Musical Movies

London, 1965: Like many other youths, Jimmy hates the philistine life, especially his parents and his job in a company's mailing division. Only when he's together with his friends, a 'Mod' clique, cruising London on his motor-scooter and hearing music such as that of 'The Who' and 'The High Numbers', does he feel free and accepted. However, it's a flight into an illusionary world.

The film is a day in the life of a young artist, Jean Michel Basquiat, who needs to raise money to reclaim the apartment from which he has been evicted. He wanders the downtown streets carrying a painting he hopes to sell, encountering friends, whose lives (and performances) we peek into. He finally manages to sell his painting to a wealthy female admirer, but he's paid by check. Low on cash, he spends the evening wandering from club to club, looking for a beautiful girl he had met earlier, so he'll have a place to spend the night. Downtown 81 not only captures one of the most interesting and lively artists of the twentieth century as he is poised for fame, but it is a slice of life from one of the most exciting periods in American culture, with the emergence of new wave music, new painting, hip hop and graffiti.

Joe Gideon is a Broadway director, choreographer and filmmaker, he in the process of casting the chorus and staging the dance numbers for his latest Broadway show, starring his ex-wife Audrey Paris in what is largely a vanity project for her in playing a role several years younger than her real age, and editing a film he directed on the life of stand-up comic Davis Newman. Joe's professional and personal lives are intertwined, he a chronic philanderer, having slept with and had relationships with a series of dancers in his shows, Victoria Porter, who he hired for the current show despite she not being the best dancer, in the former category, and Kate Jagger, his current girlfriend, in the latter category. That philandering has led to relationship problems, with Audrey during their marriage, and potentially now with Kate who wants a committed relationship with Joe largely in not wanting the alternative of entering the dating world again. Joe also lives a hard and fast life, he chain smoking, drinking heavily, listening to hard driving classical music and popping uppers to keep going. In addition to pressures from investors and meeting film deadlines above and beyond his own self-induced hard life, he is teetering on the brink physically and emotionally. With Kate, Audrey, and his and Audrey's teenage daughter Michelle looking over him as best they can, Joe flirts with "Angelique" in the process, he potentially succumbing to her if he doesn't listen to them or what his body is telling him.

Corrine Burns retreats far into plans for her band, The Fabulous Stains, after her mother's death. So far that she gets them (she and two cousins) on a tour with a washed-out glam-rock group and a rising British punk band, radically changes her appearance, attracts a cult following and national media attention. With luck like this, what could go wrong?

David Byrne walks onto the stage and does a solo "Psycho Killer." Jerry Harrison, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz join him for two more songs. The crew is busy, still setting up. Then, three more musicians and two back-up singers join the band. Everybody sings, plays, harmonizes, dances, and runs. They change instruments and clothes. Bryne appears in the Big Suit. The backdrop is often black, but sometimes it displays words, images, or children's drawings. The band cooks for 18 songs, the lyrics are clear, the house rocks. In this concert film, the Talking Heads hardly talk, don't stop, and always make sense.

Manchester 1976: Cambridge educated Tony Wilson, Granada TV presenter, is at a Sex Pistols gig. Totally inspired by this pivotal moment in music history, he and his friends set up a record label, Factory Records, signing first Joy Division (who go on to become New Order) then James and the Happy Mondays, who all become seminal artists of their time. What ensues is a tale of music, sex, drugs, larger-than-life characters, and the birth of one of the most famous dance clubs in the world, The Hacienda - a mecca for clubbers as famous as the likes of Studio 54. Graphically depicting the music and dance heritage of Manchester from the late 70's to the early 90's, this comedy documents the vibrancy that made Mad-chester the place in the world that you would most like to be.

Jon, a young wanna-be musician, discovers he's bitten off more than he can chew when he joins an eccentric pop band led by the mysterious and enigmatic Frank.

London, 1971 - Flower Power is on the wane and floundering hippie troubadour Brian Slade feels old-fashioned and out of step until he experiences the raw power of rock musician and exhibitionist Curt Wild at a live concert. Smitten and inspired, Slade rises from the ashes of fussy brocade, reincarnating as the ambiguous pop-rock God/dess of platinum dust and phoenix feathers, Maxwell Demon. His alluring androgynous imagery and the seductive sounds his 'glitter rock' seduce teenagers across the world, offering refuge for the weird and unwanted with the promise of an everything-goes hedonism. At the height of his fame and cultural influence, he plots his sensational demise to escape, alienating his fans and falling into obscurity. On the 10th anniversary of the character assassination, journalist Arthur Stuart investigates Slade's disappearance, forcing him to revisit his own confusing teenage identity crisis and rebirth mirroring that of his idol Brian Slade.

The early 1970s. William Miller is 15-years old and an aspiring rock journalist. He gets a job writing for Rolling Stone magazine. His first assignment: tour with the band Stillwater and write about the experience. Miller will get to see what goes on behind the scenes in a famous band, including the moments when things fall apart. Moreover, for him, it will be a period of new experiences and finding himself.

In 1982, the legendary English heavy metal band Spinal Tap attempt an American comeback tour accompanied by a fan who is also a film-maker. The resulting documentary, interspersed with powerful performances of Tap's pivotal music and profound lyrics, candidly follows a rock group heading towards crisis, culminating in the infamous affair of the eighteen-inch-high Stonehenge stage prop.

This is the story of a friendship that changes the course of rock history forever, of the fateful collision of minds between JB and KG that led to the creation of the precedent-shattering band Tenacious D, and of the two heroes' quest to find the fabled Guitar Pick Of Destiny...

Rock star Pink Floyd is a tortured soul. Because of his childhood, he has always tried to make meaningful emotional connections to other living creatures. That childhood includes not having a male role model with his father having been killed in the war, his overprotective mother smothering him, and an oppressive school system quashing his natural creativity. Being a rock star, he is often wanted more because of what he is than who he is. The most recent failure in that true connection to someone or something else is his marriage, when on tour, he discovers that his wife back home is cheating on him. His response is to go in the opposite direction, by building a figurative wall around him to isolate himself from the rest of the world, but not before showing graphically his feelings on different gut levels. The question becomes if he or anyone else can do anything to tear down the wall in a meaningful way.

Funny, musical and occasionally dramatic, this is the story of tumultuous rise and fall of a Dublin Soul band, The Commitments. Managed by Jimmy Rabbitte, an unemployed wheeler and dealer with a vision to create "The Worlds Hardest Working Band".

Thirty-something Rob Gordon, a former club DJ, owns a not-so-lucrative used record store in Chicago. He not so much employs Barry and Dick, but rather keeps them around as they showed up at the store one day and never left. All three are vinyl and music snobs, but in different ways. Rob has a penchant for compiling top-five lists. The latest of these lists is his top-five break-ups, it spurred by the fact that his latest girlfriend, Laura, a lawyer, has just broken up with him. He believed that Laura would be the one who would last, partly as an expectation of where he would be at this stage in his life. Rob admits that there have been a few incidents in their relationship which in and of themselves could be grounds for her to want to break up. To his satisfaction, Laura is not on this top-five list. Rob feels a need not only to review the five relationships, which go back as far as middle school when he was 12, and try to come to terms with why the woman, or girl as the case may be, left him, but also, in the words of Charlie Nicholson, number four on the list, "what it all means" for why he has ended up where he is, which is nowhere, personally or professionally, close to what he envisioned. He also has to come to terms with what it means that Laura has moved on to Ian Raymond, a man for whom neither had any respect when they were together.

Hedwig, born male as Hansel in East Berlin, fell in love with an American G.I. and underwent a Gender Reassignment Surgery in order to marry him and flee to the West. Unfortunately, nothing worked out quite as it was supposed to - years later, Hedwig is leading her rock band on a tour of the U.S., telling her life story through a series of concerts at Bilgewater Inn seafood restaurants. Her tour dates coincide with those of arena-rock star Tommy Gnosis, a wide-eyed boy who once loved Hedwig - but then left with all her songs.

'Pleasantly Plump' teenager Tracy Turnblad achieves her dream of becoming a regular on the Corny Collins Dance Show. Now a teen hero, she starts using her fame to speak out for the causes she believes in, most of all integration. In doing so, she earns the wrath of the show's former star, Amber Von Tussle, as well as Amber's manipulative, pro-segregation parents. The rivalry comes to a head as Amber and Tracy vie for the title of Miss Auto Show 1963.

In 2008 while rehearsing for a charity event, actor Joaquin Phoenix, with Casey Affleck's camera watching, tells people he's quitting to pursue a career in rap music. Over the next year, we watch the actor write, rehearse, and perform to an audience. He importunes Sean Combs in hopes he'll produce the record. We see the actor in his home: he parties, smokes, bawls out his two-man entourage, talks philosophy with Affleck, and comments on celebrity.

A struggling young musician and devoted fan of Ricky Nelson wants to be just like his idol and become a rock star.