The first-anywhere screening of Luke Meyer‘s Breaking a Monster just concluded at South by Southwest. It’s a decently assembled success-story doc about Unlocking The Truth, an African-American classic metal trio who were 12 and 13 when the footage was shot a year or so ago. It’s about how they built upon the novelty of “black kids playing metal” along with some serious YouTube popularity by joining forces with veteran music manager Alan Sacks. It takes the band forever to crank out a catchy, listenable song but they finally do, and eventually they land a $1.8 million record deal with Sony Music.

My initial reaction: “Basically meh, yeah, not bad, so-so but not enough information. The whole thing about Unlocking The Truth is the novelty (black teens doing metal) and the Times Square YouTube trending and people around them (especially Sacks) getting ahead of themselves in thinking ‘wow, these guys are unusual…and really young!…and sellable!” I’ve never been a metal fan. Ever. And I kept asking myself ‘okay, but where’s the beef when you get past the novelty? Where’s the song or songs that people are looking for?’ Isn’t that what makes a band successful? The songs they write and sing and the way they’re recorded/performed? Or am I missing something?

I can’t overstate how jolting and invigorating and even ground-shifting Ondi Timoner‘s Brand: A Second Coming plays, especially during the second viewing and especially when it hits the 40-minute mark, which is when the story of Brand’s social-political awakening kicks in. It’s a brilliant, go-for-it thing that not only portrays and engages with a brilliant artist-provocateur but matches his temperament and picks up the flag. Superb photography by Timoner (especially loved the occasional punctuation of grainy 8mm) and HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko. The doc constantly pops, riffs and punches over its nearly two-hour running time. Magnificent graphics and editing, and a perfect ending.

What’s significant is that the lives of Che Guevara, Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi and Malcolm X, whom Brand identifies with and admires, had a similar dramatic arc in that they finally “became” after floundering around — Che as a son of Argentine privelege, Jesus as a stay-at-home carpenter until he was 30, Malcolm X as a pimp and an incarcerated con until he was awakened by Elijah Muhammed, etc. Similarly Brand became truly interesting and transcendent when he stopped projecting like a hyper, swaggering, shag-crazy narcissist and became a “champagne socialist” revolutionary and began saying “look at what’s wrong here”…that‘s when he became a lightning bolt.

From Variety‘s Dennis Harvey: “Brand might look like a dissolute rock star, but take away the expletives and jokes and it’s clear that what he says is eagerly dismissed in some quarters precisely because he’s smart and provocative, and reaches a large audience with a message that is off-the-charts liberal by current standards. The reasons he gives for being fed up with the status quo are very persuasive — and delivered in such a way that they reach people who’d be bored stiff by any standard political sermonizing.”

From The Guardian‘s Alex Needham: “It’s Brand’s journey from comic to activist which is the meat of Timoner’s story: what happens when drugs, sex, fame and wealth all fail to thrill and a charismatic man decides to make the almost unprecedented transition from comic to guru. Even if you’re cynical about Brand’s motives or just think that he’s a bit of berk, the film convinces you of the almost alarming sincerity of his political mission — not least because his mother reveals that as a child Brand claimed that he was indeed the second coming.”

Harvey again: “Such self-comparisons might seem odious on the surface, and indeed they are quite odious to those who’d prefer to dismiss Brand’s concerns because they hail from an English comedian, ex-drug addict and former Mr. Katy Perry. But Brand’s motormouth eloquence and sharp if often gleefully rude intelligence certainly qualify him as much to talk about corporate greed, economic equality, climate change and other pressing issues as many professional pundits whose often dubious legitimacy is seldom questioned.”

Three years ago I posted a wish piece about finding some way to post Live Skype video feeds of my sundry activities on Hollywood Elsewhere. The idea was that an HE/Skype icon on the side could be clicked on and transformed into an expanded video screen when a flashing red light indicates activity. The idea died when it became apparent that Skype protocols didn’t allow for this, but now it’s back and crackling with live Twitter video feeds being offered by Meerkat and down the road by the Twitter-aligned Periscope.

Yesterday Twitter “kneecapped” Meerkat by preventing the importing of a user’s Twitter follower lists (i.e., the social graph), but the potential feeding of live video to unlimited thousands by a single feeder is a firm reality. There surely must be some way to adapt Meerkat’s or Periscope’s skill sets to generate Hollywood Elsewhere video from my iPhone at the touch of a button and have it appear on the site. Live events happening at the Cannes Film Festival, say. Or during a sojourn in Rome or Paris or Prague or wherever.

Live-video interviews during a hotel press junket, live video chit-chat, live-video of Cannes press conferences, live-video of La Pizza dinners with the Cannes regulars, live GoPro video from a motorcycle jaunt around lower Manhattan or Vietnam, etc.

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg has posted an interview (and accompanying audio q & a) with ’50s teen heartthrob Tab Hunter, whose closeted-in-Hollywood tale is told in Jeffrey Schwarz‘s Tab Hunter Confidential, which is screening at South by Southwest (a.k.a., “South By”). Hunter, 83, has never sounded to me like a layered or complex fellow, but he seems happy, settled. He lived an amazing life, certainly during his mid-to-late ’50s heyday. The doc is basically a visual accompaniment to “Tab Hunter Confidential,” an ’06 tell-all written when Hunter heard about the then-imminent publishing of Robert Hofler‘s “The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Wilson.” Wilson was a gay Svengali who spotted, brought along and managed the biggest closeted hunks of the ’50s and early ’60s, including Hudson and Hunter. Wilson’s first move was always “butching” these guys up with studly-sounding screen names — i.e., Arthur Gelien/Tab Hunter, Roy Scherer/Rock Hudson, Robert Mosely/Guy Madison, Orison Whipple Hungerford Jr./Ty Hardin, etc. No Wilson client was actually given the name “Ben Dover.”

Last night Jamie Foxx told Power105 FM’s Angie Martinez that the Mike Tyson biopic that was announced last summer, in which Foxx will play the former heavyweight champion in a film written by Terrence Winter (Wolf of Wall Street), will be directed by none other than Martin Scorsese. “I just went in with Paramount with Mike Tyson,” Foxx told Martinez. “So I’m going to do the Mike Tyson story. Listen, to be in the same room pitching Mike Tyson to Paramount…Mike Tyson is on one side, I’m on the other side ‘doing’ Tyson at the same time. And Martin Scorsese at the helm. This will be the first boxing movie that Scorsese has done since Raging Bull.” Foxx’s manager Rick Yorn will produce. Scorsese is currently directing Silence in Taiwan.

During press interviews for Jules et Jim, which opened in the U.S. in May 1962, director Francois Truffaut realized after discussing Alfred Hitchcock with the top U.S. critics that he was not taken seriously. Truffaut wrote Hitchcock to propose a series of in-depth interviews that would cover Hitchcock’s entire career, film by film. The transcripts would eventually become “Hitchcock/Truffaut.”

Truffaut ended his letter to Hitchcock with the following: “If, overnight, the cinema had to do without its soundtrack and become once again a silent art, then many directors would be forced into unemployment, but among the survivors there would be Alfred Hitchcock, and everyone would realize at last that he is the greatest film director in the world.”

So Robert Downey, Jr. decided to pay for the kid’s bionic arm, right? Or is he just publicizing it? Either way it was bequeathed “at no cost to the family.” Downey says the bionic 3D printed arm is “affordable.” It’s from Albert Manero, the founder of Limbitless. A 3.13 Washington Post story by Leah Polakoff says the arm is 3-D printed on a Stratasys printer, [and] takes approximately 40 to 50 hours to manufacture. The average prosthetic limb costs around $40 K, but Manero’s “Iron Man” arm cost less than $350 in materials not counting labor, research and development time.

Last Tuesday I spoke with Ondi Timoner, director of Brand: A Second Coming, a fascinating, motor-mouthed portrait of actor-comedian-social activist Russell Brand. It will open Austin’s South by Southwest film festival this evening. Timoner’s doc (partly shot by HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko) is one of the most unusual and impressive documentary portraits of a famous person I’ve ever seen because of…well, its eagerness to step out of the standard function of a documentary and take the proverbial ride. It’s a film that transcends itself and becomes something else by embracing the attitude and temperament of its subject. Just as Brand has begun moving the focus of his life beyond fame and wealth and the lowest form of humor (i.e., simply making people laugh), Brand: A Second Coming is about seeing and transcending and turning a page. It’s about breaking out of the Wachowski’s Matrix by way of comic irreverence, manic energy and a massive ego.

Ondi Timoner, director of Brand: A Second Coming.

Russell Brand

Brand is partly advocating a kind of Iceland-styled social revolution by way of consciousness raising and neighborhood organizing and more compassion for drug addicts and fierce resistance to most of the goals and systems of 1% corporate dominance, and partly calling for the debunking of conservative myths about individual fulfillment through the acquisition of power, money, sex, property, etc. Brand is rich so who’s he to talk, right? His response is to swear over and over that he’s been to the very top and gotten drunk on luxury and debauch and that none of the spoils are particularly fulfilling. He genuinely sees himself as a kind of change agent in the vague tradition of Malcolm X, Jesus of Nazareth, Mahatma Gandhi and Che Guevara. I realize this will rub some the wrong way, but what’s wrong with choosing these fellows as heroes and wanting to follow in their path? Brand’s obviously an eccentric, but he has the aura of a guy who’s really seen through the bullshit.

Born in June 1975, Brand first gained fame as a nervy, drug-addicted stand-up comedian, award-show m.c. and televized provocateur. He became sober in ’04 and got into transcendental meditation but continued to provoke and challenge and piss people off. His first big American-fame injection came, of course, from starring roles in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Get Him To The Greek and Arthur. But gradually the focus of his comedy became more and more political, and Timoner’s film comes alive when this phase, which kicked in sometime around 2012, takes over. We’re speaking of a phase in which Brand has more or less forsaken narcissism in and of itself (well, mostly) and has resolved to be, as he explained during a relatively recent q & a, “the people’s narcissist.”

The new Esquire cover is ballsy in a modest, cautious sort of way. If Esquire, Nick Offerman and Chelsea Handler had really wanted to recreate the spirit of John Lennon and Yoko Ono‘s Two Virgins album photos they would’ve gone full-frontal. To stay within newstand distribution standards Esquire could’ve attached a peel-off sticky on top of the unfortunate truth of things. That would have rocked the world and sent people running and screaming for the exits like nothing before. Lennon allegedly said that the Two Virgins uproar “seemed to have less to do with the explicit nudity, and more to do with the fact that the pair were rather unattractive; [he] described it as a picture of ‘two slightly overweight ex-junkies.'” Offerman/Handler don’t look like druggies but, to be fair and honest about it, they look like most normal 40ish people here, which is to say not…well, not “unappealing” but at the same time not hugely attractive in a raw, biological, photo-studio context.  But it’s okay.  It could’ve been worse.  The monochrome helps.

Russell Brand is an exceptionally brilliant, wise, cosmically plugged-in fellow — funny, relentlessly narcissistic, socially utopian and beholden to truth. I’m serious — he’s a lightning bolt and a major exception to the rule of celebrity and especially modern comedy. He has to be one of the least attention-averse people in the world. It therefore seems odd…make that extremely odd that he’s decided to not attend tonight’s South by Southwest premiere of Ondi Timoner‘s Brand: A Second Coming, which I’ve seen and, trust me, is nothing to be sheepish about — it’s quite the crackling, electric, transcendent experience.

In a statement on his website Brand says that “you’d think a narcissist would like nothing more than talking about themselves and their…story but actually, it felt like, to me, my life was hard enough the first time round and going through it again was painful and sad. For me watching [the film] was very uncomfortable.” In a just-posted interview with Indiewire‘s Nigel M. Smith, Timoner agrees that Brand “had a hard time…[a] really hard time with it.”

I wouldn’t mind seeing John Schlesinger‘s Far From The Madding Crowd (’67) as a warm-up for Thomas Vinterberg’s version, which Fox Searchlight is finally opening on May 1st. But that seems unlikely as I can’t attend the upcoming London theatrical showing and the new British Bluray won’t pop until 6.1.15. If Fox Searchlight wanted to be clever about it, they would offer a screening of the 168-minute Schlesinger version to critics on both coasts. That effort, scripted by Frederic Raphael, shot by Nicholas Roeg and and starring Julie Christie, was regarded as a failure during its time. I have a recollection of it being handsome but dirge-like. If nothing else critics seeing (or re-seeing) it would probably emerge with a finer appreciation for Vinterberg’s film, as it runs almost a full 40 minutes shorter.

In a way I’ve always regarded Ben Stiller‘s Zoolander as a kind of 9/11 film. The fashion-realm satire, largely based in Manhattan, opened only 17 days after that slaughter, and Stiller’s film, which is quite funny and actually inspired at times, just seems fused to that end-of-an-era feeling, that sense of shock that descended upon Manhattan in mid to late September of ’01. That was 13 and 1/2 years ago, and yet that recently released footage of Stiller and costar Owen Wilson walking the runway in footage for Zoolander 2 (Paramount, 2.12.16) indicates they haven’t aged a day. Justin Theroux‘s script is set in Europe; much of the filming will happen at Rome’s Cinecitta. Will Ferrell‘s “Mugatu” character (another holdover from ’01) is part of the new mix. Penelope Cruz and Christine Taylor costar. Four years ago Stiller said it’s basically about Derek and Hansel’s “lives [having] changed…they’re not really relevant anymore…it’s a new world for them.” If you define “relevance” as directly influencing or at least contributing to the shaping or flavoring of a given culture, what percentage of the population qualifies? At any point in time over 99.5% of humanity is along for the ride.