Everyone has a bugbear. One actor or actress who, for no easily explainable reason, they find phenomenally irritating. For this writer, that person is Juliette Lewis. It’s not that she’s a bad actress — she’s given performances that are, objectively, good, in films from “Cape Fear” to “Conviction” — it’s that there’s something about her that irritates us down to the very marrow of our bones, to the extent that we had to be physically restrained from fleeing the screening room after seeing her name in the credits for Drew Barrymore‘s “Whip It.”
As such, we were never going to be the target audience for her musical side-projects, but it’s hard to argue that she’s been more successful than your average movie star’s vanity rock sidebar; she’s produced four albums of defiantly mediocre garage rock with her two bands, Juliette and the Licks and The New Romantiques, playing to sell-out crowds and becoming something of a festival favorite. And soon, those of us who’ve mostly managed to avoid her rock’n’roll dabblings will be able to check them out on the big screen.
Variety reveals that Lewis has been working on an untitled documentary about her own musical career, and hopes to unleash it on the world at Sundance early next year. The actress/singer has teamed up with “Martha Marcy May Marlene” producers Maybach Cunningham for the film, assembling nearly 400 hours of footage into a doc that’s nearly done. Lewis claims that the film won’t be a vanity project, but we imagine that it won’t exactly be warts-and-all, seeing that she’s made the thing herself. Apparently, the focus will be on “an exploration of how performing live as a singer became a full-time primary career with extensive social networking.” Sounds, um, fascinating?…