is this flick not good. i had read elsewhere that it was boring, tedious and unrewarding, but i usually have more stamina for "boring" things than most. that just usually means someone was expecting something different. so i was expecting just long periods of inactivity while the band waited around to play, and not much music--but you know, with some point, or method of entertaining me. and it even failed with these expectations! it's horribly shot on black and white gunky-looking video. when someone does mutter something it's often hard to hear. this could all be forgiven, but...mike mills, who shows creativity with the videos he did for air--thankfully included--has no instincts or ideas for a music doc. periods of watching the air guys sitting saying little or nothing are broken up by banal man-on-the-street interviews about what music means to people, etc. i have seen a doc he did about paperboys which also failed to elicit much from his interviews that was not trivial and uninteresting. it just isn't his forte (the interviews in one of the air music videos did manage to get by with the charm of their banality, somehow). oh yeah, his other idea is to rip off godard's stones doc ("sympathy for the devil") by slowly panning around in a circle a lot. while this works pretty well onstage (as it did with the stones' sessions), it is just retarded during interviews. the camera drifts off to the side and stays there, recording nothing of visual interest, while part of the subject remains on the edge. it's just pretentious and pointless. at least he cops to the ripoff by duplicating a scenario from the godard film to show it's quite intentional. but what was the point? he seems like an extremely creative and talented guy, esp. with graphics. but i do not think he is at all good with documentaries, and this movie is the calling card for that idea. fanatics only! (the casual fan will be better served with the dvd magazine circuit, one issue of which--i think #6--features air and can be rented. it doesn't offer a lot, but it's a handful more than this.)