Spend an Evening with Saddle Creek (2005 Video) User Reviews

Amazing for Saddle Creek Fans

[marissagubbins · 9/10 · 24 March 2006]

Drags here and there but ultimately a great representation of the development of Saddle Creek and their excellent artists. A must have for fans. There is major involvement of the bands and SC staff. The extras have a lot of show footage which is awesome. Overall a great DVD. Of course there is more emphasis on the more prominent artists, but they do include the original 11. It's also funny to see a lot of the artists jumping from band to band, helping each other out; it also shows that it is not just a record company, but a tight knit family. Well, a family of extremely talented, multi-instrumented, and insanely intelligent people. I just wish they would release a DVD of their artists' music videos, that would be fantastic :-D.

A film that never should have been made

[adamlweber · 2/10 · 5 October 2006]

As a fan of much of the music that has come out of Omaha in the past 15 years, I was very disappointed at this shoddy excuse for a documentary. The filmmakers should have engaged in a bit of genre research and watched a film like 'No Direction Home', where Scorcese traces the evolution of Dylan's music with the breakdown of social order in 1960s America. As it is, 'An Evening With Saddle-Creek' makes no effort to connect the music, bands or community with the world outside Omaha. The viewer is left to remark, "who cares?," no matter how much they may or may not like the music. Of course, it may be argued this little music community doesn't actually have any connection or relevance to anyone that isn't immersed in the indie-pop music scene. Even if this were the case (and I tend to agree that it is) an interesting film could still have been made. It would have been a wise move to focus on one or two especially interesting characters and turned the film into a character study a la 'Don't Look Back'. Instead, 'An Evening' tries to pretend that every band on the label is equally compelling, so it stitches together a series of mini-documentaries (some a mere 5 minutes long) on each petty project that each peripheral friend of the label is engaged in. Big boring mistake. Let's face it, all people want to see is Conor anyways.