R.E.M. Movies

In 1970, a music aficionado and entrepreneur named Michael Eavis staged a "pop, folk, and blues" festival on a dairy farm in the English community of Glastonbury, not far from Stonehenge. 1,500 attended the "Glastonbury Fayre," and a second festival followed in 1971. By 2005, The Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts had grown into the biggest pop music festival in the world, playing host to the biggest names in rock, reggae, electronic, blues, and world music for a crowd of up to 150,000 people over the course of a three-day weekend in June. Filmmaker Julien Temple offers a backstage look at the history of this event, as well as a cross section of the memorable performances which have taken place on the festival's stage in the documentary Glastonbury. Performers featured in archival footage include R.E.M., David Bowie, New Order, Radiohead, Coldplay, the Velvet Underground, Nick Cave, Oasis, Blur, Björk, and many more. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Released around the time of the R.E.M. best-of collection In Time, R.E.M.: In View - The Best of R.E.M. 1988-2003 features 16 of the band's music videos. Among the songs are "All the Way to Reno," "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?," "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite," "Everybody Hurts," "Man on the Moon," and "Losing My Religion." The DVD release includes an additional six bonus videos and three live songs performed in London. The bonus videos are for "Tongue," "How the West Was Won & Where It Got Us," "New Test Leper," "Bittersweet Me," "Lotus," "I'll Take the Rain." The live songs are "Imitation of Life," "Losing My Religion," "Man on the Moon." ~ Matthew Tobey, All Movie Guide

Circuit is a series of DVDs that brings the viewer closer to the music and the musicians. This edition of Circuit features interviews with REM and the award winning Beck, a music video from The Cardigans, a clip from a documentary about Guided With Voices, and a live performance from Grant Lee Buffalo. ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide

Comedian Andy Kaufman gave performances that were bizarre and difficult to categorize, in which he might do or say almost anything: show cartoons, impersonate Elvis Presley, play conga drums while singing children's songs, read aloud from The Great Gatsby, or take the audience out for milk and cookies. Written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski and directed by Milos Forman (the team behind The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996)), this biopic takes an in-depth look at Kaufman's life and art, with Jim Carrey as Kaufman, who could (and would) be any number of different people onstage: the quiet and childlike man, the little foreign guy, the overbearing showbiz "professional," the violently obnoxious wrestler, or the world's worst lounge singer. As Kaufman rose from comedy clubs to guest appearances on Saturday Night Live and a spot on the TV sitcom Taxi, his performances became more complex and dangerous -- so much so that when word got out in 1984 that he was suffering from lung cancer, many fans and associates thought it was just another bizarre stunt; the disease took his life later that year. Man on the Moon features Danny De Vito as Kaufman's manager George Shapiro, Courtney Love as his girlfriend Lynne Margulies, Paul Giamatti as his friend Bob Zmuda, and David Letterman, Judd Hirsch, Marilu Henner, Carol Kane, and Christopher Lloyd as themselves. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

In 1992, R.E.M. released one of their most introspective and ethereal albums, Automatic for the People, and two years later they returned with their hard-rocking, most physical set to date, Monster. R.E.M.: Parallel features five music videos from each of these two albums, including "Man in the Moon," "Everybody Hurts," "Drive," "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?," "Crush With Eyeliner," and "Star 69." This video also includes excerpts from short films created by the band and outtakes from the documentary Rough Cut. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

This 1991 episode of Saturday Night Live is hosted by Catherine O'Hara and features musical guest R.E.M. ~ Skyler Miller, All Movie Guide

Wim Wenders' sprawling cyberpunk noir epic -- shot in no less than nine different countries -- is set in 1999 and stars Solveig Dommartin as Claire, a young Frenchwoman who comes into contact with a large sum of money stolen during a bank heist; in her travels she picks up a mysterious American hitchhiker (William Hurt), who himself steals some of the money before parting from her company. Upon discovering the theft, Claire sets out on his trail, with both a Hammett-styled German private eye (Rudiger Vogler) as well as her former lover, a novelist portrayed by Sam Neill, in tow. The hitchhiker is really Sam Farber, the son of an underground scientist (Max Von Sydow), and his mission is to travel the globe in order to acquire the funding necessary to develop the technology which will allow his blind mother (Jeanne Moreau) to "see" visual recordings of her family members; the second half of the film takes place largely in the Farbers' compound in the Australian Outback, where Sam, Claire and the others take refuge while attempting to bring the sight project to its fruition, in the meantime pondering earth's future in the wake of a nuclear disaster in outer space. Wenders' most ambitious film to date, budgeted at $23 million, Until the End Of the World is also among his most seriously flawed efforts -- despite a keen sense of cultural perception, a fascinating sci-fi take on life in the near-future and stunning Robby Muller cinematography, the picture never quite gels. Much of the blame seems to fall upon its distributors -- upon its wide release in 1991, the movie was drastically cut to a running time of 2 1/2 hours, resulting in a disjointed narrative that doesn't shift gears so much as grind them as the action moves from country to country. Still, while a three-hour version, issued on laserdisc in Japan, comes closer to realizing the full scope of Wenders' epic vision, rumors of a five-hour director's cut -- said to have been screened to thunderous applause at a handful of film festivals -- continue to persist, suggesting that a masterpiece may well exist here after all. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide

Long one of America's most-respected alternative rock bands, R.E.M.'s expressive visual sense helped to expand the boundaries of the music video. This home video collects clips for nine of the group's songs, including "The One I Love," "Stand," "Orange Crush," "It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)," and "Finest Worksong." ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

The town of Athens, Georgia exists mainly to provide services to the local university. It also serves as the setting for a whole movement of small, independent rock bands -- which is the subject of this documentary. Cheap local rents and plentiful audiences create a venue for the fulfillment of many a creative dream in this unlikely location, as most of the musicians featured here (whose style is based on U.S. and European punk styles of the 1970s) have no desire to become big hits and only want a chance to perform before a live audience. An additional segment focuses on the accomplishments of the highly eccentric "Reverend" Howard Finster, whose artwork for the Talking Heads album Little Creatures won a national "Album Cover of the Year" award. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide