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Review by Connor Lightbody ★★★

A guy in the Venice press screening tonight took his phone out to google the band Pavement

Review by Ly La

My experience watching this movie was that I walked out halfway through and Stephen malkmus was standing directly outside. He asked me if I didn’t like his movie. I told him it was fine but my neck was hurting. He said fair, and then I left.

Review by john ★★★★ Liked

After watching this I am not convinced this band actually exists

Review by izzy ★★★★

for your consideration: joe keery

Review by Ella Kemp Liked

Impossible to review lol, fascinated to see how this lands if you’re just walking into a movie about a band. And even if you know the irony going in! Kinda mad. Nothing I’m saying makes any sense.

2

In Pavements’ climax, its half-dozen threads are drawn together in an intricately cross-cut sequence, scored to a crescendoing pastiche of the group’s greatest non-hits. The soaring, operatic medley is perhaps, the maudlin, melodramatic pop form. Think only of Celine Dion or the Key & Peele sketch mocking Les Mis. Yet Pavements feels like it has earned the indulgence. It’s not a sudden, mawkish fishtail into earnestness. It’s almost as if Perry, Pavement, and their movie project have transcended irony and all that “jaded weltzschmertz” stuff and achieved a hard-won sincerity. It’s not just a doc-hybrid steeped in deep stew of cynicism and sardonicism. Rather, it marshals its many ironic techniques—the fake interviews and artifacts, the self-consciously “bad” Bohemian Rhapsody-style biopic—in the service of a totally heartfelt, meta-sincere message, which is, basically: Pavement rules. It is ironic only in the truest sense of exploring the space between what is said (or seen) and what is meant.

Wrote about this for The Baffler.

Review by nora ★★½

this movie is edging for people who get off on hearing pavement play an entire pavement song

Review by Justin LaLiberty ★★★★

formally cavalier and riotous, the type of ironically volatile slacker energy that defines the band yet feels impossible to establish in a feature length moving image document -- but that this attempts to do something unorthodox, defiantly metatextual, and willingly comedic upends any notion we've had of the biopic or music doc; there's nothing else like it, for better or worse (for Pavement fans, it'll obviously be for the better)

Review by Robert Daniels ★★★★★ Liked

The only request you can make of a documentary is for it to be as interesting as its subject. Alex Ross Perry’s slippery experimental mockumentary “Pavements,” a film about the 1990s slacker band behind Slanted and Enchanted and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, is as gleefully idiosyncratic and as suspicious of mainstream success as the band and its fans.

Though the film doesn’t totally embrace an easy rise and fall structure, or even a jukebox format that feeds viewers the songs they love along with the stories behind them, it doesn’t disavow those formats either. Instead, “Pavements” recalls the satirical spirit of “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story” and the rock n’ roll mythologizing of “Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan…

1

I’m in it so that’s fun.

And I love it so that’s fun too.

2

I had a great time at this, which probably says as much about me as about the movie. I’m not sure every bit about packaging that serves to structure it works, but I think it is aware the more conventional parts are the more pleasurable ones. I did enjoy that the Oscar hopeful movie inside the movie focuses on the Wowee Zowee period as a way to sound less like a commercial move, and that Malkmus got Perry to almost redact Terror Twilight out of the band history. Malkmus remain a very compelling figure to anchor a movie like this. Lots of great footage. Too much of the jukebox musical. Joe Keery is a great sport.

Review by JJ ★★★★★ Liked

Finally, they made a movie for guys like me.