REVIEW: The Velvet Underground [2021]

It was all about extended time. Director Todd Haynes has culled through contextually relevant and era-specific footage, artistic contemporaries, interviews both archival and new, and more (the end credits are over five minutes long to fit the myriad sources) to create a definitive oral history of one of the most influential rock/pop bands of all-time, simply (and aptly) titled The Velvet Underground. He needs to go through these hours of information because, as we soon learn through the journey, that name was bigger than just a band. Its originators Lou…

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REVIEW: Tiny Tim: King for a Day [2021]

It’s all ambiguous with Tiny Tim. Context is everything. That’s the first thought that came to mind at the beginning of Johan von Sydow‘s Tiny Tim: King for a Day (written by Martin Daniel) since I was born in the 1980s and knew the subject only as his “has been” self at the tail end of both his career and life. In my mind the celebrity he won was therefore always of a complicated sort: toeing the line between laughing at the “freak” and laughing with the entertainer. What I…

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