loudQUIETloud: A Film About the Pixies (2006)

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

I've been a Pixies music fan for years, but I never really knew much about the individual members. All I knew is that they inexplicably dropped off the face of the earth one day, and reappeared recently as middled aged people.This documentary makes it quite clear what happened. The individual band members are fragile, sensitive, flawed people, who made unbelievably unique and magical music when they were together. Unfortunately their fragility made it impossible for them to deal with their success.This film could have very easily taken the TV-style doc route with music industry producer and "expert" interviews, instead it just follows the band members around during their 2004 reunion tour. By showing Charles, Kim, Joe and Dave engaging in mundane everyday activities, we come to know them better than from any lecture delivered by a music "expert".Despite the fact that they never achieved any great commercial success during their heyday, the string of recent sold out tour dates proves that their music had a profound effect on millions of people worldwide.The Pixies now have a second chance to achieve the financial success that eluded them the first time around. Very few people in this life get a second chance at anything. I hope that they can achieve their financial goals, as well as finding the inner peace that they lacked in their younger years.I highly recommend this film to Pixie fans, new and old alike.

The Pixies are a real phenomenon in the history of rock. While they were young in the 80s and beginning of the 90s they did not enjoy too much success, and it can be said that their legend and influence started to build only at the moment when they split. Twelve years later, in 2004 they decided to get back together after a series of individual failures that seemed to bring all of them on the brink of personal and financial bankruptcy. The film tells very little about their first period of activity and focuses on Act 2 of their career.It is not that it tells too much we do not know from the music of the group. The Pixies are great musicians, decent human being and poor communicators. We do not learn from the documentary too much about the sources of their music, we do not understand why despite the success of their second career and despite of them writing music for their individual careers there was and there is no new album since they reunited. We learn something about their personal lives, but frankly speaking what we hear is not interesting or revealing. Music remains the best part of this film.

The film kicks off with a quote from Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, about his famous song, Smells Like Teen Spirit: "I was basically trying to rip off the Pixies." As a tribute documentary, loudQUIETloud goes on to explore the Pixies strange career and provide some clues to why they have been so influential.The Pixies established themselves musically with deep contrasts, not just in volume (as the title suggests) but by combining many strange elements, melodic and abrasive, and cryptic lyrics - they are almost like a David Lynch rock experience (one of their songs is a cover from a song in Lynch's early Eraserhead). What made them extraordinary is that they disbanded just as they approached critical acclaim (within six years) and didn't reap the benefits of their popularity until they re-formed nearly twelve years later - at which point this movie begins.Tickets for their 2004 reunion tour sold out in four minutes, but the band members are no longer young. As the film develops we see some have families with small children, but they all have outside interests, musical or otherwise, and 'being the Pixies' is hardly something they identify with beyond a sense of responsibility to make sure the live performances go well. The detachment is so great that a struggling interviewer, asking an innocuous question about whether they will make another album, is nonplussed that the band really haven't considered the question one way or the other.Lead singer Frank Black ('Black Francis') is a bulky, almost intimidating figure with a shaven head, so it's something of a revelation to see him doing positive affirmations before bed, telling himself, "I am a nice person, people like me . . ." Bassist Kim Deal looks with surprise at the blisters on her fingers after the first concert - Frank reassures her they'll get better in about a week. Both of them continue working on their own material while on tour, Kim for the Breeders and Frank on his solo work. The band seem to accept that it is not in their natures to talk to each other much, even when they are getting on fine, but they seem more mature than the days of early acrimony where one or the other would unilaterally make public announcements of the band's imminent break-up.The sound and camera-work throughout is first rate, so if you like the Pixies even a little bit, this is a rare opportunity to experience them at their best. For those who have never heard of them, you might recall the song, 'Where Is My Mind?' as the exit music to the film Fight Club, or sections from their records 'Gigantic' and 'Hang Wire in the United States of Leland. For fans, the song listing taken from the credits includes: Where is My Mind, Hey, Here Comes Your Man, U-Mass, Caribou, Gouge Away, Nimrod's Son, In Heaven, Wave of Mutilation, Something Against You, Bone Machine, Cactus, Vamos, Monkey Gone to Heaven and also the Breeders song Iris.

The film loudQUIETloud fails to be an effective documentary for several reasons. The first failure is that the filmmaker does nothing to justify the making of this documentary—the film is so devoid of background information or historical context that, for someone without extensive prior knowledge of the Pixies, there is nothing to suggest that the Pixies are important or interesting enough to merit documenting their comeback. The filmmaker makes the audacious claim that the Pixies are among the most influential bands of all-time, and maybe they are—but the film does nothing to prove this or show how or why they are influential. The opening quote from Nirvana's Kurt Cobain is the only time in the film where we are given a sense of the Pixies' impact on modern pop music. Where are the interviews with music historians, music critics, or other musicians that would validate and define the Pixies' influence? Where are the excerpts from Rolling Stone articles about the Pixies—during their heyday, their breakup, their absence, and their reunion? Surely if the Pixies were indeed 'one of the most influential bands of all-time,' then these secondary sources would be overflowing with information that the filmmaker could have used to place in the Pixies in the context of modern music for viewers who aren't already familiar. Yet there is not ONE secondary source interview, not one article quoted—the film consists entirely of interviews with band members, live concert footage, and interviews with the band's family and fans. In this way, loudQUIETloud feels like little more than a puff piece, a made-for-the-fans DVD of the tour released by the band itself. If you are looking for live concert footage of the Pixies, loudQUIETloud does just fine. If you are interested in a thought-provoking, intelligent documentary, loudQUIETloud falls flat on its face. I knew almost nothing about the Pixies before watching loudQUIETloud, and now having seen it, I still feel as though I know nothing about them. Why did the Pixies breakup? The documentary cites 'creative differences and tension,' a generic answer that could probably be used for hundreds of bands. Why did the Pixies get back together? The documentary cites money and 'it just feeling right' as the reasons for the reunion—again, these reasons are painfully dull and provide none of the insight that is the purpose of a good documentary. What is the title's significance? Other than my own inference that loudQUIETloud refers to the band's path from popularity to obscurity and back to popularity, I am given no other clues as to what the title is meant to mean. Most importantly, the film fails to answer the question of why the Pixies were significant and influential, and left me angry and frustrated that I had spent 90 minutes on what, from my perspective, might as well have been some random garage band.For the hardcore Pixies fan, loudQUIETloud may be sufferable since it gives viewers ample face-time with the band members themselves. However, for those who don't particularly know or care about the Pixies already, loudQUIETloud is among the most hopelessly ineffective documentaries I have ever seen.