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      ‘Museum Town’ Review: A Love Letter to Mass MoCA

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Museum Town’ Review: A Love Letter to Mass MoCAThis documentary looks at how a contemporary art museum in Western Massachusetts transformed a struggling small town.A scene from the documentary “Museum Town,” about Mass MoCA.Credit…Kino LorberDec. 17, 2020, 10:49 a.m. ETMuseum TownDirected by Jennifer TrainerDocumentary1h 16mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.At its heart, the documentary “Museum Town,” is a love letter — to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, to artistic experimentation and to North Adams, the struggling factory town where the institution is situated.The film’s main thread follows the staff of Mass MoCA as they prepare for “Until,” a colossal exhibition by the Black sculptor Nick Cave that includes an eclectic mix of found materials like ceramic birds and 10 miles of crystals. The project, which was on display from October 2016 to September 2017, perfectly encapsulates Mass MoCA’s mission: to help contemporary artists realize their wildest dreams and to curate in ways not dictated by the art market. Between scenes of Cave approving different ceramic trinkets and the staff maneuvering the moving pieces of the exhibition are two other stories, narrated by Meryl Streep: The history of Mass MoCA’s uneven development and the story of how North Adams went from a bustling working-class factory town to a divested one.[embedded content]The film was directed by Jennifer Trainer, who was also the first director of development at the museum, and her adoration for Mass MoCA is obvious at every turn. This isn’t always bad, but at times, one wishes the documentary had more distance from its subject. Interesting conversations about gentrification as a means to revitalization and who a museum serves (the public, the artist, both?) are quickly papered over, and the focus on local residents’ indifference toward contemporary art begins to feel gimmicky. But for those even mildly curious about the story of one of the country’s largest visual and performing arts spaces, “Museum Town” is worth watching.Museum TownNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 16 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘The Belovs’ Review: Another View of Farm Life

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘The Belovs’ Review: Another View of Farm LifeThe director of “Gunda” filmed two Russian siblings in the early 1990s.A scene from the documentary “The Belovs.”Credit…Film ForumDec. 17, 2020, 7:00 a.m. ETFor viewers charmed by the Russian documentarian Victor Kossakovsky’s “Gunda,” an immersion in the sights and sounds of farm life from something close to a pig’s-eye point of view, Film Forum is streaming an intriguing portrait of agrarian living that the director filmed in 1992.Likewise shot in black and white and just as hermetic in its purview, “The Belovs” retrospectively plays like a human-centered companion piece. It focuses on a sister and a brother — Anna, a double widow; Mikhail, left by his wife presumably long ago — who live together on a farm in western Russia. But it’s also a different kind of documentary. In “Gunda” and the preceding “Aquarela,” Kossakovsky turned his gaze on nature’s wonders. “The Belovs” finds him working closer to the direct-cinema tradition of the Maysles brothers (“Grey Gardens”), giving eccentric personalities the space to reveal themselves.“Why bother to film us?” Anna asks in “The Belovs.” “We are just ordinary people.” Initially, it’s tempting to agree. Kossakovsky shows Anna talking to her cows and even the wood she’s chopping. The film, periodically scored with eclectic, global song selections, delights in observing a dog run ahead of a tractor or torment a hedgehog.The human angle comes to the foreground when the siblings receive a visit from Vasily and Sergey, their brothers, and Mikhail’s ramblings about the Soviet system (which had just ended) threaten to derail a pleasant tea. Kossakovsky stations his camera in a corner, in a voyeur’s position. Later in the film, he cuts the sound during a nasty argument. As in “Gunda,” this is behavior to watch, not explain.The BelovsNot rated. In Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour. Watch through Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Nasrin’ Review: Righting Wrongs in Iran

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Nasrin’ Review: Righting Wrongs in IranFilmed in secret, Jeff Kaufman’s portrait of the Iranian lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh captures her ongoing battles for the rights of women, children and minorities.The Iranian lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh is the subject of “Nasrin.”Credit…Floating World Pictures/Virgil FilmsDec. 17, 2020, 7:00 a.m. ETNasrinDirected by Jeff KaufmanDocumentary1h 32mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.“Nasrin,” a surreptitiously filmed documentary about the imprisoned Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, offers a strangely cheerful portrait of extreme sacrifice and ongoing suffering.The uplift is a little unnerving, the bright positivity of Sotoudeh echoed among her supporters (including the dissident filmmaker Jafar Panahi) and clients. One young woman, Narges Hosseini, arrested for protesting Iran’s mandatory head-covering law, smiles calmly as she accepts the possibility of a lengthy prison sentence. Her courage, like that of so many in this film, is breathtaking.[embedded content]Defending women like Hosseini led, in part, to Sotoudeh’s 2018 arrest and a sentence of 38 years and 148 lashes, according her husband, Reza Khandan. A pocket history of Iran’s volatile record on human rights, along with examples of Sotoudeh’s political work on behalf of women, children and minorities, provide context for her various incarcerations as the director, Jeff Kaufman, compiles secretly captured footage from multiple sources. Interviews with Iranian exiles and other activists enrich his portrait, as do warm moments with Sotoudeh, Khandan and their two children.Yet this extraordinary woman, seemingly incapable of despair through roughly two decades of struggle, remains elusive. There’s something daunting about this degree of implacable selflessness, and it has a curiously flattening effect on a movie that feels less emotionally complex — less enraged — than it ought to.By the end, I worried mainly about Sotoudeh’s children, enduring yearslong separations from one or both parents. And when a prison visit showed her son laughing delightedly at his mother through a glass partition while her daughter wept quietly nearby, it felt like the most painfully human moment onscreen.NasrinNot rated. In English and Farsi, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘The Art of Political Murder’ Review: Behind a Bishop’s Assassination

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘The Art of Political Murder’ Review: Behind a Bishop’s AssassinationThis documentary from Paul Taylor explores the killing of Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera in Guatemala in 1998.Protesters marching after the killing of Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera.Credit…HBODec. 16, 2020The Art of Political MurderDirected by Paul W. TaylorDocumentary, Crime1h 29mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.The murder in “The Art of the Political Murder,” a documentary based on the book of the same title by Francisco Goldman, is the killing of Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera in Guatemala in 1998. Suspiciously, his death came two days after he had presented a report on human rights abuses during the country’s decades-long civil war, which had ended in 1996.A possible political motive for Gerardi’s assassination was obvious; a high-profile death might frighten victims who would otherwise come forward for atrocities trials. But for a time, a prosecutor pursued a theory that Gerardi had been killed by a German shepherd. Arturo Aguilar, who was part of an independent investigation run by the human rights office that Gerardi had directed, emphasizes the importance of following evidence and disregarding conjecture.[embedded content]Others featured at length include Ronalth Ochaeta, who had worked with Gerardi on the human rights report and pursued the killers until he felt that his family was under threat; the journalist Claudia Méndez Arriaza, whom Goldman, in the movie, describes as the only reporter he knew tenacious enough to stick around through the most tedious stretches of the trial; and Goldman himself, who explains how the case became a test of Guatemala’s justice system.The director, Paul Taylor, who uses re-enactments to visualize the night of the crime, clearly faced certain limitations of material, and the film has dry stretches as the interviewees relate a complicated history better-suited to a book. But the movie succeeds at weaving a web in which justice appears impossibly elusive — which gives the ending all the more punch.The Art of Political MurderNot rated. In Spanish and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Watch on HBO Max.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Break It All’ Celebrates the Oppositional Energy of Latin Rock

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Break It All’ Celebrates the Oppositional Energy of Latin RockA new six-part Netflix series explores half a century of music under pressure.Soda Stereo onstage in 1984. The band is one of many featured in “Break It All,” a six-part documentary series on Netflix.Credit…NetflixDec. 16, 2020, 4:33 p.m. ETLatin America has taken rock seriously. Seriously enough for governments to suppress it. Seriously enough for bands to sing about political issues, societal troubles and the spirit of rebellion. Seriously enough for fans to risk arrests and beatings to see a concert. While Latin rock can be thoroughly entertaining — catchy, playful, rambunctious, over the top — it rarely settles for being mere entertainment. There’s often far more going on behind the melody, rhythm and noise.“Break It All,” a six-part documentary series named after a song by Los Shakers that arrives Wednesday on Netflix, hurtles through the history of rock in Latin America, from the 1950s — when Ritchie Valens, a Mexican-American born in California, turned the traditional Mexican song “La Bamba” into an American rock ’n’ roll cornerstone — to the 21st century.“Rock ’n’ roll is a form of communication,” Àlex Lora, of the blunt and boisterous Mexican hard-rock band El Tri, says in the documentary. “And it would be illogical, since there are millions of people who speak the language of Cervantes, if we didn’t have our own rock ’n’ roll.”[embedded content]The documentary is narrated by the artists themselves, speaking about both their music and the times they lived through. There are glimpses, and often considerably more, of nearly every major Latin rock figure of the last half-century. The names of bands and performers rush by, many of them probably unfamiliar to listeners in the United States. For those who want a second listen, the documentary makers compiled a companion playlist on Spotify under its Spanish title, “Rompan Todo.”A prime mover and executive producer for “Break It All,” as well as one of its onscreen musician-historians, is Gustavo Santaolalla, who has won two Academy Awards for his film scores and has produced albums for rockers across Latin America, winning a dozen Latin Grammy Awards. His own group, Bajofondo — which mixes tango, rock, orchestral arrangements, electronics and even a bit of disco — is nominated for a Grammy this year in the Latin rock or alternative album category.“I believe the future of rock resides in women and in the third world,” said Gustavo Santaolalla.Credit…NetflixAs “Break It All” moves through the decades, it juxtaposes exuberant songs and concerts with contemporaneous images of dictatorships, coups, uprisings and crises. Musician after musician defines rock as “freedom.”“I had this idea forever,” Santaolalla said in a video interview from his home in Los Angeles. “I wanted to tell this story against the background of the sociopolitical ambience of the time. Even musicians that are part of the story don’t make this connection easily. But when you start to dig in and look at the big picture, you realize how similar the situations were, how the same things happened in many countries.”During his younger days as a longhaired rock musician, Santaolalla himself was arrested and jailed multiple times in Buenos Aires — though never, he recalled, for more than three days. “Rock is not associated with any political party,” he said. “It doesn’t hold a political flag. But nevertheless we were enemies of the state.”Latin rock, also known as rock en español or Latin alternative, evolved with eyes and ears on English-language rock. There’s Latin blues-rock, Latin psychedelia, Latin metal, Latin new wave; throughout the series, Latin rockers cite their American and British counterparts. So in some ways “Break It All” shows a Spanish-speaking parallel universe to the history of rock in the United States and England, particularly in its early years.“We wanted to have self-expression — music that was crafted by us, that talked about our daily life,” said Rubén Albarrán, the lead singer of Café Tacvba.Credit…NetflixIn the 1950s, bands like Los Locos del Ritmo and Los Teen Tops translated American rock ’n’ roll songs into Mexican slang; in the 1960s, bands like Los Shakers vied to sound like the Beatles.“In our early, early, early years, when we were little kids, we were trying to be like the Beatles and sing in English,” Santaolalla said. “And then we realized, no, we have to sing in our language. And we have to play in our own language.”The best Latin rockers have infused imported sounds with local legacies, moving beyond imitation to innovation — bands like Soda Stereo from Argentina, Aterciopelados from Colombia and Café Tacvba from Mexico. Along with all they learned from rock, those bands and others draw on tango, ranchera, cumbia and numerous other homegrown styles, creating hybrids that resonate with and ricochet off cultural memories.“We wanted to have self-expression — music that was crafted by us, that talked about our daily life,” Rubén Albarrán, the lead singer of Café Tacvba, said via video interview from his home in Mexico City. “We put the energy of rock music behind the concept of being inquieto,” which translates as restless, worried or uneasy. “To be moving all the time, and to break away from the rules of our society.”“Break It All” hops from country to country, more or less chronologically, but concentrates on Mexico and Argentina. “There’s great music in all the region, but I like to think of those countries as a battery,” Santaolalla said. “One pole is Mexico and the other is Argentina, the north and the south. Mexico is closer to the U.S., and Argentina is closer to Britain in terms of sound and perspective.”Maldita Vecindad onstage in 1987.Credit…NetflixThe documentary traces cycles of expansion, suppression and rebound, of growing ambitions and widening connections. Under dictatorships, rock was at times forced underground. In Argentina, after the singer Billy Bond incited an arena crowd to “break it all” and the audience smashed seats, rock disappeared from television and radio; recording projects had to be submitted to government committees. In Mexico, the country’s rockers were vilified for more than a decade — and shut out of mainstream performing spaces — after a 1971 festival modeled on Woodstock, Avándaro, where the band Peace and Love declaimed songs like “Marihuana” and “We Got the Power” and used obscenities during a live radio broadcast that was immediately cut off.But musicians persisted, and audiences supported them. Mexican rock started to resurface when radio stations were playing Spanish-language rock from other countries and Mexican labels wanted their own share of the market. Argentine rock got an unlikely boost when, after Britain won the Falklands War in 1982, rock in English was banned from Argentina’s airwaves.The arrival of MTV Latin America in 1993 brought a new, border-crossing solidarity to Latin rock. Musicians became more aware of kindred spirits abroad; they realized that they weren’t struggling alone. Individual or national missions began to feel like a movement. And they had plenty of targets: authoritarian governments, economic turmoil. The music continued to cross-pollinate — with electronics and hip-hop — and it began, though belatedly, to recognize women’s ideas and voices.Latin rock never broke the language barrier to reach English-speaking audience in the United States; that current commercial breakthrough belongs to reggaeton and the vaguer Latin genre called urbano, both drawing primarily on hip-hop and reggae.“In my 50 years in this, I’ve heard the phrase ‘rock is dead,’ ‘rock is finished,’ so many times,” Santaolalla said. “When we started the series three years ago, I said rock is in hibernation. But now I say rock is in quarantine. I believe the future of rock resides in women and in the third world — they are going to be the pillars of rock. They are going to bring the vaccine.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      A New Breed of Animal Documentary

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyA New Breed of Animal Documentary“Gunda” and “My Octopus Teacher” present creatures as distinct beings with qualities that have nothing to do with humans.Victor Kossakovsky’s “Gunda,” one of a number of films that avoids presenting animals as objects of wonder or scientific curiosity.Credit…NeonDec. 15, 2020, 1:19 p.m. ETThere’s a moment in “Gunda,” an artful documentary about barnyard animals, that could take its place in a list of the year’s best scenes. The star, a sow with a bustling litter of piglets, has just experienced an unmistakable trauma. Pacing around the farm, she conveys a palpable agitation and emotion, before turning to look at the camera, pointedly.This isn’t the sort of thing we’re accustomed to seeing in nature films. It feels as if we’re getting a glimpse into Gunda’s inner life, and there’s no narrator telling us what the animal might be thinking. It’s emotionally engaging and feels distinctive to Gunda, instead of an illustration of the species or the planet as a whole.More frequently, a voice-over and a crystal-clear story guide our attention and define our understanding of what we’re seeing in a nature documentary. There’s no shortage of drama, to be sure, but usually it’s spectacular: tales of survival or mass migration. Even when we’re not looking at a panorama on the scale of “Planet Earth,” the greater context seems to overshadow the individual animal.But there are signs of new directions in how animals are portrayed in nature films. “Gunda,” which opened Friday via virtual cinema, feels like part of this movement, along with a different but also unusual film, “My Octopus Teacher” on Netflix. Both present animals as beings apart from us, not just objects of wonder or scientific study, and with qualities that are all their own, not shadows of human emotions.“Let’s film animals the same way we film humans,” Victor Kossakovsky, the director of “Gunda,” said he told his cameraman. “If you feel like they need space, let them be. If you feel they are comfortable, you come closer.”You’ve probably already had “My Octopus Teacher” recommended to you by friends or family: Over the course of a year, a South African naturalist, Craig Foster, becomes fascinated by and (let’s just say it) emotionally involved with a small octopus. We observe the vicissitudes of her life and moments of contact with Foster, who explains his experience in interview segments that have the candor of a therapy session.What makes the film stand out is that this is most definitely not a god’s-eye account of an octopus’s life. Foster’s ardent curiosity reflects a different approach to animals than that of the traditionally authoritative conservationist or guide.“They’re more or less letting the animals live, and they’re trusting the viewers more to make their own conclusions,” said Dennis Aig, a film professor at Montana State University, where he runs a program on nature filmmaking. “Even in larger blue-chip movies, this kind of sensitivity is starting to emerge.”Craig Foster and the cephalopod he’s drawn to in “My Octopus Teacher.”Credit…Netflix, via Associated PressBlue-chip documentaries like the dazzling “Planet Earth” series loom large in the minds of many viewers. But nature films have had an evolving lineage. Early 20th-century accounts of safaris and exploration gave way to Disney’s anthropomorphic appreciations of the animal kingdom. Eventually, a conservationist ethos and sense of scientific discovery took hold, with a perceived desire for spectacular shots (no doubt given a boost by the arrival of HD television and ever larger screens in the 2000s).Popular interest in these films has only grown — especially against the urgent backdrop of climate change — with viewership increasing and more nature shows than ever before. But a particular strand of filmmaking has persisted among the explorations and explications of nature’s mysteries, and its likely origins arose decades ago.“I think Jane Goodall started this work with her first early work on chimps,” Pippa Ehrlich, one of the two directors of “My Octopus Teacher,” said. “I think it’s been a slow change over time.”The nature programs that followed Goodall’s immersive research shared her perceptive evaluation of the chimpanzees’ personalities, emotional states and interpersonal relationships. It’s scientific in approach, but her open-minded point of view and profound insights into emotional intelligence inform the filmmaking. That paved the way for forms of engagement that do not mean solely to elicit sympathy but rather open up a new kind of space for the animals and their individuality, as in “My Octopus Teacher” and “Gunda.”“Hopefully the lesson is that, actually, everywhere you turn there are complex personalities in nature that just haven’t been documented yet,” James Reed, Ehrlich’s co-director, said.Films like “Gunda” and “My Octopus Teacher” join predecessors like “My Life as a Turkey,” a 2011 TV documentary in which a man raises a group of turkeys and susses out their traits and habits. “Kedi” (2017) might also be a recent influence, partly for its popularity, but also for its detailed accounts of Istanbul’s street cats. On the more conventional side “The Elephant Queen” (2019) seeks out an emotional intimacy that feels fresh and similar in spirit.In “Gunda,” we can learn about the particular cautious intelligence of a chicken picking its way into the grass, or spot personality traits among piglets in Gunda’s brood. “My Octopus Teacher” surprises many with the strangeness of its subject: a mollusk with barely distinguishable eyes, that demonstrates a kind of light-footed moxie and reserves of iron will.The filmmakers avoided giving the octopus a name (though they do refer to the animal as a female), specifically to sidestep the impulse to humanize her behavior — long a point of tension in nature documentary.“There’s no question that drawing comparisons with people has been a great convenience and sometimes very educational storytelling strategy,” Aig said. “But it is limited in many ways, because as our knowledge of science increases, we also realize that there are differences in why certain species do what they do.”The tendency toward portraying animals with nuanced, individual depth is driven by this growing knowledge and interest in animal intelligence, often across disciplines. New understandings of the planet recognize the coexistence of all animals, and, Aig said, younger audiences seem driven by an urge to relate to nature rather than exert a kind of mastery through knowledge.The moment opens up the possibility of seeking out and identifying thought processes particular to animals. Reed emphasized the importance of the feature-length focus on a single animal (or two, counting Foster) in “My Octopus Teacher,” and the camerawork that allowed them to show “how she felt the world, how she perceived it.”It’s a close encounter of a sort that’s becoming more apparent in nature documentaries — both physical and emotional.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘The Last Blockbuster’ Review: All the Nostalgia, With No Late Fees

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘The Last Blockbuster’ Review: All the Nostalgia, With No Late FeesThrough celebrity interviews, this documentary looks back at the history of the home video retail industry.The Blockbuster Video store in Bend, Ore. featured in the documentary “The Last Blockbuster.”Credit…1091 PicturesDec. 15, 2020, 11:16 a.m. ETThe Last BlockbusterDirected by Taylor MordenDocumentaryNot Rated1h 24mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.You ever hear the one about the guy who asked for “Of Human Bondage” at the video store and was told to look in the “adult” section? I saw it happen. In the ’80s. A fair amount of “The Last Blockbuster,” a documentary on video stores — and on one store in particular, as the title implies — spends time with Gen X folks kicking around not dissimilar reminiscences.Directed by Taylor Morden and narrated with engaging energy by the actor Lauren Lapkus (“Orange Is the New Black,” “The Big Bang Theory”), the nostalgia appeal of the movie extends a bit beyond its subject. Its talking heads — including the director Kevin Smith; the actors Jamie Kennedy and Ione Skye; the comedians Brian Posehn and Doug Benson; and members of the music groups Savage Garden and Smashmouth — make the documentary feel like a supersized episode of the old VH1 show “Best Week Ever.” Coincidentally, VH1 and Blockbuster Video once had the same corporate parent, Viacom.[embedded content]The movie does a good job of explaining the fundamentals of the video store as a business, and how corporate machinations relative to debt and capital led to the Blockbuster chain’s doom. Was it, as conventional wisdom holds, Netflix that killed Blockbuster? The answer is both “no” and “sort of.”As this pleasant but ultimately inconsequential movie’s narrative thins out, it emphasizes again and again that there is, as of now, only one operating Blockbuster store in the world. Luckily its proprietor is the warm and ingratiating Sandi Harding, who reckons that by now she has given a job to almost every teenager in the town of Bend, Ore., where the store operates. She refers to herself as a “Blockbuster Mom.”The Last BlockbusterNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Apple TV and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How the Bee Gees Stayed Alive

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookHow the Bee Gees Stayed AliveThe HBO documentary “The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” traces the decades-long arc of a band that mastered a rare pop skill: adaptation.Maurice, Barry and Robin Gibb in “The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” a documentary that explores the group’s long and winding career.Credit…HBO MaxDec. 14, 2020, 1:16 p.m. ETDiscovered, embraced, disbanded, reunited, ignored, reinvented, hailed, scorned, disguised, recognized — the Bee Gees’ long career was filled with improbable ups and downs. Most bands are lucky to get one Top 10 hitmaking streak. The Bee Gees — the brothers Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb — had at least two, singing heartache ballads in the late 1960s and re-emerging in the mid-1970s as the multiplatinum pop face of disco.“The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” an HBO documentary directed by Frank Marshall, moves sympathetically and efficiently through the group’s decades of making music. It traces the ways artistic instincts, family dynamics, business considerations, cultural shifts and sheer coincidence can shape memorable songs.In the documentary, abundant archival footage — a cavalcade of flashy fashions from 1960s frills to 1980s cool — coalesces around 2019 interviews with the last surviving member of the Bee Gees, Barry Gibb, who is grizzled and thoughtful but by no means retired. The documentary shows him performing as a headliner at the 2017 Glastonbury Festival, and he has an album due in 2021, “Greenfields,” that revisits the Bee Gees catalog with country musicians. The documentary also features the Bee Gees’ studio collaborators and, cannily, members of other bands of siblings: Oasis and the Jonas Brothers.The Bee Gees were prolific and often masterly songwriters, and they sang three-part harmony as only siblings can. Many of their songs are credited to all three brothers. “The only way I can describe how we work at it is to become one mind,” Maurice Gibb says in a clip from a 1999 interview.They started performing together before they were teenagers, in the late 1950s, looking to R&B vocal groups like the Mills Brothers and then, like countless others, to the Beatles. And like the Beatles, they soaked up all sorts of music: rock, country, gospel, vintage pop.But nearly from the beginning of their recording career, the Bee Gees clearly had something of their own. Barry and Robin Gibb, who traded off lead vocals, each brought a tremulous drama to their melodies, a striking mixture of eagerness and hesitancy. In an era of brash frontmen, they could sound like they were painfully shy yet simply unable to hold back.From 1967 to 1970, the Bee Gees released a string of hit ballads including “Massachusetts,” “To Love Somebody,” “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You,” “I Started a Joke” and “Words.” With melancholy lyrics, delicately blended voices and careful, often Baroque-tinged productions, their songs offered yearning and solace in psychedelically turbulent times. Around the hits, their albums — notably “Odessa” — floated larger musical and poetic concepts and more eccentric productions.In 1969, egos boiled over. Robin quit the Bee Gees to try a solo career, and he and Barry sniped at each other via interviews for over a year as Maurice played go-between. They regrouped — in part to support their manager, Robert Stigwood, as he started his own company — and came up with more hits: “Lonely Days” and “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart.”But by 1974, the Bee Gees’ fortunes had waned. They had drinking and drug problems; their scattershot albums weren’t selling. Their label was “about to drop us,” Barry Gibb recalls in the documentary. “We had to adopt a new sound. We had to adopt a new attitude.”The Bee Gees were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame — but not until 1997.Credit…Ed Caraeff/HBO, via Getty ImagesLuckily Stigwood also managed Eric Clapton, who suggested that they record where he had, at Criteria Studios in Miami. There, in 1975, some alchemical combination of sunny skies, close collaboration with their backing band, the stirrings of disco culture and a producer close to American R&B — Arif Mardin — led to the Bee Gees picking up their tempo and finding a brisk, guitar-scrubbing groove they would use in a new song, “Jive Talkin’.” In the documentary, Gibb connects it to the clicking rhythm he heard driving across a bridge to the studio each day.Because the Bee Gees had fallen so far out of fashion, their label sent “Jive Talkin’” to radio stations without identifying the group. With a blank label, the song became a radio hit; the Bee Gees were back.There was another breakthrough at the Criteria sessions. Barry Gibb was ad-libbing some backup vocals at the end of “Nights on Broadway” when he happened upon a sound he hadn’t fully realized he could make: a bright, piercing falsetto, androgynous and insistent, linking the Bee Gees to a longtime falsetto tradition in Black American music. It was a voice — a whole new sonic persona for Gibb, not shy at all — that would leap out of club and radio speakers in “You Should Be Dancing” and in songs the Bee Gees wrote for “Saturday Night Fever.”When they wrote those songs, the Bee Gees were at the Château d’Hérouville, a dumpy old French estate where Elton John had recorded the album “Honky Chateau.” During the sessions there, the band’s drummer, Dennis Bryon, was called away for a family emergency; to keep working, Albhy Galuten, a co-producer, made a tape loop from two bars of “Night Fever,” slowed it down and ran it as the Gibbs brothers wrote “Stayin’ Alive.” The mechanical feel of the loop gave the song something mysterious and tenacious; it stayed in the finished song, and has spawned innumerable looped drumbeats ever since.The 1977 “Saturday Night Fever” album, a two-LP anthology of disco hits and Bee Gees songs, became a record-setting blockbuster. Although disco had emerged from Black music and Black and gay clubs — as the documentary takes pains to point out — the Bee Gees, smiling in their silvery suits, became disco’s pop figureheads. In the late 1970s, the Gibb brothers’ music was everywhere: their own hits; songs for their younger brother, Andy; songs written for others. In 1979 they toured stadiums. They didn’t realize an anti-disco backlash was building.For a directorial flourish, Miller intercuts a euphoric July 1979 Bee Gees concert in Oakland with an event that happened two days later: “Disco Demolition Night,” promoted by Steve Dahl, a rock disc jockey who had popularized the obnoxious slogan “Disco Sucks.” Between games of a Chicago White Sox doubleheader at Comiskey Park, Dahl exploded a pile of disco records, which set off a hugely destructive crowd rampage. In the documentary, Vince Lawrence, who worked as an usher at Comiskey Park that night and later became a house-music producer, describes the event in hindsight as “a racist, homophobic book-burning.”The Bee Gees finished their tour amid bomb threats; radio stations pivoted away from dance music and shunned the Bee Gees. “We’re just a pop group, we’re not a political force,” a defensive Barry Gibb says in television footage from the time. “We’re just making music, and I don’t think there’s any reason to chalk us off because we existed in the ’70s and we would like to exist in the ’80s.”Avoiding the spotlight, the Gibb brothers persisted as songwriters and producers. The longtime Bee Gees sound — tuneful midtempo ballads, vocal high harmonies, distinctive chord progressions — comes through unmistakably in songs they wrote for others, including Barbra Streisand’s “Woman in Love,” Dionne Warwick’s “Heartbreaker” and the Kenny Rogers-Dolly Parton duet “Islands in the Stream.” Even in post-disco purgatory, the Bee Gees were still hitmakers. And as disco and the backlash receded (and dance music never went away), the Bee Gees returned more modestly, making albums every few years and garnering the respect they deserved. Yes, they got into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame — but not until 1997.Maurice Gibb died in 2003, Robin Gibb in 2012; that vocal blend is extinct. In the documentary, Barry Gibb understands exactly what his brothers and his band accomplished. “We never really had a category. We just had periods and we managed to fit into different eras,” he reflects. “We didn’t always connect. But we stayed around.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More