Reviews

Currently the review meter is at 4.something stars. That is just plain wrong. I don't understand how anyone could see this and give it a bad rating. It's obvious more work and ingenuity went into it than most other actual Hollywood movies. The bar and truck scenes are both exciting and were brilliantly shot and edited...by freakin' kids! There's pyro, stunts, kissing, blood, violence, all that great stuff. How they were able to stay on course with such a long enormous project and have it come out so spectacularly well is the stuff of legend. These guys set themselves on fire and jumped out of moving trucks. They deserve to have a major film made about them.

Fascinating and watchable as hell.

I was obsessed with this movie back in March '86 when it was shown on Cinemax a few times. It's an incredibly ambitious piece of work. The animation is extremely impressive, particularly the mouths matching the voices. The story is a bit like Star Wars, but with a super-sarcastic and nihilistic slant. I'll be buying the DVD when it comes out.

The music for the film is pretty inspired, in a 70's punk way. I don't remember Iggy, Lou, Cheap Trick, or Blondie being that big anymore in '83. Cool that the filmmmakers would/could get those artists to compose and record songs expressly for their movie.

Evil spelled backwards is live, and we all want to do that.

'In 1978, a musician released his first album, Ready For The House. It featured a lonely voice accompanied by acoustic guitar. His subsequent recordings made him one of the most prolific artists in contemporary music. Almost nobody has noticed.' -preface to Jandek on Corwood

Picture yourself making a documentary about a musical entity that refuses to be interviewed or photographed. By anyone. Sound daunting? Two young filmmakers, director Chad Friedrichs and producer Paul Fehler, traveled 22,000 miles, shot 50 hours of footage and interviewed 24 people to do just that.

'Little waves spill over the rocks, you can peel mica from the rocks, as it shines like smooth silver…'

The first images of the new documentary Jandek on Corwood illustrate this seemingly abstract prose perfectly. Ocean waves roll over a beach of small stones under cold gray skies. 'And there's a lighthouse in the distance…' Indeed the lighthouse is there, and suddenly the early Jandek song 'Point Judith' (from 1981's Six and Six) takes on a very literal meaning. Point Judith is an actual ocean town in Rhode Island, and the waves, rocks, and lighthouse that Jandek sang about all those years ago really do exist.

This revelation and several others concerning Jandek are thanks to the efforts of Chad Friedrichs and Paul Fehler, who worked for a year and a half to produce Jandek on Corwood, a self-financed documentary about the reclusive Texas musician who has somehow produced an enormous and cathartic body of work (34 albums and counting) without hardly anyone even noticing.

rest of review at http://www.ibrecords.com/journal/entry.php?idB4