3/25/2023 0 Comments Color me obsessedThere’s the wasted but brilliant Grant Hart (of Replacements rival Hüsker Dü), who is filmed in the graffiti-covered dressing room of Minneapolis’s 7th Street club, where the Mats used to play. (“They opened for R.E.M., and I thought they really sucked that night.”) “So I thought, ‘Why not let the fans tell their stories.’” It just so happens that some of the fans-or “witnesses”-are pretty famous. “I wondered how I could get my love for the Replacements across to people who didn’t really know their story,” says Bechard, who first saw the band in 1983 at Toad’s in New Haven. And the low-key, homemade movie (which began filming in 2009, after another filmmaker and Mats fan Hansi Oppenheimer gave up her own, similarly themed project to come help produce Bechard’s) is quite the corrective to the burnished, worshipful rock docs we’ve all become accustomed to-most recently exemplified by Cameron Crowe’s Pearl Jam hagiography. “And I mean Bitches Brew Miles Davis.” Everyone has something funny, sad, and/or strange to contribute. One of Westerberg’s pals reveals that, surprisingly, the rocker listened to Miles Davis. Bob Stinson remembers the crazy outfits her Replacements guitarist husband wore in the early days. The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn shares space with Minneapolis fiction writer Robert Voedisch, who talks about how the band’s music got him through his teen years living on a remote Minnesota farm. Think My Dinner With Andre with about 100 guests. Instead, “all” we get are fans, friends, critics, and rockers sitting around talking, theorizing, and, most importantly, disagreeing about the Mats. Color Me Obsessed contains not one note of the punkish noise created by Westerberg and his bandmates-noise that helped a lot of Reagan-era misfits and screwups through their adolescence. Regardless of circumstances-Replacements frontman Paul Westerberg is notoriously guarded with his image and did not participate in this film and, according to his manager, is working on his own film about the band-Bechard, a 52-year-old Connecticut writer and fiction filmmaker, has done something pretty original in this movie about Minneapolis’s beloved rock brats. So said director Gorman Bechard recently about the making of his documentary, Color Me Obsessed: A Film About the Replacements, which has been screening across the country and makes its New York debut this week at the Bowery Electric. ![]() People don’t want to believe that I did it this way on purpose. Or from people who insisted that I did it that way because I couldn’t get the rights. And it came from people who couldn’t accept the idea of a rock documentary with no music. “Most of the drama of the film took place offscreen.
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