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| The week ahead for "In Your Dreams" |
The National Post (Canada)
by Dave Bidini
A documentary that follows Stevie Nicks as she begins writing and recording her first solo album in nearly a decade.
“And herewith be the tale of the bescarfed nymphette spritzed with the gay mist of ladyhood traipsing about her earthen wares and sacred beads while cast in the glow of an everlasting aurora” is how any review about anything regarding Stevie Nicks should probably start. And yet the film, In Your Dreams, about the Fleetwood Mac sirenette, begins, regrettably, without much of her medieval-by-way-of-Topanga hoodoo or late ’70s Angelino imagery choosing, instead, to put us on a jet — a private jet, Nicks’s jet — before lapsing into footage of fans outside some indeterminate concert bowl in some indeterminate American city espousing life-changing testimony bout the bigness of Nicks’s songs as they relate to their lives. After too much of this, the plane lands. A limo. More fans telling the camera (and, ostensibly, telling Nicks): “I love you.” Then Nicks being made up backstage. Nicks shaking her bracelets. There’s the dull roar of the crowd, some lights, and: go. Lips struggling to push a food cart into his old highschool cafeteria in the opening moments of Anvil: The Story of Anvil this is not.
Movies about rock ’n’ roll — its scent, its pulp, its shattering emotional properties — are inherently disappointing because they’re not rock ’n’ roll, although In Your Dreams is disappointing because it’s not even really a movie. Instead, it’s a vanity postcard co-directed and co-produced by the film’s two principles, Nicks and Dave Stewart of The Tourists/Eurythmics, who are to cinematic objectivity what Stewart was to the ’80s neckbeard: ill-suited and gaudy. Because Stewart and Nicks are new filmmakers — and because everyone these days is a pocket Buñuel with their digital apparatii — the movie plays as if demanding visual Ritalin: colour becoming black and white becoming bordered with Kodak film stock becoming archival footage becoming video before eventually blurring into a kind of artless everything. Within the first few minutes, Stewart and Nicks are seen talking about the genesis of their working relationship — they have gathered to make her first record in 10 years — which amounts to each of them, by turns, telling the other how great they are. It’s like an SCTV sketch only no one gets blown up.
The concept of the film is all right — it’s essentially a making-of doc that hiccups between tiresome music videos of the songs — yet it’s a wonder that neither of the musicians/filmmakers’ watched VH1’s Classic Albums instalment on Fleetwood Mac’s seminal Rumours, a fine 60 minutes that reveals more about Nicks and her life than anything here. That said, it’s easy to imagine them deciding that they could do better, the massivity of their ego being what it is. Long and terrible passages in the film are spent while Nicks lounges on a settee worrying over lyrics, which are also long and terrible. While watching people write is rarely effective cinema (“Let’s face the music and dance” is a great lyric, but I doubt the scribbling down of its words would make a good film), the only thing less gripping is watching people track boring albums, which Nicks and her band do throughout In Your Dreams. In these scenes, Stewart directs himself pitching advice while wearing his fedora and sunglasses, which he never takes off. The truth is that, after a few weeks in the studio, one is rarely in good enough shape to get dressed, let alone dress well. Being in the studio is like being shipwrecked: oxygen-deprived and starving for normalcy and a decent meal. There’s nothing here that comes close to reflecting this experience. In the end, this film, like the sessions that produced Nicks’ album, reeks of catering.
Visit inyourdreamsmovie.com for more information.
A Stevie Nicks documentary by Stevie Nicks
The Globe and Mail (Canada)
by Brad Wheeler
Billed as an “intimate portrait of one of rock’s most enduring and legendary artists,” In Your Dreams, a documentary on the making of Stevie Nicks’s 2011 album of the same name, runs the risk of being too intimate for its own good. Musician Dave Stewart, who co-produced the album, shared directorial credit on the film with the singer herself. We spoke with him about a documentary being too close to its subject.
Stevie Nicks was involved in the editing of the documentary. Without someone independent doing it, doesn’t In Your Dreams end up being a fans-only film?
I suppose. My favourite music documentary is D.A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back, on Bob Dylan. But that kind of film would have never been made with Stevie. She never would have allowed an independent filmmaker to film her making a record. She wouldn’t have felt comfortable writing and recording with a camera filming. This came about naturally. A lot of it in the beginning was filmed on a cell phone.
I cringed watching her visit with soldiers in the hospital. Isn’t that a bit self-serving on her part?
Maybe. But it’s something she’s been doing for quite a while, that kind of charitable endeavour. It’s something she wanted to put in. She felt very seriously about the song Soldier’s Angel. The film could have had many different narratives. But once she got involved in the editing and really put herself into it, it meant that it wasn’t going to be the movie I would have exactly made.
At the end, she describes the experience of making the album as the best year of her life. You were there. Why do you think she felt so strongly about it?
I think there was a realization that happened to her – that the album was a collaboration, and that it was possible. She’d been closed in and locked in, if you know what I mean, and then the whole world opened up for her. I’m sure she could spend a lot of time in her house on her own, or with the people she normally works with, and not realize that there’s a world out there to play with.
In Your Dreams screens April 16 to 18 (special screenings on April 15 with Nicks Q&A sessions are sold out). TIFF Bell Lightbox, 350 King St. W., 416-599-8433.
Visit inyourdreamsmovie.com for more information.
A Stevie Nicks documentary by Stevie Nicks
The Globe and Mail (Canada)
by Brad Wheeler
Billed as an “intimate portrait of one of rock’s most enduring and legendary artists,” In Your Dreams, a documentary on the making of Stevie Nicks’s 2011 album of the same name, runs the risk of being too intimate for its own good. Musician Dave Stewart, who co-produced the album, shared directorial credit on the film with the singer herself. We spoke with him about a documentary being too close to its subject.
Stevie Nicks was involved in the editing of the documentary. Without someone independent doing it, doesn’t In Your Dreams end up being a fans-only film?
I suppose. My favourite music documentary is D.A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back, on Bob Dylan. But that kind of film would have never been made with Stevie. She never would have allowed an independent filmmaker to film her making a record. She wouldn’t have felt comfortable writing and recording with a camera filming. This came about naturally. A lot of it in the beginning was filmed on a cell phone.
I cringed watching her visit with soldiers in the hospital. Isn’t that a bit self-serving on her part?
Maybe. But it’s something she’s been doing for quite a while, that kind of charitable endeavour. It’s something she wanted to put in. She felt very seriously about the song Soldier’s Angel. The film could have had many different narratives. But once she got involved in the editing and really put herself into it, it meant that it wasn’t going to be the movie I would have exactly made.
At the end, she describes the experience of making the album as the best year of her life. You were there. Why do you think she felt so strongly about it?
I think there was a realization that happened to her – that the album was a collaboration, and that it was possible. She’d been closed in and locked in, if you know what I mean, and then the whole world opened up for her. I’m sure she could spend a lot of time in her house on her own, or with the people she normally works with, and not realize that there’s a world out there to play with.
In Your Dreams screens April 16 to 18 (special screenings on April 15 with Nicks Q&A sessions are sold out). TIFF Bell Lightbox, 350 King St. W., 416-599-8433.
In Your Dreams runs from April 16-18 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto, with further screenings across Canada listed below.
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