 2009 picture commemorates Child’s impact on food culture through a parallel story, also fact based, of a blogger, Julie, making the recipes in “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” which Child wrote with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholie.This documentary is a conventional one, replete with archival footage and talking heads. Child, born in Pasadena, escaped an affluent and conservative upbringing by serving in World War II. Her husband, Paul Child, was both helpmeet and soul mate, supporting her when she enrolled in the exalted Cordon Bleu cooking school on the G.I. Bill — the only woman in her class.Their marriage here is presented as an ideal stew of sex, food and intellectual compatibility. Among the many still photos here chronicling their love is a nude portrait of Julia, something you probably never thought you’d see.The movie doesn’t shy away from Child’s personal shortcomings, touching on a casual homophobia she renounced when the AIDS crisis hit, pouring her energies into raising money to fight the disease. “Julia” is an apt tribute to a life well-lived and well-fed.JuliaRated PG-13 for salty language and one artful nude. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Paper & Glue’ Review: A Sequel of Sorts to ‘Faces Places’

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      JR, plying his art of making and displaying gigantic portraits, carries on, this time without the inimitable Agnès Varda.In “Paper & Glue,” a young Hispanic man stands in the yard of a sprawling prison in Tehachapi, Calif., talking about taking part in a photographic project by the French artist JR.With a group of fellow prisoners, he posed for and then helped paste up the impressive result of their work, which spanned the expanse of the yard. Drone footage shows the men looking up out of a huge group portrait to meet the gaze of the eye in the sky. After helping dismantle the temporary display, the prisoner says with a hint of melancholy, “The process is what matters.”This handsome documentary confirms that sentiment repeatedly as the artist-director recounts two decades of his travels. In 2017, JR was half of the delightful tag-team of “Faces Places,” the Oscar-nominated documentary he and the groundbreaking director Agnès Varda made in the French countryside. “Paper & Glue,” while not as tender a romp, is a sequel in spirit. Faces and their places continue to matter. JR’s always-on sunglasses remain a coy trademark (after all, his own work relies on people showing their faces), but it’s clear strangers respond to him. The incarcerated men laugh at his stories. The women of Morro da Providência, a favela outside Rio de Janeiro, make introductions that ease his entry into their community. The French filmmaker Ladj Ly looks to him to help with a school for budding artists in a Paris suburb. A young mother in Tecate, Mexico, allows him to snap photos of her infant. In 2017, an enormous image the baby’s beatific face towers above the fence at the United States border with Mexico. Her thoughts about JR’s work are so celebratory yet nuanced, she could be his gallerist.Paper & GlueNot rated. In English, Portuguese, French and Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘3212 Un-Redacted’ Review: Trying to Solve a Mission’s Mysteries

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      The documentary looks into the complex circumstances involving four American soldiers who were killed in an ambush in Niger in 2017.For anyone confused about the circumstances in which four American soldiers were killed in an ambush in Niger in 2017, the documentary “3212 Un-Redacted” clearly lays out the geography and complicated timeline. It also suggests that confusion is understandable: The movie argues that the Pentagon’s official investigation, which placed the bulk of the blame on junior-level officers, unfairly characterized the events and went out of its way to protect high-ranking officials.“3212 Un-Redacted,” produced by ABC News with the investigative reporter James Gordon Meek serving as a writer and an onscreen presence, visually plays more like a television special than a feature documentary. It devotes much of its first half-hour to remembering the fallen men — we learn, for instance, about how Sgt. La David T. Johnson rode a single-wheeled bike around the Miami area — and introducing their families, no strangers to military culture, who feel betrayed. “The army let me down,” says Arnold Wright, the father of Staff Sgt. Dustin M. Wright. “They let my son down. And then they lied about it.”Meek is particularly interested in why higher-level officials might have proceeded with the operation, after pushback from the ground; the answer he proposes suggests complex motives that probably couldn’t be fully assessed without more information than is publicly available. But at times, the filmmaking itself could be clearer. Meek indicates that he was first contacted about the project around 2018, but the movie shows footage of an American-Nigerien military meeting in September 2017, the month before the ambush. (A representative for the film says it comes from “Chain of Command,” a series by National Geographic, which isn’t credited until the end.) The lack of labeling only raises questions, slightly marring what otherwise plays like a thorough, outraged exposé.3212 Un-RedactedNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Mayor Pete’ Review: Politics Is Local

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      This film, which follows Pete Buttigieg on his campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, rarely captures him in what looks like an unselfconscious moment.We already knew Pete Buttigieg was good on camera. For “Mayor Pete,” the documentarian Jesse Moss followed Buttigieg — the current transportation secretary and former mayor of South Bend, Ind. — during his campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. But the resulting portrait rarely captures him in what looks like an unselfconscious moment.Maybe Buttigieg is always on. “In my way of coming at the world, the stronger an emotion is, the more private it is,” he says in an interview for the film. He chafes against consultants’ advice that he “let loose” and be himself — because letting loose, he says, would not be being himself. The movie does show him singing a “Schoolhouse Rock” tune as he signs papers at his mayor’s desk.But Moss — a director of “Boys State,” in a sense a companion look at political novices finding their voices — hasn’t succeeded in becoming a fly on the wall, if such a thing is possible during a heavily photographed campaign. (“The War Room” focused on strategists, not the candidate.) Showing Buttigieg at one public appearance after another, “Mayor Pete” more often plays like outtakes from the trail than an inside glimpse.Occasionally the movie encounters situations that appear as if they weren’t intended to be filmed, as when Buttigieg’s husband, Chasten, points out that he’s not going to be positioned as prominently as other candidates’ spouses in Iowa. Later, in South Carolina, Chasten encourages his weary spouse to deliver yet another speech (“Everything you’re going to say is new to them”). For a minute, you can see Buttigieg let a private emotion through.Mayor PeteRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Watch on Amazon. More

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      in Television

      Know How the Beatles Ended? Peter Jackson May Change Your Mind.

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      The director’s three-part documentary “Get Back” explores the most contested period in the band’s history and reveals there’s still plenty to debate.It is a cold January morning in 1969, and three of the four Beatles are assembled in a cavernous film studio in London, with cameras rolling and microphones everywhere. “Lennon’s late again,” Paul McCartney says matter of factly, as he plugs in his bass guitar.With Ringo Starr and George Harrison sitting groggily before him, a tray of toast and jam by their side, McCartney starts to strum and sing, searching for inspiration. Within minutes, a mid-tempo groove takes shape and a familiar vocal melody emerges. “Get back,” he sings in a faint howl. “Get back to where you once belonged.” Almost like magic, a Beatles classic begins to form out of nothing.Later that same day, after John Lennon arrives, the four rock deities gather in a circle and bicker. They have loose plans for a concert TV special featuring brand-new songs, but most of the men appear to be dreading it — and may be dreading each other, too. Lennon, who seems to space out for much of the meeting, declares vaguely that “communication” with an audience is his only aim, while an impatient McCartney challenges his bandmates to show some enthusiasm for the project or abandon it.Harrison blurts out what they may all be thinking: “Maybe we should have a divorce?”Those back-to-back scenes in Peter Jackson’s documentary series “The Beatles: Get Back,” a seven-hour-plus project that will be shown in three parts on Disney Plus from Nov. 25 to 27, encapsulate the twin sides of the most contested period in Beatles history — the glory of artistic creation by the world’s most beloved and influential rock band, and the grueling conflicts that led to its breakup, announced a year later.For Beatles fans, or any student of 20th-century pop culture, these are astonishing glimpses into the band’s working life and the tensions that surrounded them.“It’s sort of that one impossible fan dream,” Jackson said in a video interview from Wellington, New Zealand, where he has spent much of the last four years in a darkened editing suite surrounded by Beatles memorabilia. “‘I wish I could go in a time machine and sit in the corner of the stage while they were working,’” he said, describing a lifelong dream like a child praying for the ultimate Christmas present. “‘Just for one day, just watch them, and I’ll be really quiet and sit there.’”“Well, guess what?” he continued. “The time machine’s here now.”Peter Jackson pored over nearly 60 hours of footage for his documentary “Get Back.”Nicola Dove/DisneyJackson’s film is also a volley in one of the longest-running debates in Beatles scholarship. The band’s journey in January 1969 began with intense pressure to put on a high-concept live show and ended with something wonderfully low-concept: an impromptu lunchtime performance on a London rooftop that reminded the world of the band’s majesty, spontaneity and wit. “I hope we passed the audition,” Lennon quips at the show’s end.That period was already the subject of “Let It Be,” a 1970 vérité film by Michael Lindsay-Hogg; its soundtrack was the Beatles’ final studio LP. In time, that film took on a reputation as a joyless document of the band’s collapse, and later testimony from members of the Beatles seemed to buttress that view. Lennon described the sessions as “hell,” and Harrison called them the group’s “winter of discontent.”Yet that narrative has long been challenged by some Beatles aficionados. Lindsay-Hogg’s film, they argue, was selectively edited for maximum dreariness, perhaps to retroactively explain the breakup — “Abbey Road,” the Beatles’ true swan song, was made after “Let It Be” but released first — while evidence from bootlegged tapes suggests a mixture of pleasure and frustration familiar to any musician struggling through Take 24 on a deadline.The mere existence of “Get Back” is a sign that, more than half a century after the Beatles disbanded, their history is still unsettled, and remains endlessly ripe for deep-dive research and partisan counternarratives.Jackson’s film, arriving with the authority of a lightning bolt hurled from a mountaintop in Middle-earth, may become the final word in the argument over this period, though the story it tells is far from simple. Jackson, the Oscar-winning director of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy — and an avowed Beatles nut — was given access to nearly 60 hours of previously unseen footage by Apple Corps, the Beatles’ company, with no brief, Jackson said, but to restore the film and tell the full story.From left: Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, John Lennon and Yoko Ono in the studio.Apple CorpsThe Beatles, or at least their corporate surrogates, have embraced Jackson’s retelling, and a preview of the film highlighted moments of brotherly silliness, like the band dancing and clowning in the studio. At a music industry event last year, Jeff Jones, Apple Corps’ chief executive, promised that the new film would “bust the myth” that these sessions were “the final nail in the Beatles’ coffin.” Yet Jackson said the band has had no influence over his work.“Everyone sort of thinks it’s a whitewash” because the Beatles have authorized the film, Jackson said with a laugh. “But actually it’s almost the exact opposite. It shows everything that Michael Lindsay-Hogg could not show in 1970. It’s a very unflinching look at what goes on.”For fans who remember Lindsay-Hogg’s film, or have read dismal anecdotes in any of dozens of Beatles books, Jackson’s scenes of lighthearted antics and creative breakthroughs jump off the screen. We see the Beatles cracking each other up at the mic, mimicking posh accents and performing absurdist slapstick as if in a “Monty Python” skit.“You see these four great friends, great musicians, who just lock in and develop these songs, and you see it all onscreen,” Jackson said.Day after day, new material takes shape. Polishing the lyrics to the song “Get Back,” McCartney and Lennon test out names for a character who departs his Arizona home: Jojo Jackson, Jojo Carter, Jojo Daphne. Shaving off the last name gives McCartney enough syllables for some more specificity in the story: “Jojo left his home in Tucson, Arizona …”Lennon, chewing gum, glances up to ask: “Is Tucson in Arizona?”The original “Let It Be” was shot on 16 millimeter film and blown up to grainy 35 millimeter. Generations of fans, if they’ve seen it at all, have had access to the movie only in crummy bootlegs transferred from videotape. It has never been officially released on DVD or in online formats.I told Jackson that when I finally saw “Let It Be,” 20-odd years ago, my local video rental shop required a $100 cash deposit. Jackson grabbed a vintage VHS copy and said he had long regretted not buying it when visiting the United States in the early 1980s, but the format was unplayable on his machine in New Zealand. While making “Get Back,” he tracked down an original on eBay for $200.“I don’t have a VHS machine,” he said, “so I still can’t play it.”Jackson’s restored images in “Get Back” are strikingly clear, and help flesh out a story of creative anxiety and creature comforts inside Fortress Beatle. Attendants pour glasses of wine as the musicians rehearse; Yoko Ono paints Japanese calligraphy while Lennon and McCartney, a few feet away, yuk their way through “Two of Us” in goofy accents.But the misery is never far away, and as the arguments grind on, it starts to seem miraculous that the Beatles can still come together at all. At one point, Harrison briefly quits the band, apparently fed up with his second-fiddle status. In the studio cafeteria, Lennon tells McCartney that the band’s rift with their lead guitarist has been “a festering wound.”After Harrison walks out, the remaining Beatles jam loudly and angrily. Starr tears through the drums. Ono, dressed all in black, stands at a microphone and wails to a wild climax — perhaps the most violent sound the Beatles ever created.A recurring theme is the band’s discomfort over the role of Ono, who sits by Lennon’s side constantly during the sessions and will come to be vilified by fans for her supposed role in the Beatles’ breakup. A companion book to the film, with further transcripts from the tapes, quotes Lennon telling McCartney: “I would sacrifice you all for her.”Jackson’s restored images in “Get Back” help flesh out a story of creative anxiety and creature comforts inside the Beatles’ cloistered world.Apple CorpsYet it is never clear whether the Beatles’ conflicts are caused by the events of the day or by the accumulated stress of years in the spotlight. Peter Brown, who was a top executive at Apple during this time, said in an interview that the troubles began with the success of “Sgt. Pepper” in 1967.“They were doing things that they’d never done before, and they were very, very worried that it was going to take off,” Brown said. “And of course it took off like crazy. Then how do you follow that?”Some of the drama, of course, may be typical band stuff. Neil Finn, of the New Zealand group Crowded House, said that Jackson showed his band about four hours of footage earlier this year. “We all wept,” he wrote in an email.“So much of it struck a chord with me from my own rehearsals and recording experiences,” Finn added. “Paul asking John if he had any new songs, and John kind of blustering with his answer: Uh, maybe, not really. You can see the others staring in disbelief. I’ve seen that look before.”But the stakes were incredibly high for the Beatles, and the prospect of the band’s dissolution hangs like a cloud over almost the entire film. Early on, McCartney floats an idea for the still-undefined TV special. Their performance, he proposes, would be interspersed with news reports about earthquakes and other “red hot” events around the world. “And at the end,” McCartney says, “the final bulletin is: ‘The Beatles have broken up.’”To some extent, “Get Back” and the original “Let It Be” are exhibits in a study of truth. Does the footage actually show the endgame of the Beatles, or has history gotten it wrong all these years? Does the weight of the evidence point to the band being joyful and creatively fecund, or fed up with each other’s company? The answer may be: all of the above.In one of many moments of levity, Starr hoists a mug behind the drum kit.Apple CorpsIn a note included with a new reissue of the album “Let It Be,” McCartney writes that the original film “was pretty sad as it dealt with the breakup of our band, but the new film shows the camaraderie and love the four of us had between us.”Lindsay-Hogg believes that not only fans, but likely also members of the Beatles themselves, have been misreading “Let It Be” for years.“I think part of the rap that ‘Let It Be’ has had is no one has seen it for a very long time,” he said in an interview. “And it got very confused with the time it came out, which was just after they’d broken up.”Of course, the Beatles did not disband in January 1969. They went on to record “Abbey Road” later that year, with great care; most of the songs on that album, including “Octopus’s Garden,” “Mean Mr. Mustard,” “Carry That Weight” and “Something,” are heard in early stages during “Get Back.”But Jackson’s film makes clear that the end was nigh. If there is a true culprit in the breakup, it was the business conflicts that ensued during 1969, when the group tussled over its management, and Lennon and McCartney tried but failed to take control of the company that held their songwriting rights.Those problems are foreshadowed in “Get Back” with the utterance of a single name: Allen Klein, the American business manager who arrives a few days before the rooftop show to pitch his services for the band. Shortly after the events shown in “Get Back,” Lennon, Harrison and Starr all signed on with Klein; McCartney declined, and the schism was never repaired. Klein died in 2009.“Our movie doesn’t show the breaking up of the Beatles,” Jackson said, “but it shows the one singular moment in history that you could possibly say was the beginning of the end.”If Beatles’ scholarship and fandom has proved anything, it is that even a contradictory summation of the band and its influence can still hold true. The Beatles were a pop boy band that ended up pushing the creative boundaries of rock music further than anyone else; nearly every day of their existence together has been documented exhaustively, though a full accounting of their motivations is impossible.“Get Back” seems to contain all those multitudes — the delight, the tension, the fighting and the wonder of the Beatles simply playing music on the roof.“There’s no goodies in it, there’s no baddies,” Jackson said. “There’s no villains, there’s no heroes. It’s just a human story.”Jackson’s scenes of lighthearted antics and creative breakthroughs jump off the screen. Apple Corps More