Alex Ross Perry’s ’90s Diptych

“Misanthropy—or the perception of same—is probably the common denominator between Perry and his subjects,” wrote Nayman in his introduction to the conversation. “If it’s rather too easy to juxtapose his ex-video-store-clerk biography with the fast-talking (and Tarantino-ish) specimens highlighted in Videoheaven’s deep-cut montage, it’s not a stretch to compare him, positively, to Malkmus, whose sardonic lyrics belie a certain tenderness—the same quality that bled through in the best parts of Listen Up Philip (2014) or Her Smell (2018), where Elisabeth Moss so sentimentally (and unforgettably) serenaded her child with Bryan Adams’s ‘Heaven.’”

When Perry was approached with the idea for Pavements, “somebody on the call said that ‘Stephen Malkmus feels like an Alex Ross Perry character,’ which is ridiculous, but also I understood what he meant,” Perry told Nayman. Malkmus’s “behavior occasionally verges on my absolute favourite question of human psychology and behavior that is in some of those other movies: why is this person acting this way, why is everyone around them okay with it, and why are they so successful despite not conforming to traditional standards of human behavior? Because they’re fascinating to watch, is always my answer. Malkmus, for over thirty years, has been and remains a fascinating character to watch, study, and consider.”

Pavements, which premiered in Venice last September, is winding down its theatrical run but will land on MUBI on July 11. In his review for Film Comment, Vikram Murthi recalls the first time he heard the band. “I didn’t know music could be unpolished yet fully realized,” he writes. “I didn’t know art could feel both handmade and larger-than-life.” Pavements “embodies the Gen-X group’s irreverence by enacting and parodying the worshipful contexts typically reserved for Boomer-approved cultural icons.”

Among the interlocking parts are a faux biopic featuring Jason Schwartzman and Tim Heidecker as music industry types and Joe Keery (Stranger Things) as Malkmus; a behind-the-scenes making-of; archival and fresh rock-doc footage; the staging of an exhibition; and snippets from a full-blown jukebox musical, Slanted! Enchanted!, which was performed late last year. As Murthi puts it: “Anyone who has ever committed to a complicated, perplexing bit knows how much genuine work it can require.”

“If the band seemed out of step with grunge, Britpop, noise rock, and other sub-genres of the decade’s so-called alternative scene,” writes John Semley in the Baffler, “then Pavements is (perhaps fittingly) a little outside its own time. Driven by the era’s twinned, warring energies of ultra-hip irony and cloying sincerity, Pavements is a superlative Gen X treatment on what may be the ultimate Gen X band. It’s a playful, bitter, joyous, enervating, postmodern meta-take on a slacker band—and the slacker ethos—that pleads, heart-on-sleeve to be taken seriously. But not, like, you know, too seriously.”

“Trying to manage the different planes of reality in Pavements is mind-bending, and maybe a little pointless,” writes Hua Hsu in the New Yorker. “Perry’s aggressively clever story about Pavement is different from what mine would be, yet I recognized a fellow-traveller.” The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, in the meantime, finds Videoheaven to be “an engrossing, thematically organized compilation of clips from more than a hundred movies (and a few TV shows) in which video stores are depicted.”

The layout of Perry’s historical overview is rooted in Daniel Herbert’s 2014 book Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store, “an academic book,” as Perry tells Jordan Cronk in a terrific Notebook interview, but also “highly readable and very, very pop.” Maya Hawke narrates, and early on, as she’s declaring that the video store is “a place of hope and anxiety about the future,” her father, Ethan Hawke, is seen whispering “to be or not to be” in the aisles of a Blockbuster outlet in a clip from Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000).

Videoheaven runs a full three hours, and for some, that’s a lot. “As a middle-aged film historian, ’80s kid, and former video store clerk, I’m pretty much the straight-up bullseye target audience for Alex Ross Perry’s Videoheaven, and even I thought it was too damn much,” writes Jason Bailey at Crooked Marquee. Perry “simply goes overboard.”

At the Film Stage, though, David Katz finds that “it’s always lucid, sophisticated, and amusing,” and “we never question its demand on our time—for the decade Perry spent whittling away at it with editor Clyde Folley, those 180 minutes flow crisply . . . With passages from media obvious and essential (Body Double, Clerks, The Watermelon Woman), welcome yet more unexpected (massive chunks of Seinfeld and Friends), and the more novel, but most insightful (crappy noughties indie flicks, Troma movies, I Am Legend), Perry creates a petri-dish of cultural mores and compulsive social behaviors, all glimpsed via roomy, over-lit master shots of shelves, sticky counters, and cardboard standees. Hopeful first-daters, snotty clerks, and embarrassed porn consumers are all here.”

In Sight and Sound, Tarah Judah writes that what Perry “lands on as the most significant factor is that video stores were a social mode of distribution: face-to-face, hand-to-hand, enmeshed with taste values. This, Perry argues, is what created the double-edged sword that made them simultaneously desirable and shameful spaces where a heightened mix of emotions played out.”

At Screen Slate, Öykü Sofuoğlu finds that “overall, an academic tone weighs heavily on the film,” but at Slant, Taylor Williams argues that, over time, “it becomes clear how personal this subject is to [Perry], not in spite of his didactic approach but because of it. He doesn’t insert himself into something he views as bigger than himself, and that sense of reverence lends an emotional anchor to even the driest, disaffected parts of Videoheaven.”

Opening today at IFC Center in New York, Videoheaven will be presented along with three films addressed in the essay: David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), Brian De Palma’s Body Double (1984), and Gary Cohen’s Video Violence (1987). The next stop for Videoheaven is Los Angeles, where it will screen on August 6 at—naturally—Vidiots.