Revenge of the Mekons / Wordplay
Documentaries about arty music geeks and puzzle geeks, respectively.
Revenge of the Mekons (2013). Grade: B-. Wordplay (2006). Grade: B
The other day, driving around, I heard a curious song called “Ghosts of American Astronauts.” (Which really isn’t about the dangers of crewed spaceflight — the lyrics seem to be about how the space race diverted attention from the horrors of Vietnam. I think.) The song ended, and the D.J. said it was legendary band The Mekons. I had heard the name, but knew nothing of the band or its music.
The Mekons are a bi-continental band, started in England in 1977, now with some American members along for the ride. They met in art school (like the Talking Heads), and hung around/idolized the punk band Gang of Four. Their first live performances were just during breaks in Gang of Four concerts — the Mekons would come on stage and borrow their instruments/equipment. And when the Mekons’ first album came out, the record label accidentally put a Gang of Four band picture on the back cover.
The front cover was still the one the Mekons wanted, and it’s cool as heck:
It’s a reference to the old notion that if 1000 monkeys sat at 1000 typewriters and hit random keys, one of them would eventually produce Shakespeare. The actual line, “the quality of mercy is not strained,” comes from The Merchant of Venice, and is a plea to a lender to have pity on a broke debtor. As the Mekons were/are all left-wing, pro-worker political types, it’s a line that appeals to them. And as youngsters who really couldn’t play musical instruments very well at all (not yet), the inage suits who they were. Plus, it's funny.
Also, their name is funny. It’s from a 1950/1960s English comic-book series, which (as one German Mekons website puts it) “was part of a stable of UK comics, put out in the 50s by a religious gent anxious to counter the insidious dangers thought to be posed at the time to wholesome British youth by American comics. The latter were believed to be responsible for a wide range of social ills including juvenile delinquency, gum chewing, avoidance of attendance at church and overuse of hair cream. Clearly ineffective.”
While band members have drifted in and out of the lineup for almost 50 years, the Mekons keep on going, keep on putting out albums. Even though they’ve never made much money doing so. All the bandmembers have other jobs. As one person says in Revenge of the Mekons, the band’s been a critical favorite for decades — but the critics all get free copies of the albums. They ain't buying the things.
The movie’s directed by Joe Angio, who previously did a documentary about actor/author/filmmaker Mario Van Peebles, and it does a good job of telling the Mekons’ interesting story and letting the bandmembers tell it themselves. How they went from punk rock to country and back again as they saw fit. There’s also an impressive collection of archival footage, mixed with more recent concert performances. And we’ve got brief interviews with critics and other musicians who are huge fans. This documentary is obviously a labor of love.
As a music movie, though? It’s not my thing. The Mekons are noted for their terrific, energetic live performances, and I just didn’t get the feel for these in the moments we see. Maybe that’s because Joe Angio isn’t very good at filming live performances, maybe because I’m just not into this band at this point in time.
In a really top-notch musical documentary, you don’t need to be a fan of the music to enjoy the movie. I liked ZZ Top: That Little Ol’ Band From Texas even though I’m not really a Top-head. (I didn’t know that ZZ Top started out as sort of a psychedelic 60’s band.) And I thought Metallica: Some Kind of Monster was fascinating, even though I’ve not a big Metallica fan. (It’s about the all the intra-band problems and pressures from being a group that’s THAT huge.) But the makers of Some Kind of Monster had experience in making documentaries about hard-hitting subjects which featured material that’s tough to watch.1 They perhaps have a better idea how to structure a film for the audience than Joe Angio has.
Even though the music didn’t do much for me, I ended up liking the band members and what they stand for a lot. At the end, they participate in a group activity that’s about sticking by each other, staying weird, and thumbing their noses at conventional expectations. Which is what their music has always been about, too.
Wordplay is about a different sort of weirdos; puzzle geeks. Specifically, geeks over The New York Times crossword puzzle, which since 1983 has been edited by Will Shortz. (He picks the puzzles from the various ones submitted, and works with the puzzle makers to refine the clues. He's also rather a dull fellow, but he’s not talking a ton here.)
For those who don’t know, the NYT crossword puzzle is a favorite of crossword solvers because it sticks by some pretty set rules. Monday’s puzzles will be the easiest, Tuesday’s a little harder, and so on, with Saturday’s the toughest. Sunday’s will always be mid-level in terms of difficulty, and it will always be larger-sized. (So, it will take a little while to finish, but you’re probably not going to get stuck… probably.) If you like the fun puzzles, you can do the easier ones and skip the harder ones, and vice versa if you prefer the tricky ones. (I’m in the middle, myself.)
The director, Patrick Creadon, had worked in the camera department in film and TV for 15 years, and he + his wife (the producer here) were big NYT crossword fans. They thought a movie about who makes and who solves crosswords might be fun. So they called the Times, left a phone message for crossword editor Shortz, and he called them back the next day. He was eager to help, and gave the Creadons the names of some prominent people in the puzzle world.
One is a prolific puzzle creator, Merl Reagle, and he creates a puzzle in front of the camera! Not the whole thing, it takes a while to do, but he sketches out the basic concept and we get the sense of how tricky it is to invent these. Many puzzles have themes, where the longest answers are connected in some way, and Reagle makes a puzzle where the theme is “word play,” this film’s title. And the NYT accepts it, and prints it, and we see the various celebrities interviewed in the movie solving the crossword created during the movie!
Oh, yes, there are celebrities. Does their presence help? Not especially. For the most part, it doesn’t hurt, either. Hey, it’s kinda neat to know that Ken Burns and the Indigo Girls like crosswords. Or that Mike Mussina of the Yankees does, and sometimes the team would have one player be a designated puzzle filler-in-er while the other players shouted out answers. And I suppose you’ve gotta have Bob Dole and Bill Clinton in there.
(For Election Day in 1996, the Times ran a puzzle with the clue, “Tomorrow’s headline.” The way the puzzle was designed, BOTH “BobDoleElected” and “ClintonElected” were correct answers!)
Perhaps awed to be interviewing an ex-president, the Creadons let Clinton go on too long. He’s giving us His Thoughts on how, with access to higher education, anybody can achieve great things in life, no matter how “smart” they are. Now, expanding accesss to student loans was a big part of Clinton’s policy agenda. So he’s tooting his own record as President, not talking about crosswords.2 That footage doesn’t need to be here.
There’s too much emphasis, in general, on “smart” people, and how “smart” people do the NYT crossword puzzle. Jon Stewart jokes about how, in a pinch, he’ll do the USA Today crossword puzzle, but he won’t feel good about it, it’s like doing a word search. Daniel Okrent, a former editor at the NYT (and who’s genuinely kind of amusing), talks about how it’s the greatest puzzle in the world because it’s the greatest paper in the world.
Hmm. Tell that to Chris Hedges, the NYT reporter who’d been forced out for saying that the Iraq War was immoral and bound to be a disaster. He was right, of course. And Jon Stewart’s Daily Show made its place in the cluttered late-night world by doubting the Bush administration’s really dubious claims about Iraq having “weapons of mass destruction.” Claims the NYT basically accepted at face value. That might seem like a long time ago, now, but this movie came out in 2006 — so, not long ago at all, not then.
Plus, even if you grant that the NYT sometimes did/does do great reporting… does that necessarily make its puzzle solvers the smartest people? Cryptic puzzles are far harder than crosswords. (It’s why I don’t like cryptic puzzles). Fans of cryptic puzzles have the same attitude towards crosswords as Jon Stewart has towards word search games.
Being a good puzzle solver does not make you a “smart” person, any more than any other hobby you might be good at. I’ve enjoyed listening to model ship makers talk about their hobby. They seem damn smart to me. I know writers who are really excellent at analyzing obscure baseball stats. Being a good puzzle solver means you are good at solving puzzles, and, as one former crossword champion puts it here, having a lot of useless trivia in your head. (That’s Ellen Ripstein, who won in 2001, and is really charming — aside from doing crosswords, she loves twirling batons, and when one former boyfriend was putting her down, retorted with “how many times have YOU been best in the world at anything?”)
The last part of the movie focuses on one crossword championship, and that’s when it really becomes sweet and endearing. All of these people want to win, of course, but they’re also nerds who just enjoy seeing each other every year. After an opening set of competitive puzzle solving, there’s an amateur talent show, and I started to tear up a little at just how much these geeks appreciate their geek community. (And, yup, Ripstein does her baton-twirling, too.) It’s scored to a cover of “This Must Be The Place” — a song about feeling at home and loved, by one of the geekiest dang bands to ever make records, Talking Heads.
This documentary is probably most entertaining for those who enjoy crosswords; it’s got an excellent use of graphics to show us people solving the puzzles in real time, that shows us how fun it is to find an answer (and how fun it must be to create the puzzles, too). But I think it’d be a fun watch for anyone who’s ever enjoyed any kind of offbeat hobby.
I go through stretches where I do a lot of crosswords, and stretches where I don’t. Right now, I’ve got other things I’m into. But watching this made me have to try that day’s NYT crossword puzzle. I got the theme fairly quickly — the theme answers were all celebrity names that begin with D and B, like David Bowie and Drew Barrymore. Yet I was stumped, for a bit, at the theme clue: “One place to find 18-, 28-, 49- and 64-Across ... or, parsed differently, how these people might introduce themselves.”
Until I muttered, “oh, crap.” It was IMDb. And I use IMDb all the time! That was pretty funny…
Disc formatting note: the copy we got, printed in 2006, was not formatted for wide-screen TVs. So, it’s going to show up on a HDTV like this:
There might be a way to fix this on your remote! We have two TVs, and one has a button labeled “P.SIZE”; the other a button labeled “<—>”. They both mean the same thing, “picture size.” If you ever run into this problem watching an old DVD, see if you have a button like that on your remote! It can blow the image up to fit the full screen.
They did Paradise Lost, a tough watch about child murders in Arkansas and the three young persons wrongly convicted of the murders. Prosecutors tried claiming that because the suspects listened to heavy metal bands like Metellica, it proved that they were Satanists and the murders involved a Satanic ritual. The band Metallica allowed the filmmakers to use their music. That’s how they met.
Which, incidentally… WAS his educational policy such a good policy? It enabled more poor people to get diplomas, sure. And some of those people had better lives as a result. And I’m happy about that. It also led to diplomas being devalued. I promise you mine is utterly worthless. And it led to the cost of college skyrocketing. So, Clitnon’s record on college education is NOT the slam dunk of perfection he seems to think its is. But I'm sure the current agenda of making it harder for poor people to afford college isn't an improvement. What we need is for skilled non-college jobs (like nursing home care) to to better paid. But I've already beat that dead horse and will probably do so only another zillion times. Poor dead horse.