I've been meaning to put some thoughts down on two concert films playing at your local mom and pop IMAX theater.
The concert film is a lost art form, but once in a blue moon you get one released in a theater. More often, documentaries on a band, such I Am Trying Break Your Heart or Tell Me Do You Miss Me, play at film festivals. Concert performances are released all the time on DVD, but rarely they are worth a second viewing. They tend to be repetitive and there's only so many crane shots you can use in 70 minutes.
Thus, you need a major band, a major filmmaker and a substantial budget to get one into more than 30 theaters. Which brings us a rarity in movie going -- two concert films in theaters at the same time.
I saw the Martin Scorsese-directed Shine a Light in IMAX and it was intense. I'll first think of it as the best photographed concert ever put on film and how it sounded as perfect as you can get in a cinema.
I was thinking to myself while waiting for the film to start that any concert film has to live up to the three grand daddies of concert films, two of them Scorsese was involved with. He was on the editorial team for Michael Wadleigh's Woodstock, which doubles as a documentary of the performances and chronicle of the experience and the era. Then Scorsese directed the best concert movie ever made, The Last Waltz. The third concert film masterpiece is Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense, which captured the sheer joy of performance by the Talking Heads. All three movies were made by fiction filmmakers and had the best craftspeople working on it.
So when you have Scorsese and the Stones on a project, it's going to get the best in the business. I'm a sucker for cinematography in film and Scorsese got the best American lensman around, Robert Richardson who worked with him on The Aviator and Casino and shot a lot of Oliver Stones best work. It's important to note that Richardson lensed the intense concert scenes in The Doors. With him aboard, you got a who's who of filmmakers operating cameras, Stuart Dryburgh, Robert Elswit, Ellen Kuras, Andrew Lesnie, Emmanuel Lubezki, Declan Quinn, John Toll and Albert Maysles (who directed the legendary Gimme Shelter documentary).
Just for the photography aspect, it was such a moving, beautiful looking film, with glowing stage lights and framing of the bands. Obviously, I wasn't there, but the film probably made the show better looking on screen than it would have been if you were in the second balcony in the back row at the Beacon Theatre. Again, seeing all this great camera work in IMAX was mind-blowing
As someone who's picked up on concert photography, I love that even Academy Award-winning cameraman have a hard time getting a performer in focus and not the microphone. I had to laugh because I can picture all these guys going nuts to trying to stay in focus, not over or under-exposing the film and then trying to follow the action. Now, you know how I feel sometimes.
It's not a pristine film with focus constantly being shifted, which makes it all the more authentic feeling. The important thing is they capture all the little moments on stage that you can't get even if you're there -- Buddy Guy staring down Keith Richards, Charlie Watts looking into the camera after a song and the little give and take between Keith and Ron Woods.
What IMAX also deliverers is a sound experience where the seats rattle and you can pick up on the crowd noise coming from behind you and the left and right dynamic that was happening on stage. When I heard crystal clear applause, I had to looking around to see if the crowd was applauding and discovered that it was part of the sound mix.
I digress about all the techie jargon, but it's a movie and movies are about people, places and times. The film is not an all-encompassing documentation of The Rolling Stones. You can't make a film like that since The Rolling Stones can't be summed up in any two hour movie. When you boil it down, it's a film about a band putting on a show. All the little tiny moments that you capture on stage leads up to the theme that these guys have joined the ranks of all the famous bluesmen that inspired them back in the 60s.
Beyond the concert, the archive footage served as little reminders of where they came from. I'm tired of the questions about how long they can perform and how old they are. Let them be, they are having fun. My only reservation about the Stones in the past decade, their new material isn't the strongest. Steel Wheels, Voodoo Lounge, Bridges to Babylon and A Bigger Bang, all don't do much for me.
With Scorsese involved, you get a clash of two ideas. He's a director built on storyboards, planning and his vision of the show. Then you have the Stones, who are built on feeling the moment and not about planning. Some of the beginning footage is based on that idea. As a Scorsese film, it's a must-see for any film fan because there are areas where you can interpret the concert and its meaning any way you want. My only criticism is that the last shots seemed forced and too staged.
As a concert goer, the movie even captured the annoying aspects of seeing shows. All the rich, hot chicks from the Upper West Side with their chunkhead boyfriends get all the front row seats. Then every 10 seconds they are whipping out their camera phones to take shitty photos.
In all, I would love to see it again in IMAX, because even the best home theater won't do it justice. A concert film should make you say at the end, "Man, I wish I was there." With Shine A Light, they pretty put you on the stage and in the front row.
Then with U2-3D, it also made you feel like you were on stage. It's well documented that I'm not a U2 fan, but I can appreciate and understand why they are now an institution. Luckily, the songs they chose for the film included the ones I liked from Joshua Tree and before. I did have to suffer through One, Beatiful Day and With or Without You. BLAH!
3D movies are tricky because it's a neat trick that gets tired quick. With this new technology, the band all seems superimposed like they were shot on a green screen and then digitally added to the stage. Plus, you get the cliche of the subjects throwing things at the cameras that dates back to the 1950s 3D films. Like Shine a Light, the movie is a self-contained event. The difference being that Shine a Line broke down walls and you saw all the camera people and backstage workings. In U2-3D, you never see a guitar tech or roadie in sight.
The staging of the shows in Latin America was impressive, you get a sense of scale and intimacy at the same time. Again, you felt you were on stage next to Bono doing his thing. Obviously, the sound was impeccable.
I just wished there was more of an artistic expression on the film makers side. It was helmed by U2's art director Catherine Owens and video director turned moviemaker Mark Pellington, who's best known for Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" video and the movie The Mothman Prophecies. The only bits you get outside of the show are quick cuts of concert goers running through the stadium to get to the front row. I wanted just a little bit more of that, than just 3D video graphics projected on the screen.
Despite not being a U2 fan, I enjoyed the film. It's about the spectacle of a U2 show and how powerful their music can be. "Bullet the Blue Sky" and "Where the Streets Have No Name" are my favorite songs from them and the staging of them for the movie are pretty memorable.
Now that we have two theatrical concert films, here's who else I'd like to see make concert films.
-- A Springsteen concert made by John Sayles or Steven Soderberg
-- An Arcade Fire concert movie directed by Spike Jones
-- Radiohead show helmed by either David Fincher or Johnathan Glazer
No longer does Richard Ashcroft have to pimp out Verve tunes with his backing musicians on a solo tour. He can get his old mates, The Verve, to do it for him.
