'Burn to Shine 3' review

Hip shakers, map makers, and risk takers - reasons why the third installment in an ongoing indie film series has no been-there-done-that sophomore vibes

By Sheba White
Published: August 10th, 2006 | 9:20pm

Like John Lurie's early-'90s Fishing with John, which has become a cult-classic TV series for its campy voyeurism into the relationships between musicians and their environments, the premise behind the Brendan Canty-produced and the Christoph Green-directed Burn to Shine 3 (recorded June 15, 2005) never gets boring. Take an owner-donated house, fill a room with curated bands each playing one song over the course of a day, and then film the house when it's demolished at the end of the day - there's just no room for boredom in that idea.

For the third installment in this series (the first was filmed in D.C., and the second in Chicago), Canty and Green find an equally quixotic curator in the Decemberists' guitarist-instrumentalist Chris Funk, who not only packs the film with Portland indie stalwarts like the Shins, Sleater-Kinney, and his own band doing a camera-rocking, floor-creaking version of “The Mariner's Revenge Song,” but puts some serious effort into breaking up the die-hard, indie-rock-boy aura of the past series' installations with Girls Rock Camp pop darlings the Ready and the room-working, hip-hop antics of the Lifesavas.

Ultimately, what Funk's choice of bands does is add a lighter, less deliberately poignant energy to the film so that the focus is not centered on the oncoming house's destruction - in this case by a staged fire department drill - so much as it is on the theme running throughout the series: a musical community gathering to create something permanent. With such an intimate experiment and such wildly divergent band choices, it's only a matter of time before the kids begin collecting the DVDs like the cultural and landmark keepsakes they are.

Trixie DVD, 50 min., release date 8.22.06