Described as "a semiotic experiment",[4] the film combines elements of documentary with a spoof biopic of the band, and incorporates moments from Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical, a jukebox musical using Pavement's music. That play is about Essem, an aspiring Stephen Malkmus-like musician in a small town, who meets and falls in love with a woman named Anne, boards a train for New York City with her, is tempted by fame and glory, has an affair with another aspiring musician named Loretta, and wonders if love is worth it. The story loosely tracks the progression and themes of Pavement's works, chronologically.[5]
Lucy Benzinger, Brandi Campbell, John El-Jor, Tenaya Kelleher, Joe Laplant, Nicholas Lovalvo, and Sophie Morris appear as ensemble members in Slanted! Enchanted!
Production
Matador Records first approached Perry about creating a film with the band, except that frontman Stephen Malkmus wasn’t interested in hiring a documentary filmmaker, instead wanting to hire a screenwriter who would not write a screenplay. Inspired by the elliptical nature of that request, Perry conceived a version of the project that would defy explanation, comparing it to a film about Bob Dylan that combined D.A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back, Todd Haynes’ I'm Not There, Martin Scorsese's Rolling Thunder Revue and Dylan's own Renaldo and Clara.
The film's production encompassed the creation of "Pavements 1933-2022: A Pavement Museum", a touring museum exhibit composed of real and fake artifacts from the band's history.[6]
The production of Slanted! Enchanted! signals the first foray into musical theater for Perry, who had previously worked with Pavement on a music video for their song “Harness Your Hopes” and aided in creating the aforementioned Pavement Museum,[7] Longtime Perry collaborator Craig Butta produced the play, enlisting Angela Trimbur to choreograph the musicals extensive and complex dance sequences along with co-choreographer Tenaya Kelleher.
Keegan DeWitt and Dabney Morris, film composers and previous collaborators with Alex Ross Perry worked on the arrangements, re-contextualizing the indie rock slacker songs into the big broadway musical parlance. Robert Kolodny, another Perry collaborator, created the on stage projections which play throughout the entirety of the performance. John Arnos created the set and Amanda Ford designed the costumes.[8]
The New York off-Broadway production started previews on December 1, 2022 at the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture in Manhattan's NOHO neighborhood.
A film directed by Perry, entitled Range Life: A Pavement Story, premiered at the Park Slope location of the Nitehawk Cinema on September 14, 2023, described as "a one-of-a-kind, never to be repeated journey through the histories of Pavement."[10] While the screening was not private, it was not advertised as the premiere of the publicized Pavements film project. Like the musical and museum exhibit, the production of this film within a film comprises one strand of Pavements, including footage of the September 2023 "premiere" at the Nitehawk in Brooklyn, complete with red carpet,[11] as well as snapshots of supposed articles promoting Range Life and boasting of its huge budget from the fictitious "Paragon Vantage".[a][12] However, it is unclear what movie actually played at that event, and by some accounts it was an early cut of Pavements instead.[11]
Stephen Malkmus revealed in an October 2024 interview that he had been unhappy with an earlier cut of Pavements (possibly the film exhibited as Range Life in 2023, or another edit in the period since), saying it was "not ready for public consumption... unless it was a prank".[13]
Reception
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 100% of 15 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.8/10.[14]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 79 out of 100, based on 10 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[15]
^Hagan, Joe (October 4, 2024). "Stephen Malkmus on Super Groups, Pseudo Documentaries, and Geriatric Guitar Gods". Vanity Fair. Condé Nast. Retrieved November 3, 2024. I thought it was, like, not ready for public consumption. I understand you were upset by it. Yeah, they had to re-edit it or whatever. Unless it was a prank. Or maybe it was intentionally bad. It's that kind of movie. I'm not even sure. It was all too bloated. And stuff that shouldn't—but that's not in it now, so that's good. Were you pissed off? No, I was just embarrassed. It's not that I wasn't completely surprised also. I think it was just like a prank. Or it was not the real film. It was just like a digital dump. What he showed, the guy showed, I thought it was pretty weird.
