Something to watch tonight: Monday 29 July

The Chills: The Triumph and Tragedy of Martin Phillipps (Parnell/Curry, 2019)

Last night’s sad news about Martin Phillipps sug­gests a slight change of plan. The new releases sum­mary will now appear tomorrow.

I was only lucky enough to meet Martin Phillipps once – back in 1988 when I was just a stu­dent (and stu­dent radio DJ). The Chills were exper­i­en­cing an early career rebound with the Brave Words album and had recor­ded a live gig in Studio 9 at Avalon – you can see some of it here, maybe also the back of my bob­bing head.

That week­end they played the Clarendon Tavern in Wellington and, because I was mates with the pro­pri­et­or, was invited upstairs for the after-match func­tion. There, I met Martin.

I wanted to talk about music, he wanted to talk about com­ic books, but he gra­ciously indulged me.

A cher­ished memory. 

I was lucky enough to review the 2019 doc­u­ment­ary about the man and the band when it went to cinemas:

Any decent film his­tor­i­an will tell you that there are only three real dis­tinct genres: Musical, Western and Martin Phillipps/Chills Comeback Documentaries. I have sev­er­al on VHS at home, taped off the TV back in the day. Of course, there’s little* room for stor­ies like this on TV any­more and they have to find a home at the cinema instead. Luckily, dir­ect­or Julia Parnell (and co-director Rob Curry) know that the big­ger screen requires a dif­fer­ent approach and the visu­als they have come up with jus­ti­fy the extra acreage.

But the film fol­lows a famil­i­ar path for any view­er who is even remotely famil­i­ar with the career arc of one of New Zealand’s finest song­writers and we meet Mr. Phillipps in Dunedin, lick­ing his wounds from a recent career or per­son­al set­back. He is emer­ging from his funk and is put­ting the band (The Chills) back togeth­er. We hear about the long his­tory of fine music, inter­na­tion­al oppor­tun­it­ies, thwarted ambi­tions and miss­ing band mem­bers. Audience mem­bers are stunned when they hear the bril­liance of the music made between 1981-ish and 1992-ish and won­der how it was that – dur­ing the most luc­rat­ive peri­od ever for recor­ded music – Phillipps would end the 90s on a sick­ness bene­fit fight­ing drug addic­tion and Hepatitis C.

…

The oth­er day I reviewed John Reid’s book about John O’Shea and Pacific Films (Whatever It Takes, VUP) and noted how dif­fi­cult it has always been in New Zealand to be a vis­ion­ary. This film rein­forces that impres­sion. The obstacles to suc­cess in the 1980s were enorm­ous, not least that no one had ever had pop suc­cess like that from New Zealand before. No one had any exper­i­ence – they were all sleep-deprived pioneers.

…

Refer a friend

Films like this usu­ally pull the rug from you just before the end – the arc of redemp­tion requires one more great low before any rejoicing – but Parnell’s film, and Phillipps him­self, doesn’t sink to that. So much so that maybe the title is the wrong way around – it should be The Tragedy and Triumph of Martin Phillipps.

Where to watch The Chills: The Triumph and Tragedy of Martin Phillipps

Aotearoa and Australia: Streaming on DocPlay and Beamafilm 

Canada, Ireland & UK: Digital rental

USA: Streaming on Roku (free with ads)

Today’s favourite comment

Friday’s recom­mend­a­tion (Deathgasm) has the weak­est stats of any post since we restar­ted Funerals & Snakes here a year ago. Not everyone’s cup of tea, I guess.

But we did get this enthu­si­ast­ic com­ment from read­er Momo:

I love this film so much! Got to see it at the Embassy as part of that year’s NZIFF – big crowd defo amped up the vibe. Have a phys­ic­al copy that we whip out. There was talk of a fol­low up…. 🤞

and

Looks like there was a Kickstarter for it! Had an update last month to say… “we will very soon be mak­ing an announce­ment as to when & where DEATHGASM 2 will be going into production”