Nick Cave Movies
A post-punk, neo-gothic balladeer with an ardent following, Australian musician Nick Cave has also lent his distinctive presence to films as both a composer and performer. Raised in small town Wangaratta, Australia, Cave attended boarding school in Melbourne, where he met future collaborator Mick Harvey and formed a band that became the Birthday Party. After a couple of years in art school and a move to London, Cave and the Birthday Party left their incendiary mark on the second-generation punk scene before disbanding in 1983. Cave then settled in West Berlin following a brief sojourn in Los Angeles, teaming with Harvey and German musician Blixa Bargeld to form Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. As befitting a band named after a passage in the Bible, Cave's songs evolved into intense narratives filled with love, violence, and Biblical portent accompanied by dramatically eclectic, blues-tinged sonic backdrops. Among the Bad Seeds' admirers was German director Wim Wenders, who cast Cave and the band in his Berlin seraphim allegory Wings of Desire (1987). Appearing in the climactic scene, Cave inwardly despaired about having to perform a fan favorite before launching into the thematically fitting "From Her to Eternity." The Bad Seeds also contributed an apocalyptic love song to Wenders' millennial epic Until the End of the World (1991).Continuing his movie work after Wings of Desire, a screenplay Cave helped pen during his Los Angeles stint was turned into a film by fellow Aussie John Hillcoat. A brutal prison drama based on actual events, Ghosts...of the Civil Dead (1988) featured Cave as one of the inmates, and was nominated for a slew of Australian Film Institute awards, including one for Cave and one for Harvey and Bargeld's haunting score. After kicking an infamous drug habit and moving to Brazil in the late '80s, Cave's creative output flourished into the 1990s, beginning with the sixth Bad Seeds album The Good Son and a German documentary chronicling the band, The Road to God Knows Where, in 1990. Continuing to make acclaimed music with the Bad Seeds throughout the decade, including the creepy Scream (1996) and X-Files (1998) soundtrack tune "Red Right Hand," Cave also contributed to a number of offbeat film projects. Sending up his usual dark attire and goth mien, Cave appeared as the platinum blond, white-clad rocker muse to Brad Pitt's wannabe title character in Tom DiCillo's wry indie Johnny Suede (1991). An apt match of innovators, Cave scored a documentary about American avant-garde cinema icon Jonas Mekas, Jonas in the Desert (1994); his skill with dark ballads elegantly meshed with the subject in the performance-documentary September Songs: The Music of Kurt Weill (1995). Along with releasing the Bad Seeds' Murder Ballads in 1996, Cave acted in and composed the score for Rhinoceros Hunting in Budapest (1996), and reunited with Hillcoat to score Hillcoat's To Have & to Hold (1997). Moving back to London in the late '90s, Cave provided the music for the Irvine Welsh-scripted triptych film The Acid House (1998). ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi
- 1987
In this potpourri of abstract, realistic and apparently unrelated imagery, numerous figures in Germany's "underground" and avant-garde cinema make brief appearances, and visually powerful shots from around the world are interlarded with close-ups apparently intended to remind the viewer of the omnipresence of death and impermanence. This earnest visual meditation begins and ends with a performance by Blixa Bargeld of Death is a Dandy on a Horse and includes a dance performance by Japanese artist Kazuo Ohno partnered by his son, to the tune of City of Heaven as sung by Jessye Norman. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi
- Starring:
- Blixa Bargeld, Nick Cave, (more)
Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander) are angels who watch over the city of Berlin. They don't have harps or wings (well, they usually don't have wings) and they prefer overcoats to gossamer gowns. But they can travel unseen through the city, listening to people's thoughts, watching their actions and studying their lives. While they can make their presence felt in small ways, only children and other angels can see them. They spend their days serenely observing, unable to interact with people, and they feel neither pain nor joy. One day, Damiel finds his way into a circus and sees Marion (Solveig Dommartin), a high-wire artist, practicing her act; he is immediately smitten. After the owners of the circus tell the company that the show is out of money and must disband, Marion sinks into a funk, shuffling back to her trailer to ponder what to do next. As he watches her, Damiel makes a decision: he wants to be human, and he wants to be with Marion, to lift her spirits and, if need be, to share her pain. Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire is a remarkable modern fairy tale about the nature of being alive. The angels witness the gamut of human emotions, and they experience the luxury of simple pleasures (even a cup of coffee and a cigarette) as ones who've never known them. From the angels' viewpoint, Berlin is seen in gorgeous black-and-white -- strikingly beautiful but unreal; when they join the humans, the image shifts to rough but natural-looking color, and the waltz-like grace of the angels' drift through the city changes to a harsher rhythm. Peter Falk appears as himself, revealing a secret that we may not have known about the man who played Columbo, and there's also a brief but powerful appearance by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. Wings of Desire hinges on the intangible and elusive, and it builds something beautiful from those qualities. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
- Starring:
- Bruno Ganz, Solveig Dommartin, (more)
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