May 31, 2003
Gigantic
It was weird walking into the showing of Gigantic: The Story of Two Johns. Usually when I am at an event attended by a deeply geeky subculture, I am at least noddingly a participant in that subculture. But while I think "Anna Ng" is a great song and that the video for "Birdhouse in Your Soul" was fabulous, I'm not really an active fan of They Might Be Giants. The documentary only hints at the obsessive fandom that the band apparently inspires -- a girl bursts into tears after meeting the Johns, choking out that it's the happiest day of her life; a boy, maybe seventeen years old, says that he's seen TMBG upwards of seventy times -- but I got the feeling that every single person in the audience except me knew every lyric of every song in the movie.
Gigantic had three major components. It was the story of the partnership between John Flansburgh (the extrovert) and John Linnell (the introvert), the two Johns who have been the creative force behind They Might Be Giants for twenty years. It was the story of TMBG releasing their first studio album in years and touring in support of it. And it was an attempt to replicate the selfconscious, quirky cleverness of the band, as realized in some bizarre little riffs. The movie opens with Illinois Senator Paul Simon telling the story of Abraham Lincoln; Lincoln was TMBG's second album, and the Johns are from Lincoln, Mass., whose first selectman performs a ribboncutting ceremony to open the movie.
I found the concert footage surprisingly dull. Something -- maybe the very slick recording? -- pulled all the energy out of the footage despite the impressive lighting and editing. It's all the more surprising because everyone in the movie talks about what a killer live act TMBG is and because director A.J. Schnack's background is in music videos (during the Q&A period after the movie, he mentioned that he had worked with local heroes Velocity Girl and Tsunami, along with Frank Black and Blink-182, who appear in the film). The performance footage the filmmakers dug out of archives is great (including a wonderful segment of the band performing with Doc Severinsen on The Tonight Show), but the contemporary stuff felt like an afterthought. The editor's prowess was put to better use in the interviews, which are about the most tightly constructed talking head footage I've seen in a documentary. The interviews -- with the Johns, with people they've worked with in the past, and with fans like Ira Glass and Sarah Vowell -- just flew by.
The glimpse of TMBG's celebrity fan base (including celebrity readings -- Harry Shearer! Janeane Garofalo! Deadpan recitals of TMBG lyrics) was a nice touch. But despite the stunt casting and some really wonderful random interludes (there's an animated Tony Millionaire/Drinky Crow introduction to part of the movie for no apparent reasons; Syd Straw, the singer for the Golden Palominos, gives a wonderfully insane interview in which she discusses the Johns hitting on her while she was wearing a cheap blond wig), the movie really succeeds as a portrait of two friends and artistic partners who are complete opposites tempramentally and artistically, but combine to write great songs and (unlike Paul and John) stay good friends.
My only complaints were the concert footage and the fact that there was, peeking out from behind the movie that actually got made, another interesting movie, one about the performance art scene in New York in the early to mid-'80s (how influenced were the Johns by the Ohio freakout music of Devo and Pere Ubu? Who else was doing their kind of thing in New York? Did they consciously try to transform from weird unsalable art music to weird chart-topping college rock?). Except for Syd and one person who thinks they got less interesting when they went from two guys and a tape machine to a real band, nobody seems to have anything remotly negative to say about them, and they don't have anything offensive to say about each other. When a talking-heads movie (as opposed to a Talking Heads movie) about two smart and talented but basically boring people can hold my attention for an hour and forty-five minutes, it's hard to complain.
(geek) (indie) (movie) (music)