This year’s long-awaited Pavement reunion is turning out to be more unpredictable than anyone could have expected. Not only did we get the band’s first tour in over a decade, but additional experiences like a Pavement museum and even a musical (dubbed Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical of course) delighted aging hipsters everywhere. Nobody could have predicted that the Stockton-formed slacker rock band would get this kind of treatment, but we’re absolutely here for it. But wait, there’s more! A movie. That’s right, a Pavement movie. And director Alex Ross Perry says it’s all part of his masterplan for the band.
In an interview with The New Yorker, Perry (who also directed the musical) said he was approached by Pavement’s label, Matador Records, three years ago about a film with a strange directive from singer Stephen Malkmus: To hire a screenwriter, but one that could operate without an actual screenplay. “No one knew what that meant,” Perry said. So a rather insane idea will be getting a rather insane interpretation from Perry for the movie, who said it will be “Legitimate, ridiculous, real, fake, idiotic, cliché, illogical.” Perry’s guiding light for making the film — which is apparently part tour documentary biopic, part mockumentary, part clips of the musical, and part essential canon — was this: “What if Pavement, the Pynchonian rock group that never had a platinum record, was the most important band of all time?”
Ummm…ok? But cool! And while the musical’s limited performances have come and gone. The movie will arrive at a yet-to-be-specified date.
