(Vangelis Films)
Vangelis Films, 2023. documentary. 110 min.
Grade: 2 out of 4
The term “DJ” is one that requires a bit of extra qualification when dropped into most conversations. When I tell people I was one in college, I just mean I had a radio show. When a band has one, it’s usually someone who plays turntables like another instrument. At a club, it could simply mean someone who comes up with a playlist and engages it, or somebody who actively mixes songs, sounds, scratches, and other audio to repurpose it all entirely into a continuous musical set. DJ Chris Villa is in the last category, and the Phoenix, Arizona native is sufficiently renowned at what he does that he now has his own movie.
It’s easy to see why a fan might think he deserves one. Villa works magic behind his mixing board, and the parts of his sets you’ll hear onscreen should at least get the toes tapping (or maybe more, if you’re watching in a facility that allows it). Unfortunately for cinema, he himself isn’t that interesting aside from the tunes he mixes. Watching him talk about his marriage to his high school sweetheart, his brothers who are his best friends, and his supportive dad, one is reminded of comedy rapper Jon Lajoie’s “Regular Everyday Normal Guy” (“My parents…are really nice people…Motherfucker!”). He doesn’t do drugs, he’s a decent parent, he won’t even go out drinking after work now that he has a daughter. As a movie, this could be a campaign ad.
He does have a dead mother, who managed to eke out a final six years with cancer. Director Jeremy A, Lopez, seemingly antsy to find anything unusual to add to the story, tries to imply that her ghost hangs around and is periodically messing with the movie’s audio, a premise Villa clearly buys into. The evidence presented seems far from incontrovertible (Wind chimes! When an onscreen title assures us there was no wind that day!) but it’s something. Home movies give us a look at younger Villa, discovered by a local radio station when he was 13 and practicing at Guitar Center. Since then, he’s stayed both successful and out of trouble, as far as we can see.
After establishing beyond a doubt that Villa is a nice person, the documentary moves on to the U.S. Finals of the 2018 Red Bull 3Style World Championship (the “Olympics of DJ-ing”), where the winner will earn a shot at the championship in Taiwan. You don’t really have to look up what happened online to be spoiled; by the time the movie gets to Philadelphia and lingers on every set, it’s clear there’s no time for Taiwan to feature in this story at all. So what’s left is mostly highlights of Villa’s competitors – almost all of whom insert disses of him by name into their sets – and his full, climactic set. The music’s good, and the cinematography fine, but it’s not much of a narrative. We barely know anything at all about the other competitors (one is from “Englewood,” California), whose backstories might have made for a more interesting tournament-centric movie rather than a more bland Chris Villa-centric one.
I’ve seen a lot of music documentaries, on every level of budget and name recognition, and what most have that this one lacks is context. What do other people think of Chris Villa, outside of his family? What watermarks has he surpassed in his career that his peers have not? When he describes his concept of “wordplay,” that’s interesting, but also about the only insight we get into his technique. Thankfully the movie gets one key point right, which is to showcase a lot of his sound to show us exactly why he merits listening to. Even if that doesn’t translate to big-screen presence.
I did come away wondering how exactly the movie is going to clear all the major-label samples used. Is the Michael Jackson estate, to name but one party involved, going to cut him a break? That’s not my problem, of course. But Lopez enjoys showing us awkward outtakes as part of the filmmaking process, and some of those conversations might have been fun to cover in the same spirit.
Viewers will certainly come away from this understanding why Lopez enjoyed spending time with Villa. They may not take away any significant reason why, outside of a club setting, they should too.