[Review originally published 11/16/2010 on Skratchdisc. RIP Charlie Watts!]
What makes a great concert film? Terrific music, for one. Great sound? Definitely. Interesting cinematography? Yeah. An historic event? Sure. And what makes a great concert film director? Someone who knows how to present the band, their music, and what it looks like on stage in a way that makes you want to see it more than once.
So who is this guy, ROLLIN BINZER? Well, he’s the guy who directed Ladies & Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones. But I’m not sure he was the right guy for the assignment. This movie, now repackaged, remastered and remixed for 5.1 surround sound, has been out many times since the home video era began, and this time they even put it out on Blu-ray. A concert film about the Stones’ classic Exile on Main St., it’s certainly got great music. The performance of that music? About what you’d expect of Mick & Keefco in that era. The sound? It’s alright – nothing to write home about. (Not that my parents would give a shit.) The cinematography is just okay. Not only would I decline to write home about it, I might even have bypassed the movie entirely if I’d heard that it was just a basic multi-camera shoot with nothing really special about it.
All of these gripes go a long way to answer the question: If it’s such a dull, cookie-cutter concert film, why are they re-releasing it now? Well, duh. They just executed the marketing campaign for the reissue of Exile, so naturally they had to reissue the movie that went along with it. Can’t miss an opportunity to milk the golden cow, now, can we? And what’s more, as you’d expect, there’s an insert inside the case hawking official Rolling Stones t-shirts and the documentary DVD Stones in Exile, which tells the story of how this magnificent, brilliant rock ’n’ roll record was rendered. Well, I’ll stand by the album as being a great one (though I like Sticky Fingers better), but I’m not a fan of this Blu-ray showcase for Rollin Binzer’s vision of what made the Stones great. I’ll bet my stepmom could’ve made a better concert film. – Marshall Gooch
2.5/5 (Eagle Vision; DVD & Blu-ray)
“The Story of the Most Influential Radio Station in America” is the subtitle for this documentary about WLIR, a Long Island, NY radio station that championed the new wave music that spewed forth from punk rock. New Wave: Dare to Be Different documents the rise and fall of both the radio station and the music itself by interviewing not only the DJs and other WLIR personnel, but members of many of the bands themselves. Billy Idol, Nick Rhodes (Duran Duran), Mick Score (A Flock of Seagulls), Howard Jones and more tell about their experiences in breaking in America thanks to the station’s support of their music.
Maybe the story seems typical to me because it is very similar to that of KCMU and probably loads of other college and minor league commercial radio stations in America. It’s a Cinderella story, that’s for sure.
Here’s a “punk” band that rarely gets talked about here in the USA, THE SLITS. A new documentary, Here to Be Heard: The Story of The Slits, shows that the initially all-female group deserves more accolades than they generally get. There at punk’s inception, the girls – lead vocalist Ari Up was only a teenager when The Slits got going – embraced the DIY ethos that was part of punk, taking up instruments because they figured if someone like Sid Vicious or Billy Idol could do it, then why not them?
William E. Badgley does a pretty tidy job of telling The Slits’ slightly convoluted story, taking over on a project executive producer Jennifer Shagawat had worked on with Ari Up herself until Up died in 2009. All of the band’s original and subsequent members, aside from Up, are interviewed here, as well as punk/reggae legend Don Letts, Neneh Cherry, former managers, punk scholars and more. (What, no Henry Rollins or Elvis Costello? Were they busy??) Here to Be Heard is a highly interesting and watchable documentary, and the DVD contains an additional twenty minutes of bonus material, including live footage.
The Woodstock of the ’80s? In a way. The US Festival was Steve Wozniak’s “brainchild,” in quotes because the Woz didn’t quite know what he was doing when he decided he wanted to put on a bigger-than-Woodstock festival to “unite us in song.” But somehow he put together a crew that was able to avoid most of the issues that plagued the iconic ’60s rock fest. The US Festival: 1982 The US Generation is a documentary film that tells the story of the ’80s event, which was attended by some 400,000 people over three days. The doc also features a few artists performing complete songs, including Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers (“Refugee”), The B-52’s (“Strobe Light”), The Police (“Can’t Stand Losing You”), The Cars (“Bye Bye Love”), Santana and Fleetwood Mac.
Some of what they did for US has been incorporated into today’s Bonnaroos and Coachellas.
Magnetic Waves of Sound: The Best of The Move gets its name from a line in the immortal song, “I Can Hear the Grass Grow.” A CD+DVD digipack from the UK’s Esoteric Recordings, it’s a right plethora of audio and video highlights of Birmingham, England’s THE MOVE. Each disc contains 21 tracks; the CD is a greatest hits compilation featuring a majority of their singles and some key B-sides and album cuts. Most Move fans will already have a serviceable compilation of one vintage or another that probably covers most of what you’d want, though, and for them the attraction here is the DVD. On the region-free, NTSC video disc you get a whole lotta seldom seen footage, including the band’s complete performance on the BBC’s Colour Me Pop program from 1969, appearances on German TV’s Beat Club, and the original promo film of the title song (“I Can Hear the Grass Grow”). Video quality is pretty amazing when compared to what little is available on YouTube and other video ports, though some of the songs aren’t complete (probably due to cutting out the announcer overlapping the beginning or end of a song) or appear two or three times. Still, it’s a DVD that compiles a great many interesting and historic TV appearances. 
This isn’t to say that you don’t need the CD, oh Move fan you. It’s rare to get a best-of that includes their later, Harvest Records singles like “China Town,” “California Man” and Jeff Lynne’s classic “Do Ya,” the original version recorded by The Move. By the time they recorded these last few tunes in ’71-’72, the band consisted of Lynne, Roy Wood and Bev Bevan (the latter two the only original members left in the band). At that point the three were creating the new Electric Light Orchestra on the side, and of course, that’s the group that more people are familiar with today. But it’s here that you hear a unique alloy of the beat group that The Move started out as and the much more expansive, cello-fied group they became. It is a little odd that they chose the LP version of “Cherry Blossom Clinic” instead of the snappier single version (the version here appeared on their Shazam album and was farther out than the original) – it breaks up the momentum established by the first half of the CD. Regardless, sound quality is pretty top notch considering the combination of mono and stereo mixes and the time span covered (1966-1972).
Fast forward twenty years to 2016 and RON HOWARD’s Eight Days a Week: The Touring Years. Here we get a 105 minute documentary that covers only three to four years of the band’s history and uncovers hardly anything new or revelatory. (There’s both a standard one disc version and a “Special Edition,” both on Blu-ray or DVD, with an extra disc of bonus material.) The fact that the project started out as a highly publicized idea to examine the band as a live act is interesting. Either Howard and his pals were unable to come up with a good story (hard to believe, given: The Beatles!), even enlisting the public to share their stories and/or audio or video, or for some other reason they changed horses midstream and scrubbed the original plot. Well, you may have guessed that I think they botched it up, big time.
NuDisc 