Movie Review: Good Night, Oppy (2022). Amazon Prime.

This enchanting documentary of space exploration in our own era tells an uplifting story of our intelligent machines, and the fascinating emotional relationships we humans can develop with them. It seems perfect for the current moment, with our rising excitement but also fears about A.I. and robotics, and how the development of these technologies may affect us.

Two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity (or "Oppy", as it became known), were launched in 2003, and arrived six weeks apart on the surface of Mars in early 2004. Each was expected to last only a few months, but both ended up continuing to operate, and send back astonishing pictures, videos and data about Mars, for many years instead.  Spirit lasted for more than six years, until 2010; Opportunity lasted an astonishing 14 years before its final signal in 2018, surviving and continuing to explore and broadcast despite mechanical failures, unexpected harsh surface conditions and technical mishaps. 

This film is the delightful tale of these two extraordinary Mars rovers, and the marvelous discoveries they made and shared with humanity. But it is also a very human story of the individuals and teams at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) who invented the rovers, designed, assembled and tested them, successfully sent them to Mars, and then controlled and monitored their explorations from Earth.   

We meet some of the dedicated space scientists at JPL, and get to share their experiences working on the project, their growing amazement and wonder at the longevity of their far-away mechanical team members on the Martian surface, and the affection and feelings they develop with the passing years for these intrepid machines, as they work together to overcome problems so the rovers can continue to send data and photos back to them.   

Using archival footage and recent interviews, the movie shows team members at various stages of their careers and the rover project, and how they increasingly anthropomorphized the remote robots, cheered them on, and coped with their ultimate demise and their grief about it, after nearly a human generation's worth of the rovers' service and communications from Mars.

This is an inspiring and hopeful story of humans, robots and true-life adventures in space, with amazing samples of the huge volume of photos and videos of Mars taken by the rovers, and an excellent Hollywood-quality sound track. Recommended.

Movie Review: Somewhere You Feel Free: The Making of Wildflowers (2021). YouTube Documentary.

Hello again! It’s not even Christmas yet, and already I’m back from my reluctant but much-appreciated breather and short break from The Memory Cache. It was refreshing to take a break, and spend more than a week in Hawai’i with family and friends, with the trade winds blowing, warm weather every day, and gorgeous ocean views everywhere.  I took a helicopter tour of Maui, saw a sea turtle underwater at close range with my mask and snorkel on, went to the aquarium, and appreciated my life and my closest loved ones. It was wonderful.

This has been a surprisingly active bounce-back year for travel in our family, after the past two years of the COVID pandemic and lockdown. In October, my wife and I took a trip back east for a wedding in the Cleveland area, and then on to several family visits on the east coast. One fortuitous benefit of the Ohio visit, of particular interest here since it is once again Rock and Roll Friday on this blog (the fourth Friday of each month) was that we were able to visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, where we’d never been before.

It's a lovely museum, perfect for a lifelong popular music fan like me, with exhibits covering the entire history of rock since the late 1940s, including pictures, clothing, various rock stars’ guitars and other artifacts, and many explanatory articles and posters. 

The featured display at the time was one about the Beatles, tied to the recent Peter Jackson documentary about the making of the Let It Be album in 1969 (previously reviewed here), along with many other exhibits of interest, as well as mock-studio space where visitors can try playing instruments, and rocking out with a couple of on-site cover band musicians. It was a really fun museum, and if you’re ever in Cleveland, I highly recommend it. 

 

While I was there, I also saw a large poster for a new YouTube documentary I’d not heard about called Somewhere You Feel Free: The Making of Wildflowers. It’s a movie that was released more or less contemporaneously with last year’s release of the “missing” Wildflowers recordings made by Tom Petty and his collaborators, including members of the Heartbreakers, the noted music producer Rick Rubin, and other musical luminaries such as Ringo Starr (from the Beatles) and Carl Wilson (from the Beachboys).

The movie itself is not overly long at a run time of about an hour and a half. Most of it was pieced together from recently discovered 16-mm film shot during the period of the Wildflowers album recording sessions, with supplemental interviews (from both then and now) and candid conversations with some of the principals, especially Petty’s close friend, sometimes co-songwriter and lead guitarist Mike Campbell, Heartbreaker pianist Benmont Tench, Rick Rubin, Petty’s now-adult daughters, and a few other cameos.

Several people in the film claimed that Tom Petty believed that the Wildflowers solo album was his greatest work and accomplishment. That message was pushed throughout the movie, as it was in the promotions for the anniversary release in 2021 of all the supplemental recordings from that period. The film makes very clear that it was a time of major growth, change and transition for Petty, both as an artist and as a person, which had impacts on the sorts of sounds he created, and on the artists around him who contributed to the work from this period.

I’m not personally convinced that this album contained the greatest songs of Tom Petty’s long and prolific career as a songwriter and recording artist. I’ve always felt that the heavily acoustic guitar-based sound of these recordings, and the deeply personal, often somewhat somber and depressive lyrics, were not nearly as compelling or exciting as much of the other classic rock material of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

A perfect example of this is shown in the film, with the story of a short "side" recording session Petty did with the Heartbreakers while he was mostly focused on recording his own solo album. The session was needed to record two new songs for the band's last album for MCA (which was otherwise intended to be a greatest hits collection), before entering a new contract with Warner Brothers. 

One of the two new “filler songs” for this MCA-produced Greatest Hits album that Petty quickly wrote (and the full Heartbreakers band recorded) was “Last Dance with Mary Jane” – a monster hit and perennial crowd pleaser, which I believe will forever dwarf almost all of the songs on Wildflowers in popularity, except perhaps “You Wreck Me”.

Nevertheless, whatever you might think of the Wildflowers album and this stage of Tom Petty’s career and life, the movie is a fascinating, informal view into the personality, relationships, creative processes, and artistic development of one of the greatest rock stars ever, at this one particular point in the long arc of his career.  

If you are at all curious about how top musicians write and craft their songs, and how their emotional states, random events and collaborations with other musicians and recording engineers shape the outcomes of their efforts, this documentary is a fascinating and unvarnished view into the creative processes of one of the world’s favorite and most legendary popular musicians. It's also essential viewing for die-hard Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers fans. Recommended.

Movie Review: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin’ Down a Dream (2007). Peter Bogdanovich.

Among the most prized DVD sets in my musical film collection is Peter Bogdanovich's Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin' Down a Dream, a 4-disc set that includes a documentary spanning 2 of the discs, plus a full-length concert video DVD of a special live performance the band played in Gainesville, Florida, their original hometown, to celebrate the 30-year anniversary of the band's formation, and a CD containing rare and unreleased songs.

Most of my friends and family know that Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers has been one of my all-time favorite rock bands since the 1980s. I "discovered" them a little late -- by the time I first listened to their music in the late '80s, they had already been making great records and building a huge following for more than ten years. But since then, I have followed them avidly, right through the release of the band's last studio album, Hypnotic Eye, in 2014, and Petty's sad death at the end of his "final" tour in 2017.

There are documentaries about many pop music bands and musical artists, which typically follow a similar format. Interviews (where possible) with the principals are interspersed with interviews with collaborators, mentors, fans, friends and family, along with snippets of live performances, and maybe some footage from studio recording sessions as well.

Bogdanovich's massive compilation follows this same formula, but it stands out as one of the best and most exhaustive such efforts I've seen. Much of its success, which included a limited theatrical release, can be attributed to the fact that Bogdanovich is a major filmmaker and creative artist in his own right, who brought his talent, resources and vast experience to the project. It was also clearly a labor of love -- there's not much doubt that Bogdanovich was also a huge fan of Petty and the remarkable group of close friends and musical collaborators that surrounded him.

The documentary takes us back to the beginning. It covers Petty's family life as a child, including his loving and supportive mother, and his rocky relationship with his father, his discovery of rock music as a young teenager, and how the band members found each other. In telling this story, we hear interviews with Petty, and all the other band members, along with family members, friends and other musicians.

From this point on, we get a very detailed and complete history of every stage of the band's history, from their Gainesville years, the move to Los Angeles, their first recordings and record contracts, live performances, tours, personnel changes, and ups and downs, through the end of the documentary period in 2007. And the interviews keep bringing in surprising new friends and admirers to the tale, including Stevie Nicks, Johnny Depp, Eddie Vedder, George Harrison, Roger McGuinn, Jackson Browne, and many other celebrities and music industry luminaries whose lives crossed paths with Petty and the band, and were deeply affected by it.

I'm sure this documentary is too long and detailed to be of general interest to everyone, but for the many fans and enthusiasts who have followed and loved the music of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, this is the definitive visual and musical account of their amazing career as one of the best and longest-enduring rock and roll acts of all time. I haven't checked, but it may be available to borrow through local libraries, and of course it can also be bought online. Highly recommended.