About 15-20 minutes of this tribute to a 1970s novelty song are spent providing background on the tragedy that produced it and explaining the highly personalized lyrics that resulted.
The rest mostly unleashes a barrage of other-worldly praise that at first caused me to react, "Me thinkith they doth praise too much" -- that the lavish, worshipful outpouring was both intended to convince the producers of the film that it had been worth financing and to convince the makers of the film themselves that they actually were telling a story about something special.
I mean, this was a curious, modest hit that faded into 70s Gold history with the rest of the songs on the Billboard pop chart. I doubt many have seen or heard anyone declare it anything close to a classic before this documentary.
But then, as I watched the smile on the face of Garth Brooks as he proclaims this ditty is "quite possibly the greatest song in music history," I concluded this must be a parody, something along the lines of "Spinal Tap" or the Ruttles.
That theory at least helped explain the laughable premise that the song is something great because thousands of people know the lyrics and sing along at concerts, even 50 years later.
As anyone who has attended rock concerts knows, singing along to tunes is just part of the whole scene. I've been to concerts by the late Tom Petty and the Beach Boys where just about the entire audience knew and sang along to EVERY SONG over the course of two to three hours.
Much less funny, though, is the film's attempt to tie the tragic death of three pop stars to actual world-shaking events - the Vietnam war and the assassinations of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy - to support statements about the song's importance to the United States of America.
Really, even the song's title is a gross exaggeration. Music most certainly did not die after Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Richie Valens perished in the 1959 plane crash. Rock 'n roll continued to flourish unabated in the early 1960s. It took the Kennedy assassination to crash the lingering "age of innocence" from the 1950s, and then came Beatlemania and a new explosion of rock ' roll into the dominant worldwide music force it is today.
I have no doubt that for Don McClean the music may have died. He took the deaths pretty hard and was still writing about it 10 years later.
And it's also true many important contributions to the music world by at least Holly would have been forthcoming had the crash not occurred. One only has to look at the hugely successful career of Waylon Jennings, a bandmate who narrowly missed being a passenger on the plane, to see what a bright future was possible for Holly and the others.
But any theory that the song based on the tragedy was anything more one person's sad reaction is a crazy overstatement.
And it's so crazy that this documentary really has to be at least partly a parody of documentaries that take their subject matter too seriously.
The rest mostly unleashes a barrage of other-worldly praise that at first caused me to react, "Me thinkith they doth praise too much" -- that the lavish, worshipful outpouring was both intended to convince the producers of the film that it had been worth financing and to convince the makers of the film themselves that they actually were telling a story about something special.
I mean, this was a curious, modest hit that faded into 70s Gold history with the rest of the songs on the Billboard pop chart. I doubt many have seen or heard anyone declare it anything close to a classic before this documentary.
But then, as I watched the smile on the face of Garth Brooks as he proclaims this ditty is "quite possibly the greatest song in music history," I concluded this must be a parody, something along the lines of "Spinal Tap" or the Ruttles.
That theory at least helped explain the laughable premise that the song is something great because thousands of people know the lyrics and sing along at concerts, even 50 years later.
As anyone who has attended rock concerts knows, singing along to tunes is just part of the whole scene. I've been to concerts by the late Tom Petty and the Beach Boys where just about the entire audience knew and sang along to EVERY SONG over the course of two to three hours.
Much less funny, though, is the film's attempt to tie the tragic death of three pop stars to actual world-shaking events - the Vietnam war and the assassinations of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy - to support statements about the song's importance to the United States of America.
Really, even the song's title is a gross exaggeration. Music most certainly did not die after Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Richie Valens perished in the 1959 plane crash. Rock 'n roll continued to flourish unabated in the early 1960s. It took the Kennedy assassination to crash the lingering "age of innocence" from the 1950s, and then came Beatlemania and a new explosion of rock ' roll into the dominant worldwide music force it is today.
I have no doubt that for Don McClean the music may have died. He took the deaths pretty hard and was still writing about it 10 years later.
And it's also true many important contributions to the music world by at least Holly would have been forthcoming had the crash not occurred. One only has to look at the hugely successful career of Waylon Jennings, a bandmate who narrowly missed being a passenger on the plane, to see what a bright future was possible for Holly and the others.
But any theory that the song based on the tragedy was anything more one person's sad reaction is a crazy overstatement.
And it's so crazy that this documentary really has to be at least partly a parody of documentaries that take their subject matter too seriously.
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