Mason Jennings – Use Your Van (Music
Documentary)
Picture: C+
Sound: C+ Extras: D Documentary: B
Are you sick of bad, plastic, tired, soulless, pathetic,
rolling with our voice ‘til we suffocate garbage that passes itself off as
music? If so, you are really gong to
enjoy Andy Grund’s look at music artist Mason Jennings in Use Your Van,
a 2004 look at Jennings cutting a new studio album and the serious effort he
puts fourth to make music about something.
The songs that surface as we watch include:
1) Lemon
Grove Avenue
2) Butterfly
3) Sorry
Signs On Cash Machines
4) Crown
5) Bullet
6) In Your
City
7) Lonely
Computer Screen
8) Godless
9) Ballad
Of Paul & Sheila
10) The Mountain
11) Fourteen Pictures
12) The Light (Part One)
13) Killer’s Creek
There are other music-in-the-making moments as well, in
what is already his fifth studio album, Use Your Voice. Well, he does use his voice, so well in fact
that I was reminded of the intelligence of singer/songwriters of the past and
present who were good at telling it like it was and is. He’s got one of those storytelling voices
like Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Paul Simon, Billy Joel, Leo Sayer, Don Henley, The
Finn Brothers or other greats and I felt like I was watching the rise of a
serious talent the likes of the major record labels cannot seem to find
anymore. They do not have the will or
the people with the insight to back anyone unless they are pre-packaged and
their individuality sanded down into nothingness. Jennings is with the smaller Bar/None label, one I instantly want
to learn all about.
We do not learn anything too personal or extraordinary
about Jennings and fellow musicians Brian McLeod and Chris Morrissey, but we do
not need to do the “reality TV’ cliché, because it shows them being for-real
musicians, performers and artists, and that is achievement enough. That Grund does not get silly and fancy with
the camera and actually knows how to direct is even more remarkable. No Music Video clichés, no Truth Or Dare
crisis, or anything to be hip by being intentionally repulsive. Use Your Van dodges just about every
cliché most such films in the last 20 years tripped up on, and that makes all
88 of its minutes a true pleasure.
The letterboxed 1.78 X 1 image is nicely shot by director
Grund with Panasonic’s DVX-1000 camera in the Mini-DV format, then transferred
to film. The result is impressive and
looks more film-like since Grund has talent and does not get silly. The Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo has no true
surround information, which is a shame, because the music deserves it, but this
will suffice. Use Your Van is a
model for fine films on music as smart as Scorsese’ The Last Waltz
(1978) and for many like myself, an introduction to a class act in Jennings and
his crew. Hope they go multi-platinum
soon and have a ton of hits.
- Nicholas Sheffo
