The New York premiere, anyway. Out in LA, the red carpet was besieged by what looked to be the Santa Ana winds, in mourning--gales of dust, lots of celebrities frantically attending to their own disheveled hair, and one noble but helplessly overmatched red carpet interviewer, whose stammering queries about the "importance" of Michael Jackson to deep thinkers like Adam Lambert were unfortunately beamed live into the theaters of all 17 simultaneous world premieres. In New York, Sony merely snatched up every theater in the cavernous Regal E-Walk and Times Square and crammed hundreds of ushers into sparkly hats and single gloves to greet the thousands of theatergoers who came out to salute Kenny Ortega's posthumous concert (rehearsal?) doc. As for the film itself? Our review is over here.

We are against hagiography as a rule, but let's take a moment to list just a few members of the cast of Shan Nicolson's late '70s New York doc Downtown Calling, narrated by Debbie Harry and opening at the Austin Film Festival, next weekend: DJ AM, Wild Style's Charlie Ahearn, TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek, Nelson George, Ed Koch, Man Parrish, Mos Def, Liquid Liquid's Sal Principato, Questlove, James Chance, Fab 5 Freddy, veteran talking head Bobbito Garcia, and the dude who founded Tommy Boy. Just imagine that red carpet premiere. Non-embeddable trailer about how the new greatest generation broke all the rules and made it up as they went along, etc., here.

Emmett Malloy's White Stripes documentary, Under the Great White Northern Lights, premiered this past weekend at the Toronto Film Festival, where Jack White pulled a Kanye. Wider release dates are still unannounced, but we had a chance to screen the film last week in New York.

There always seems to be little bit of Bob Dylan lurking behind every Jack White endeavor. This one isn't any exception. A rock-and-roll love letter to D.A. Pennebaker, Canada, pre-Internet music culture, and, above all, the White Stripes, director Emmett Malloy's Under the Great White Northern Lights is like a modernized version of Don't Look Back set in one of William T. Vollman's Seven Dreams. (The Rifles, probably.) You should see it. It's beautifully shot, the audio sounds phenomenal, and, at times, the film even manages to be downright inspiring. It helps, of course, that Malloy picked one of the strangest rock tours of the last decade to document.

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